Denominations that trace their own history sometimes point to a founding sermon or a splitting convention. American Baptist Churches USA can point to something more ordinary and, in its own way, more telling: a hymn book its own publishing house printed for the pews of its own churches.
The American Baptist Publication Society began in 1824 as a tract society and grew into the denomination's publishing arm, producing Bibles, Sunday school material and hymnals for decades. In 1883 it published The Baptist Hymnal, for Use in the Church and Home, edited by William Howard Doane and Elias Henry Johnson, four part musical settings organized under headings running from Worship and God through the Church and the Lord's Prayer, meant to be sung on Sunday morning and read again at the family table.
The honest complication is timing. In 1883 the Society still served Baptist congregations broadly, including those that would become the Southern Baptist Convention. Only in 1897, after its own secretary publicly criticized Southern Baptist publishers, did the Society settle into an unbroken relationship with just one line, the Triennial Convention that became the Northern Baptist Convention in 1907, the American Baptist Convention in 1950, and American Baptist Churches USA in 1972. So this hymnal was not written exclusively for the denomination that exists today; it was written for a wider Baptist world that had not yet fully split, by the very organization whose later, narrower loyalty would eventually define this one denomination's own institutional line. Copies survive today in university archives, a plain, working artifact of nineteenth century congregational song.