Predestination and the Missionary Imperative: Historical, Theological, and Missiological Dimensions in the Nigerian Baptist Convention

Abstract

The relationship between predestination theology and missionary engagement stands among the most consequential and enduring debates in Baptist history. This article examines how predestination has been understood, contested, and applied within the Nigerian Baptist Convention (NBC)  from its origins in Southern Baptist missionary activity in 1850 through to its contemporary expression as one of West Africa’s largest Protestant denominations. Drawing on a critical survey of Reformed, Arminian, Barthian, and African theological traditions, a historical analysis of NBC doctrinal formation across five developmental periods, and empirical data gathered through a mixed-methods study (N = 240 questionnaire respondents; n = 9 in-depth interviews) in the Plateau Baptist Conference, this article advances three principal arguments. First, the NBC has developed a distinctive ’missional compatibilism’  holding divine sovereignty and human responsibility in productive tension rather than seeking a philosophical resolution that is both theoretically coherent and historically grounded. Second, African theological resources, particularly indigenous conceptions of divinely ordered destiny in Yoruba, Igbo, and Plateau religious traditions, constitute indispensable partners for any contextually adequate Baptist predestination theology in Nigeria. Third, the NBC’s most pressing institutional challenge is not doctrinal but pedagogical: the widespread lay misunderstanding of predestination, which manifests as fatalism, antinomianism, and evangelistic paralysis in some congregations, is structurally traceable to inadequate catechetical formation rather than to any deficiency inherent in the doctrine itself. The article concludes that Andrew Fuller’s moderate Calvinism, recontextualised through African theological wisdom and anchored in Great Commission obedience, offers the most productive framework for sustaining the NBC’s missional identity in the twenty-first century.