Frederick John WILKIN

WILKIN, FREDERICK JOHN (b. Cambridge, England, 8 May 1855; d. Surrey Hills, Vic, 10 Jan 1940). Baptist home mission leader and theological professor.

The Wilkin family came to Castlemaine from England in 1861 and attended the local Baptist Church. Converted at 14, Frederick Wilkin became a member of the church. In August 1874 he was accepted for ministerial training, undertaken at the Congregational College where the Rev James Taylor (q.v.) was a tutor. Upon ordination, he ministered at Eaglehawk near Bendigo (1877-80), where he married Louise Jane Thwaite. He then went to Kerang (1880-99), the centre of an extensive home mission work. He supervised a succession of untrained pastors, some of whom later entered college. He consolidated Baptist work in the area. In 1885, he began a monthly magazine, Kerang Home Missionary, to unite his scattered people. He studied with Melbourne University extramurally, BA and MA in 1892. He advocated temperance and was active in the formation of the Baptist Total Abstinence Society (1882). The Home Missionary Society appointed him to superintend all its country work in 1892.

He came to the city to be more accessible as superintendent, ministering at the Brighton Church (1899-1906). The patient congregation permitted him to move extensively through the country to help churches and their leaders. He found time to tutor students at the Baptist College and to edit Southern Baptist (1902-11), organ of the SA, Tasmanian and Vic Baptist Unions.

He became full-time organising secretary and superintendent of the Victorian Baptist Home Missionary Society in 1906. He encouraged his missionaries to undertake courses of study and induced College graduates to enter the Mission's service. Consequently, standards of leadership were raised. The Mission withdrew from some areas to avoid the scandal of competition with other denominations. Wilkin resigned from the Mission in 1911. In the following year he became a lecturer at the new residential Baptist theological College at North Melbourne, assisting the Principal, W H Holdsworth. Two years later he graduated BD (Melbourne College of Divinity), followed by an honours BD, and when he was 66 by the College's DD. He was secretary of the Baptist Union of Victoria (1914-20), relinquishing College duties during 1915-20 because in the war years there were fewer students. He then returned to the College as professor. At his instigation, the College began extramural courses for country pastors in 1924. When the Baptist Union of Australia was formed in 1926, he was the first secretary of the Educational Board (1926-9) thus forwarding theological education throughout the Commonwealth. Advancing age brought his resignation from the College in 1937, and two years later he published Baptists in Victoria - Our First Century, a study of Baptist church life in 1838-1938. He died in the following year.

Baptist Union Archives, Hawthorn, Victoria; B S Brown, Members One of Another (Melbourne, 1962); E J Daley (ed), Great is Thy Faithfulness (Kerang, 1977); J G Manning, Builders for God (Melbourne, (1971)

BASIL S BROWN