Heroes of the Faith: C.J. Baker

We trace the life of C.J. Baker, a Chicago entrepreneur who met Jesus, built a thriving tent and awning business, and turned profits into preaching, rescue work, and global missions. His partnership with evangelist Donald Ross shows how Scripture-led ministry can thrive outside rigid structures.

• secular work funding gospel outreach
• the Chicago fire sparking enterprise and service
• conversion through Scripture and changed priorities
• five-cent beds rescue mission and nightly preaching
• partnership with Donald Ross and tent meetings
• tension with denominational control and class barriers
• Kansas City move merging factory and church plant
• open-air evangelism, music, and children’s outreach
• profit as mission fuel and global tent support
• legacy of generosity, stewardship, and bold witness

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Ministry Website — JamesWKnox.org 

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Transcript

Welcome And Mission Of The Program

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Welcome to the Preaching the Cross Radio Podcast, featuring the radio ministry of Pastor James W. Knox of the Bible Baptist Church of Delamp, Florida. Our prayer is that these half-hour Bible study programs will bring the lost to a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ and enable the saved to grow in the grace and knowledge of the Savior. Now here's your host, Pastor James W. Knox.

The Value Of Secular Work In Ministry

Enter C.J. Baker: Early Struggles

The Chicago Fire And A New Calling

Conversion Through Scripture And First Ministry Steps

Rescue Mission And Five-Cent Beds

Meeting Evangelist Donald Ross

Tent Meetings And A Year Of Nightly Preaching

Tensions With Denominations

Move To Kansas City: Business And Church

SPEAKER_01 1:07

And I welcome you one more time to the Preaching of the Cross Radio Broadcast. This program is sponsored by the Bible Baptist Church of Delane, Florida, and by our friends and uh and supporters, supported by our supporters. That's really a great statement, isn't it? Around the world, across the nation, who pray for and contribute to these ministries and make it possible for us to be heard over this radio station. And we certainly thank you for tuning in to the program today. On these broadcasts, we often take the time to look into the lives, exemplary lives, outstanding lives of those that we like to call the heroes of the faith. And most of these men and women are missionaries, preachers, evangelists, writers. But you know, the missionary, the missionary is on the field through the financial support of those who go to the office and put in their hours on the job. The minister, the pastor, is in the pulpit doing his work, most of them, many of them, by virtue of and through the assistance of those who labor in the secular world and make a way for them to be what uh what we call full-time. Now, it's a wonderful thing for a man to say, I live by faith. I trust only in God, and that's great, that's tremendous. But one cannot make that statement and then deny that God uses, God uses to supply the needs of those who are living by faith in God. God uses to meet their needs the paychecks and the labors of those who have worked in the secular world. Now there's no question about it. You say, well, I don't take any money from anything. Uh we got a big inheritance, and and uh we don't have to. Well, that's fine, but you didn't get an inheritance from somebody who had a huge check written by God and placed anonymously by God in their bank account. You got an inheritance from somebody who worked in the secular world all their life. And so the Bible the Bible tells us not to desire riches and wealth, and not to be their servant. But if we can use them as a tool to further the gospel, we will walk in the footsteps of many who have pleased the Lord down through the centuries of the Christian church. Why, when Jesus Christ walked this earth, the Bible says certain uh women ministered to him of their substance. They had substance, and they used that for the furtherance of the good news. Uh C.J. Baker was a Christian businessman. His mother penned this in her Bible, July 22nd, 1840. This day delivered a son, Caleb Jason, the Lord have mercy on my son. That's how his life began. At seventeen, a defiant Caleb Jason Baker left Sussex, England for America. But the God who hears and answers prayers is not stymied by the distance from Hailisham to Chicago. In eighteen sixty-nine, when Baker was twenty nine years old, he was walking down the street with twelve dollars in his pocket. He stopped in front of a window shaded by a tattered awning. He made some measurements, went to the ship Chandler to price out canvas, and proceeded to rent a treadle sewing machine for seventy five cents per month. After making a modest earning from his first awning, he said, Well, I could do that. I'm going into the awning business. His sister Emma was his whole uh his sole employee and seamstress. Baker was a salesman, delivery boy, and installation artist. Soon they were ordering canvas in five hundred yard bales. In the path of the Chicago fire october eighth, eighteen seventy one, Baker wrapped his sewing machine in canvas, tied a rope around it, dropped it out the window of his riverside apartment. He then rolled his three bales of canvas in likewise. The rope was tied to a post and he ran. After the fire passed, he pulled his murky inventory out of the river. A sidewalk in the remains of the metropolis of the Midwest became his factory. The soggy canvas was stretched out, dried, and sown into tents for the homeless. Baker immediately went to Western Union to telegraph his closest supplier in Austin, Texas to send bales of canvas, lots of bales. In that tragedy, God was good to CJ Baker. Sometime in 1872, the following year, he knelt down in his room and trusted the Lord Jesus Christ as his personal savior. What made the difference? What changed, what changed a quick thinking, hard-working entrepreneur into a humbled man bowing, bowing at the feet of his creator, the creator that became in that moment his savior. When he was reading his Bible, and as he read the pages of the wonderful word of God, he read these words Him that cometh to me, I will in no wise cast out. And C.J. Baker decided it would be a good move. He's a practical man, he's he's a uh a quick-witted man. He determined it would be a good move to come to Jesus Christ. And when he came, Jesus Christ received him, saved him, gave him eternal life. We know a little about Baker's first marriage. He had a daughter, Margaret. Then in December of 1877, he married a widow named Eliza Rowe, who had a nine-year-old daughter named Grace. This marriage was in the Lord. CJ was attracted to her, to uh to uh Eliza because of her involvement in evangelism, and no doubt she was a great help meet. Together they may have run Chicago's first rescue mission. He rented the floor of a building on South De Plain Street and hung a sign outside the door. It said, and here's the sign, I'll give it to you in full. Clean beds, five cents. That's all it said. Inside were two hundred cots, two huge stoves. There was no bedding, the men just slept with their clothes on. The Chicago News reporter who wrote a large piece about the mission was as amazed by Baker's generosity as he was by the squalor of the mission's guests. The men might get a meal at night, but they would certainly get a gospel message. And Baker's friends said if someone didn't have five cents, he usually supplied the nickel. We have no record that Baker ever labored with or knew Dwight L. Moody, who was from the Chicago area. We do know that he met a Scottish evangelist named Donald Ross, whom you've learned something about on these broadcasts. Ross labored in the revival times of 1859 to 1860 among the miners of Lanarkshire, Scotland. Ross was a fearless Scot. He was a leader of a band of gospelers. They had a military mindset. They assaulted enemy citadels with the good news of the Word of God. Andrew Miller said of those sweeping days, in the country districts and in fishing villages, in small towns and cities, the heralds of the cross were busy. Brownlow North and James Turner, Hay McDowell, Grant, and Reginald Ratcliffe, Lord Kintmore and Richard Weaver, Gordon Forlong and Harrison Orr, Duncan Matheson and Donald Ross gathered numerous sheaves of golden grain for the Lord of the Harvest. Duncan Matheson and Donald Ross were men of kindred spirits. They'd preach anywhere, to anybody. If they even suspected there might be someone in the vicinity that would half-heartedly listen to a gospel presentation, they would preach anytime, any place, anywhere to anyone. They were splendid gospel pioneers. Matheson was accustomed to speak of his friend as that Chaldonian warrior. Oh, they were rough. They were fearless. They accomplished much for God. In the awakening, workers and converts found that the Spirit of God tended to either transgress or ignore their preconceived religious scruples. Some, like Ross and his co-workers in the Northern Evangelistic Association, found themselves disconnected from any organized band or denomination. As they consulted Holy Scripture, they discovered that many of their practices lined up with New Testament teaching and were therefore legitimate for today, and many of the things they were doing did not match what the Bible said they were supposed to do, did not find any precedent or command of the Word of God, and so they dropped these things. They wanted to live according to the Bible and minister according to the Word of God. Ross had his mandate. Donald Ross came to America in 1876, and in 1879 he moved his family to Chicago. He and three other men began to remember the Lord in breaking of bread in a tent, which was also used for evangelistic purposes. They would have evangelistic campaigns in the evening hours, and then they would sit together and worship the Lord in the morning hours and beg God, beg God to send lost people to hear the gospel, beg God to save precious souls. They knew of a well-to-do Englishman who claimed to be like-minded. They invited him to join them and help them in the work. The man came, looked at the tent, remarked, This is indeed without the camp, and he never returned. Ross seemed oblivious to discouragement. He he realized, recognized, uh that his plans and his schemes and his attempts to enlist a well-to-do Englishman to, you know, kind of pay the bills, was not exactly trusting in God, and he purposed not to do it again. He did what true evangelists do. He preached, he prayed, he plugged away. C.J. Baker wrote of him, I believe it was in the summer of 1879 that I first met our brother Donald Ross. He, with James Goodfellow of Canada, had pitched a tent in Chicago on the West Side opposite Union Park. I was then engaged four nights a week in my mission hall, and in spare evenings I went to hear him preach. I remember distinctly how impressed I was with his forceful, energetic preaching and his apt illustrations, also with the fact that he was proving his points with the Word of God, which was not at all the case with the preaching that I had been listening to in other places. I became much interested immediately. One Sunday morning, I went to see them and fellowship with them. Brother Ross invited me to participate with them in the evangelistic campaigns, which I did. He invited me to worship with them in the morning hours, which I did. There were six, there were seven of us, and we met together to worship the Lord. It was a novel thing. I remember it well. In August, Eliza Baker gave birth to Jesse May. In the fall of 1879, Baker offered Ross the use of his mission hall for evangelistic meetings. The nightly meetings continued until May 1st, 1880. That's that's almost five, eight, almost eight months. Every single night. That's some gospel meeting. It was only after a full year of nightly gospel meetings in Chicago that Ross conducted their first baptism, in which several genuinely converted individuals went down into the water, following the Lord and believers' baptism. The breath of God was felt in the windy city. A vigorous and devoted congregation was established. This had all created tension with Baker's uh pastor. His uh pastor was a Baptist preacher, and uh Baker's mission work didn't really bother him, and uh and and even the evangelistic meetings didn't really bother him. But people getting saved and following the Lord and believers' baptism and being baptized by the evangelist outside the denominational structure uh rubbed Baker's pastor the wrong way. He felt endangered by Baker's evangelistic outreach to children in the slums. Those weren't the kind of people he wanted coming into his church. Besides, the mission work was somewhat annoying, but uh he could tolerate that as long as the people stayed in the mission. But Baker was also superintendent over about twenty Sunday school classes, and a divide came when the Ert clergyman notified the Sunday school teachers don't go there anymore, that is, to the evangelistic meetings, and Baker suddenly had no Sunday school. He abominated such pettiness, adding it ever closer to Ross. Thereafter, the Presbyterians, Baptists, and any other Protestant group became to him part of the sects. He believed they considered their denominational structures or their particular name, their particular brand, to be more important than the preaching of the gospel. They didn't they didn't want these down and outers in the mission being converted. They didn't want the down and out children in the streets being gathered in the Sunday school classes out uh on on the Sunday mornings. Strange as it may seem, such things continue to this day. In February of 1884, daughter Marion was born. She would go on to marry a preacher, as did uh uh the uh daughter born uh that was just mentioned, um Jesse May. She also became a preacher's wife. She uh married in fact, Marion married uh Walter Lewis Wilson. Walter Lewis Wilson. Too many W's there. Wilson's the author of the Moody Press books, The Romance of a Doctor's Visits and the Doctor's Case Books, and etc. He became himself a useful evangelist and Bible teacher. In 1886, C.J. Baker published one of his two charts, Two Roads and Two Destinies, and Life or Death, which taught dispensational truth. These visual aids were accompanied by books or study guides and were widely used and really blessed. Baker also wrote several gospel and prophetic booklets and tracts. The eminency of Christ's coming was big in Baker's thinking, shows up all through his writings. Baker's new views, practices, and associates embarrassed his brother-in-law and business partner, Mr. Murray, so that their relationship was becoming tense. Still their tent and awning business was prospering. Baker said, Now look, we're sending a great many tents and a great many tarpaulins to Kansas City. There seems to be a big market down there. Let's do this. Either I stay here in Chicago and you go down to Kansas City instead of a business, or you stay here and I will go to Kansas City. We'll just split up the business. I don't know if he learned this from Abraham, who gave Lot the first choice or not, but Murray wasn't crazy and immediately said he would stay with his half of the business in Chicago. Baker then selectively approached seven or eight employees and invited them to come with him to Kansas City. He wanted capable tent and awning workers, but it appears that the chief qualification for going to Missouri was their agreement with him on spiritual matters and their abilities in gospel outreach. Several were excellent singers. One of the men's wives, Mrs. Rendell, was an outstanding children's worker. The local church in Kansas City began the day they arrived in 1887. They found a place for a factory, and the congregation met in the main room. He started his business and a church all at the same time in the same day. Kansas City was the last outfitting station for the settlers pulling their wagons to a fork at Gardner. From there, wagon trains branched out to Santa Fe, California, Oregon, or Oklahoma. Their trains could be ninety wagons long and they all needed canvas coverings. Situated in Kansas City, Baker had a virtual monopoly. These were busy days. But Baker was vigorous. He didn't tire. Lines of wagons three city blocks long would be waiting for their canvas in one day. One of the ladies who worked with him pled, Oh, Mr. Baker, we're so tired. Give us a little rest sometime. His answer There's plenty of rest in heaven. We need to be working down here. Newspaper articles talked about the man who worked all day and preached for two hours each night. Saturday was the night for the open air gospel preaching at the corner of 11th and Grand. Now listen to me. This is not a clergyman. This is not a full-time preacher. But I don't know many full-time preachers who preach two hours every night to the lost. And I don't know many full-time preachers who stand on busy street corners every Saturday night for open-air gospel preaching. Now, before you look down your nose at C.J. Baker, the layman, you'd better uh take a long look in the mirror at yourself. If you're a full-time preacher, are you a full-time preacher? Or do you get full-time pay to do a little bit of preaching? Mrs. Charles and Mrs. Randall's singing voices could be heard two blocks away in these Saturday night meetings. Clerks would pause and whisper, doesn't that sound beautiful? If the preaching was good, the singing was better, and people in the audience would call out, We want to hear that lady sing. When Mrs. Charles was told that her singing above the bustle of the streets would ruin her voice, she said, What better place is there to do it? Where am I going to use my voice? What am I going to use it for? What good is it if I don't use it for God? Oh, she probably wouldn't make the concert tour in the contemporary Christian field today. But she sang to a lot of lost people in Kansas City, Missouri, down Kansas City's main street, then a dirt road. They rented a vacant building at Fourth Avenue to start a Sunday school. Baker told Mrs. Rendell, Miss Jameson, and a few others, your Sunday school teachers, now go get yourself a class. And they fanned out a ten block radius looking for street urchins to invite in for a Bible lesson. Busy days became fruitful days. Baker was soon employing 300 workers, and the church had about a hundred and fifty in fellowship. Baker was a media event. Curious news articles appeared with headlines such as this piece on December 27, 1894, at the time of their annual Bible conference. Here's the article. On factory walls. Large Bible texts, taught gospel fundamentals. And at noontime, an evangelistic meeting was available to all workers. They are a queer religious sect, the quiet believers who are having a convention in this city. They have no organization. Organization. They have no paid preachers. Money is not accepted from outsiders. How do we explain such a group? The news media has never been able to figure out the real thing. In the year 1894, Donald Ross moved and made Kansas City his base of operations. Alfred Mace described Ross as essentially a gospel preacher. He was more than a preacher and an exhorter. He was a laborer. He toiled for the parishing at fairs, at races, in tents, in halls, in barns, in chapels, in music halls, in theaters, in cottages, and in the open air. He sounded out the wonder story everywhere he went, whether people were there for that purpose or not. From Kansas City, Ross ranged in all directions in his gospel campaigns. He wrote, he edited periodicals, he preached there until 1901, when he returned to Chicago. A year or two before his death, C.J. Baker approached his son-in-law's father, William Somerville, and gave him a job as a janitor on a floor where more than a hundred women worked at sewing machines. He said he didn't want him to spend much time pushing a broom, the less the better. Instead, Baker instructed the evangelist to linger at the ladies' workstations and witness for Christ. Baker was never accused of showing favoritism to his believing workers. At times he employed almost five hundred people. The large government and automobile industry contracts did not intimidate the evangelist. His trade catalog had more gospel content in it than any than many so-called gospel tracts do. All the officers and stockholders of the tent and awning company were Christians. At one annual meeting, Baker said, Look, the Lord has given us all of this money in our hands. All of you that work here have received your salaries. You don't really need this money. Why don't we just turn over the entire profits of this business to the Lord's work? It was amazing that he suggested such a thing, more amazing that the stockholders and officers followed through with the suggestion. Baker provided large tents free of charge to missionaries doing evangelistic work in Argentina, China, Venezuela, and here among the savages of Canada and the United States. J.J. Rouse, William Williams, and Ross were uh wore out several of those tents. C.J. Baker died of pneumonia two weeks after his dear friend William Somerville was taken home. Hundreds wept at his passing. Kansas City newspapers were emblazoned with his riches to the poor gave away his riches. That'd be a pretty good headline, wouldn't it? The copy read, With this big business, however, Mr. Baker did not die a rich man. He made it the rule of his life to give away all that he made except the amount needed in the business and for his own personal expenses. What was his secret? Baker knew the truth of 2 Corinthians 5 1, for we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God and house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. Sir, God does not require that you quit your business in order to serve him. What God does call you to do is give your business over to his control. Work, toil, labor, but not for many, not for lucre, not for riches, but for the glory of God. CJ Baker, a very successful businessman, a brilliant businessman, and yet he never allowed his success, he never allowed his potential wealth to distract him from the real duty of his life, the real love of his life, proclaiming the good news of the Lord Jesus Christ to men, women, boys, and girls in every possible way. What a man, CJ Baker. I hope that many a businessman listen to my voice right now be inspired by his story. Not to quit your work so you can preach, but to do a good job and preach for the honor and glory of your Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.

SPEAKER_00 27:05

Thanks for tuning in today. Join us every weekday for another episode of the Preaching of the Cross Radio Podcast. For hundreds of hours of in-depth expository Bible teaching, please visit our YouTube channel, James W. Knox Sermons, our sermon audio page, Bible Baptistoland, or our website, Bible BaptistTeland.com. Until next time and throughout eternity, may Jesus Christ be praised.