This year was an eventful one for the Andrew Fuller Center. As most of you know, this year marked the transition of the Center from Toronto to Louisville since I began serving as Professor of Church History and Biblical Spirituality at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in January, 2008. I am deeply honored to be serving in this capacity and thrilled to be able to work alongside godly, scholarly colleagues and to teach students passionately committed to the Kingdom of the Lord Jesus.
With this move to Louisville a change in personnel was needed to facilitate the work of the Andrew Fuller Center at the new location. Steve Weaver assumed the position of Research and Administrative Assistant to the Director for the Center, a position previously admirably filled by Mr. Allen Mickle. With Mr. Weaver's assumption of duties in July, the Center's full transition to Louisville was finally complete.
In the summer the Center published our ninth issue of Eusebeia. The theme was "Reading Andrew Fuller" and largely featured papers from the 2007 Annual Conference. At two hundred pages, this issue is the largest issue of Eusebeia published by the Center and features several excellent articles on the literary and theological influences on Andrew Fuller by leading evangelical scholars (including Tom Nettles, Carl Trueman, Jeff Jue, and Barry Howson). If you would like to order a copy, please contact us at andrewfullercenter@sbts.edu.
At the end of August, the Center hosted its second annual conference at SBTS. The theme this year was the "17th Century British Baptists" and featured presentations by Baptist scholars from both sides of the Atlantic (including R. Albert Mohler, Tom Nettles, Malcolm Yarnell, Austin Walker, Larry Kreitzer, and James Renihan). It is hoped that these papers will be published in a forthcoming volume in Paternoster's series on Baptist History and Thought. The complete audio from this conference is available online for free MP3 download here.
In mid-November, the Center sponsored yet another event on the campus of SBTS. It was a mini-conference celebrating the life and thought of John Milton on the quatercentenary of his birth. This mini-conference featured a biographical sketch of Milton, followed by presentations on his poems by Timothy Paul Jones and James Orrick, both of whom teach at Southern. The audio for this conference is also available online for free in MP3 format here.
The coming year promises to be a full one, DV. We will have the annual conference in August with the focus this year on Baptist piety. We are looking forward to some splendid lectures at that time by such scholars as Crawford Gribben and Robert Strivens (both from the U.K.), Greg Thornbury and Greg Wills, and Jason Lee and Malcolm Yarnell (both of whom will speak on John Smyth and the General Baptists). Do plan on joining us. In April we also hope to do a mini-celebration of the life of John Calvin (it is the quincentenary of his birth this year) on the campus of Southern. We also hope to publish two issues of Eusebeia, the first of which is to focus on Puritanism.
Hopefully this year will also witness the publication of the first two volumes in the critical edition of the Works of Andrew Fuller, which is being published by Paternoster Press. The first volume should be Fuller's memoirs of his close friend Samuel Pearce, which I am editing and which will be ready by the August conference, followed in the fall by Fuller's The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation, being edited by Robert Oliver. Other books in the works this year by the Director include a collection of love letters by Christians called The Christian Lover (Reformation Trust), a collection of essays on Abraham Booth (whom Fuller highly esteemed), a book on Calvinistic Baptist Spirituality (Paternoster Press), and hopefully a collection of papers that I have done at various times in the past on Andrew Fuller.
