Fredrick Rymker was born in Stige, Denmark, on this day in 1819. He learned the trade of shoemaking, but at the age of twenty he went to sea. When an accident struck him down, he was fitted with a wooden leg, and from then on looked like the proverbial peg-leg sailor. After a journey to America, and while staying in a sailor’s lodging house, he visited a Baptist chapel called “The Mariner’s Temple.” There the Lord touched his soul, and his spirit was made alive in Christ. After he became a zealous witness for his Saviour, he was licensed to preach and returned to Denmark. In Copenhagen he married, was ordained, founded a Baptist church and began to publish a paper called, “Missionary Magazine for Baptized Christian Churches.” It was at that point that he heard his “Macedonian call” to preach in Norway.
Traveling throughout Norway, where no Baptist churches then existed, he preached in the Protestant congregations of the “Free Church,” until they feared that he would cause divisions. Then settling near Porsgrund, he started a church while doing evangelistic work in surrounding communities. Having no means of transportation, he would walk. A journey to the town of Larvik would take, on a warm day, eight or nine hours, but much longer in bad weather. On one such day he fell on the ice and broke his wooden leg, laying on the road until someone found him and drove him to town.
In about 1861 Mrs. Kari Kristendatter requested immersion in order to declare her faith in Christ. Her husband said there would be blood in the river if the baptism went forward. On the chosen day he was there with some of his friends, each carrying an ax. The little group of Christians fell on their knees, praying for the Lord’s protection, and it was granted.
The growth of the Baptists in Norway was slow but steady. After about ten years of work, there were five or six churches and between one hundred fifty and two hundred members.
– Source: This Day in Baptist History, Thompson and Cummins