Missionary Boulder in Andover
- Lwin Moe
- Sep 18
- 2 min read
Andover, Massachusetts
Andover is a town in Essex County, Massachusetts, United States. It was settled in 1642 and incorporated in 1646. At the 2020 census, the population was 36,569. It is located 20 miles north of Boston and 4 miles south of Lawrence. Part of the town comprises the census-designated place of Andover. It is twinned with its namesake: Andover, Hampshire, England.
Phillips Academy
Revolutionary-era beginnings
Phillips Academy is the oldest incorporated academy in the United States. It was established in 1778 by Samuel Phillips Jr., a local businessman who hoped to educate Calvinist students for the ministry.
From 1808 to 1907, Phillips Academy shared its campus with the Andover Theological Seminary, which was founded by orthodox Calvinists who had fled Harvard University after it appointed a liberal Unitarian theology professor. The Phillips family financially backed the seminary, and the two institutions shared a board of directors.
Andover Theological Seminary
Andover Theological Seminary traces its roots to the late 18th century and the desire for a well-educated clergy among Congregationalists in the United States. That desire was expressed in the founding of Phillips Academy in 1778 for "the promotion of true Piety and Virtue".
Andover was founded by the joint efforts of traditionalist, "Old Calvinists" and the adherents of the New Divinity (also known as New England theology) which was more revivalistic. Leonard Woods, Moses Stuart, and Edward Dorr Griffin were early faculty.
Historical influence on Protestant missions
Prior to the founding of Andover and Newton, the model for the training of clergy was based on an undergraduate degree (actually the basis for the founding of most of the early colleges in the United States). The graduate model and the three year curriculum with a resident student body and resident faculty pioneered at Andover and Newton has become the standard for almost all of the 140 Protestant theological schools in the country.
Reflecting that zeal, the modern missionary movement began in this country through a group of Andover students known as the Brethren. Both Andover and Newton quickly assumed leadership in the modern mission movement, drawing the two schools into close association of people and ideas. Graduates such as Luther Rice and Hiram Bingham pioneered in Christian missions around the world. Adoniram Judson, an 1810 Andover alumnus, is best known for his work in Burma, where he translated the Bible into Burmese and produced the first Burmese-English dictionary. Adoniram Judson, class of 1810, one of the first U.S. missionaries sent by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions; later became a Baptist missionary to Myanmar, then known as Burma.
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