John Birch (missionary) - Early Life

Early Life

Birch was born to Baptist missionaries in Landour, a hill station in the Himalayas in northern India. In 1920, when he was two, the family returned to the United States. He and his five younger siblings were reared in New Jersey, Floyd County, Georgia and Macon, Georgia, in the Fundamental Baptist tradition. He received his high school diploma from Lanier High School for Boys, now Central High School. He graduated from Georgia Baptist–affiliated Mercer University in 1939 magna cum laude. "He was always an angry young man, always a zealot", said a classmate many years later. In his senior year at Mercer, he organized a student group to identify cases of heresy by professors, seeking to uphold the Scriptural definition of conversion and other doctrines.

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