Land of Opportunity

Throughout the nineteenth century, thousands of Swedish men and women boarded ships bound for America. Normally reticent to leave their homeland, persistent famine, lack of opportunities, and even oppression pushed many to seek out the possibilities of the New World. Here they found affordable and productive land and freedom their homeland could not provide.  

In 1869, a group of these immigrants left their Sioux City waystation and journeyed north, into the newly opened Dakota territory. These settlers found in the Dakotas what previous generations had discovered further east: opportunity. This opportunity, though, was not just in land and upward mobility, but in worship. 

For among them were Baptists, those who had resisted the state church of Sweden and sought a purer worship, unentangled with state authority. They had shown not only their commitment to Christ but their resistance of state influence through a re-baptism, immersion as believers. Many of their conviction - including some in that Dakota party - had lost jobs, inheritance, and even suffered beatings and imprisonment at home.  

Soon after arriving, and long before many of them even had homes for their families, a party of believers gathered to organize a church. Peter Ring, who had earlier pastored churches in Sweden, was asked to lead. Big Springs Baptist church was born.  

These settlers, though, did not rest. Revivals throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led many to follow Christ (the picture above is from 1896). The work was expanded through two “daughter” churches, one fifteen miles west in Dalesburg, and one north of here in the town of Alcester. The descendants of those pioneers have been joined by dozens of others who have carried the gospel to Chicago, Pine Ridge Reservation, Belize, Peru, Philippines, Ukraine, Haiti and Costa Rica.

A Country Church

If you visit Big Springs today, you'll find its setting hasn't changed much since those early days.  The current building, near the site of the first (completed in 1874), is surrounded by fields out in the country, where it can form its own center.  Following the ebb and flow of farm life in the Upper Midwest, the country store is gone and the country school has closed.  Farms are larger now, families smaller. 

Yet the church remains, strong, like a mission outpost on the prairie.  We preach the Gospel of salvation by grace through faith, spur one other toward love and good works, and love and listen to the Bible.  And we send the Gospel out, part of that great continuum of mission that brought the first pioneers here, and pray for the believers yet to come.  

We love it here.  We hope you will too.