Rev. James Mursell Phillippo: Life and Legacy.
Led by its pastor Rev Karl Johnson, the Phillippo Baptist Church decided to establish annual Emancipation Lectures and invited Professor Emeritus Errol Miller to deliver the first Lecture. In 1823 Rev James Mursell Phillippo was ordained as a Baptist minister in England,
Life
Commissioned by the Baptist Missionary Society as a missionary to Jamaica, married Hannah Selina Cecil, arrived in Jamaica, and was assigned to the mission, First Baptist Church, in Spanish Town, which had been founded in 1818. Phillippo died in May 1879, one year after finally retiring as the Minister of First Baptist Church, and survived only by three of the nine children of the marriage, Hannah having pre-deceased him five years earlier.
The Lecture sketches the life and legacy of James Phillippo from the hindsight of 200 years after the personally momentous year of 1823. It attempts to synthesize information from respected historical sources, the three books written by Phillippo, the biography written by Rev Edward Bean Underhill, General Secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society, which drew heavily on the personal diary which Phillippo kept from he was 19 years old. The Lecture give snip-bits of Phillippo’s early years, his transition from peaching to congregations of tens and hundreds in England to thousands in Jamaica, his fierce opposition to slavery, his role of being one of the architects of the free village following emancipation in
1838, and him being ostracized as the ‘political parson’ by the ruling planter elite.
The Lecture also depicts tragedies of Phillippo life including deaths of children and colleague missionaries, seven of deep depression following being evicted by a fellow English missionary from the sanctuary he built, the court case, and split that followed into the First and Second Baptist Churches of Spanish Town. However, the Asian Cholera Pandemic and
the Morant Bay Riot provides opportunities that restores Phillippo to prominence such that at the time of his death he is the Doyen of Missionaries in colony, the revered ‘Pastor of Spanish Town’ and the greatly beloved Minister of First Baptist mourned by all.
Legacy
The Lecture concluded by pointing to the Phillippo, Knibb, Burchell Memorial Fund established by Anglican Priest and Medical Doctor Robert Love with branches in every Parish which served to reignite participation of black men as candidates and voters for public office that led to the formation of the National Club in 1909 became the incubator of the
nationalist movement, a key element in Jamaica’s independence 1962. It alluded to the fact that the naming of the chapel that Phillippo built in 1827 as the Phillippo Baptist Church, was led by Rev James J Carter-Henry, following Hurricane Charlie in 1951 which destroyed Second Baptist Church but only damaged First Baptist resulting in both congregations
worshiping together.
