‘Not Keeping One’s Place in the Church’

This chapter examines the issue of absenteeism in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century gathered churches through their manuscript church records. Absenteeism was the offence most frequently cited in disciplinary meetings, yet some members who were censured for absence were active supporters of their churches in other ways. This chapter focuses on those members who were never under a sentence of excommunication but who had ceased to be involved in church life and to take communion. It examines the question of Dissenting identity through lay participation, the reasons why men and women ceased to come to church, and what prompted them to seek reconciliation, sometimes decades after their first admission. Evidence is taken from manuscript church records belonging to Congregational, Particular Baptist, and General Baptist churches, spanning the period c.1640 to c.1714.

The Freedom of Association and Ecclesiastical Independence

Associational freedom played a key role in reconfiguring ecclesiastical and political thought during the Interregnum. This chapter explores how Puritan Independents such as Henry Jacob and John Goodwin advanced arguments for the freedom of association by claiming a dual freedom to exit from true churches and to join or even to establish new formal ecclesiastical societies. During the English Revolution some Independents began to assert more controversial claims for the freedom to exclude others from their churches, over matters such as paedobaptism, for example. These ecclesiastical positions resonated with wider debates over institutional legitimacy during the 1640s and 1650s and also with changing views on the bonds of society and the limits of individual liberty at a time when England’s most revolutionary experiments with both popular government and godly forms of church life were being undertaken.

Godly Pastors and their Congregations in Mid-Seventeenth-Century London

This chapter examines the relationship between pastor and congregation in the London parishes during the Interregnum. It addresses how godly ministers, called on by Parliament at the outbreak of the Civil War to reform parochial discipline and prevent the ‘promiscuous multitude’ from polluting the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper in England’s parish churches, negotiated issues of authority, changes to worship and liturgy, and the already contentious issues of patronage and finance. These factors forced ministers to look to the lay leaders of the parish, whether as elders or vestrymen, making them subject to factional struggles within the church life of the parish community. This chapter assesses the establishment and operation of Presbyterianism in London’s parishes during the 1640s and 1650s, as well as the practical difficulties, economic and administrative, that godly pastors experienced at the parochial level as a result of the dismantling of the Church of England.

God’s Physicians

In accordance with its mandate from Parliament, the one hundred and twenty pastors brought together by the Westminster Assembly discussed doctrinal, disciplinary, and liturgical matters. Inevitably members of the gathering also found frequent occasion to disagree about best pastoral practice for parishioners struggling with sin, sickness, and ignorance. This chapter uses the viewpoints and arguments of Assembly members in a case study of seventeenth-century ideals regarding the pastor as godly shepherd and physician. Naturally the debates of a ten-year synod may not offer the best sampling of real-life pastoral perspectives. Thus this chapter sources its materials not only from the minutes of the Assembly but also from the personal papers and published works of its individual members. What emerges is a rich yet reliable picture of the range of perspectives on congregational care that obtained at the Westminster Assembly during some of the most critical years of the mid seventeenth century.

The Experience of Dissent

This chapter examines developments in John Owen’s thinking about church government, church membership, and the observation of the sacraments. It will outline his experiments in ecclesiology in the 1640s, when the Independent party emerged as a movement for reform within the national church. It will suggest reasons for his apparent lack of interest in ecclesiology in the 1650s: a period in which his principal writings make little reference to the benefits of church membership, and in which Owen’s own ecclesiastical affiliation cannot be traced. It will discuss the renewal of his interest in church life in the 1660s and beyond, particularly as his Restoration works on the principles of public worship, together with a very complete set of auditor’s notes covering almost twenty years of his preaching, offer new ways of understanding the challenge he faced in turning local church principles into local church practice.

Introduction

This chapter introduces Church Life: Pastors, Congregations, and the Experience of Dissent in Seventeenth-Century England. It addresses the rationale behind this volume, explains its structure, and summarizes its contents. It explores in detail the key terms of the book’s title: ‘church’, ‘church life’, and the ‘experience of Dissent’. It does so by reflecting initially on the election of the preacher and writer John Bunyan as pastor to the Congregational meeting at Bedford in order to demonstrate something of the rich and complex nature of ‘gathered’ church life as experienced by many Protestant Dissenters throughout the seventeenth century. This chapter also considers what the ‘experience of Dissent’ encompasses, shifting the traditional focus of enquiry beyond the individual believer and the ‘experience’ of religious conversion and its narratives to the more collective concerns of a communally-centred and mutually-shared experience of Dissenting church life as captured especially in manuscript church books and records.

Print and Pastoral Identity

This chapter explores the poignant dilemmas of those Presbyterian clergy who suffered ejection from their livings in 1662 following the passing and enforcement of the Act of Uniformity. Their commitment to a national church meant that they were reluctant Dissenters, demonstrated in ambiguous and complex relationships with the restored episcopal Church of England. For the likes of Samuel Clarke, Thomas Watson, Thomas Case, and other ejected Presbyterian ministers, print offered a way of establishing a virtual pastoral identity during the Restoration, not only through the production of new works but also through reissues of material first published during the 1640s and 1650s. The legacy of the Civil War was thus double-edged, in some ways comprising a culture of defeat, yet also contributing to a resolute and distinctive Presbyterian legacy through a vibrant print culture and the ongoing memorialization of Nonconformity.

The Reformed Pastor as Nonconformist

This chapter examines the complexities and tensions of Richard Baxter’s pastoral and ecclesiastical thought and practice after 1662 when, an unwilling Nonconformist, he continued to work for a less prescriptive and more inclusive national episcopal church that might accommodate the greater part of Nonconformist opinion. While he could not be a member of a church re-established by the Act of Uniformity on exclusive lines, no more would he separate from it or promote a permanent schism in the religious life of the nation by ministering to a separatist gathered church. This non-partisan Baxterian middle way, or ‘mere Christianity’, and particularly his practice of occasional communion with parish churches, was attacked by both Nonconformists and conformists, but Baxter’s commitment to church unity never wavered. For the last thirty years of his life, only through writing could the author of the classic The Reformed Pastor (1656) exercise his pastoral vocation.

Godly Order and the Trumpet of Defiance

This chapter explores the politics of church life among Congregational gathered churches during the English Revolution. In contrast to studies that view gathered church life at this time as too fluid and unsettled to be meaningfully analysed, it outlines the social relations and ecclesiastical structures that shaped the ‘mixed’ church polity of Congregational churches, arguing that these structures defined the corporate and personal experience of their members. In a close analysis of the transactional debate and conflict apparent in two case studies, focusing on the politics of Congregational church life at Norwich and Bury St. Edmunds in the 1640s and 1650s, it concludes that these politics were formative and creative. They determined a church’s beliefs, practices, identity, and communal life in a process best understood as denominational formation. This chapter therefore provides a method for studying religious experience within other institutional churches established both in this period and more generally.

Life After Bunyan

This chapter explores the ‘church life’ of the Congregational meeting at Bedford during the two decades following the death in 1688 of its most famous pastor, John Bunyan, and the passing of the 1689 Toleration Act. It examines the difficult experience of pastoral transition facing the church under the early leadership of Bunyan’s successor, Ebenezer Chandler: the first pastor to be appointed from without the congregation since its establishment in the early 1650s, but about whom almost nothing has been written. This chapter addresses matters at the heart of the relationship between Dissenting pastors and their congregations in one of the most prominent and well-documented Congregational churches of the era, and during a key period in the transformation of English Dissent: from the seventeenth century to the eighteenth century, and from persecution to toleration, via the short-lived ‘Happy Union’ of Presbyterians and Congregationalists in the early 1690s.