Journal: Journal for Baptist Theology & Ministry
Volume: JBTM 22:2 (Fall 2025)
Article: G. Landon Adams
Author: Anonymous

G. Landon Adams

Landon Adams serves as Baptist Student Union Director at William Carey University in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

Hail, Friendship! Queen of earthly joys,

Without thee, diadems are toys,

And vain is Nature’s store;

With thee I am supremely blest,

And with thee I would ever rest,

Nor ask the world for more.

—Achátes (William Ward)1

William Ward (1769–1823) made friends wherever he went. While editing his first newspaper, The Derby Mercury, he chose Achátes—meaning “faithful friend”—as his first pen name (Virgil, Aeneid, 1:494–578). Ward seems to have understood himself throughout life as a supporting companion in service to purposes much greater than his own self-interest. As he evolved from newspaper editor to preacher to missionary, Ward spent his life in search of ways to be of use. Plying his trade of printing in usefulness to the expansion of God’s kingdom, he made friends wherever he went. These friends helped shape him along the way.

Friends In Low Places

One Saturday evening in the English village of Gildersome, a twenty-nine-year-old bachelor seminary student rested in the parlor of his host’s home before preaching the next Sunday morning. The young minister in training had become accustomed to making the seventeen-mile trek across the Yorkshire countryside to preach three times on Sundays for a church that was without a pastor. One might think that he would have fallen asleep at a

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modest hour with such a busy day of ministry ahead. On the contrary, he and his hosts joked late into the night about their theological differences and the difficulties involved in finding a pastor for a contentious group of Baptists!

As midnight approached, they sat and laughed beneath the portrait of the most theologically controversial English minister of their age, Joseph Priestley (1733–1804). Priestley had been chased out of Birmingham (1791) and eventually England altogether (1794) for his dissenting religious teachings and his revolutionary sympathy by overzealous loyalists to church and king. Perhaps displaying Priestley’s portrait in one’s parlor would have been controversial, but this was the home of both relatives and fellow dissenters in an out-of-the-way provincial village. While Priestley was regarded wrongly as a dangerous French spy, his odd assortment of extended Yorkshire relatives—and their interim pastor—had no reasons to be regarded by anyone of importance at all. From the safety of obscurity, Priestley’s widowed sister Martha Crouch (1741–1812), his second cousin W...