The Triennial Convention (so-called because it met every three years) was the first national Baptist denomination in the United States.
[1]: 90 [2]: 14 In the 18th and 19th centuries, Baptists began forming regional associations and societies to foster cooperation in missionary, benevolent, and educational work.
[2]: 19 Associations could determine their own standards for fellowship and offer advice to churches, but local congregations governed themselves and ordained their own ministers.
[1]: 90 The Second Great Awakening inspired the establishment of foreign missions agencies to spread the Christian religion throughout the world.
[2]: 19–20 Carey and the three American missionaries mobilized Baptists in America to support the Judsons' planned mission trip to Burma.
Their efforts led to the creation in 1814 of the General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States of America for Foreign Missions.
Immigrants, such as Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and German Americans, also formed their own Baptist denominations along ethnic lines rather than affiliate with the Anglo-American oriented Triennial Convention.
[citation needed] In 1843, the abolitionists in the Northeast founded the Northern Baptist Mission Society in opposition to slavery.
[6]: 62–3 In 1844, the Home Mission Society refused to ordain James E. Reeve of Georgia as a missionary because he was put forward as a slaveholder.
The abolitionists in the Northeast inherited the Triennial Convention and the Northern Baptist Mission Society was dissolved.
[7] The Triennial Baptists supported Progressivism and the Social Gospel, but not the more radical ideas of Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) and other Christian Socialists.
[6]: 629, 652 In 1888, the Triennial Convention founded the American Baptist Education Society to organize support for affiliated schools, colleges, and seminaries.
[citation needed] The New Hampshire Confession states that "[Humans] by voluntary [free will] transgression fell from the holy and happy state [they were created]" and that "We believe that Election [predestination] is the eternal purpose of God, according to which he graciously regenerates, sanctifies, and saves sinners".