Another week’s break between posts here, and once more it’s not because of sunning myself on the Jurassic Coast, nor even our upcoming Golden Wedding Anniversary this weekend (“…and it don’t seem a day too long…”), but because of further digging into the highly interesting history of my own Baptist Church. I spent a morning at the Exeter records office photographing the Church proceedings book we kept from 1653 until 1795, when it was borrowed by John Rippon, of hymn-collecting fame, and not returned for over a century. I spent most of the last week transcribing the archaic handwriting and spelling, correcting the chronological order, all garbled for several contingent reasons. Who would have thought, for example, that the word “Popain” in a list of local settlements where members lived actually refers to “Pope Hayne,” an old farm just down the hill from us?
It’s a fascinating read in many ways. For example, one can use it to date approximately the two Conventicle Acts of Charles II’s reign, forbidding churches like ours from meeting, by the long gaps in entries, and the references in the entries that do come up for air of the difficulty of meeting, and the poverty of the members, shown in the small amounts they were able to subscribe for the relief of their own poor. This explains why the number of members had dropped from 92 to around 25.
Similarly an entry of 1695, allowing singing in meetings, corresponds to its controversial introduction into Particular Baptist meetings nationally. Baptists were pretty unusual amongst seventeenth century Puritans in avoiding even metrical psalms, for some reason, but one probably wouldn’t twig this from the book without this entry.
What strikes me most, though, in relation to lessons to be learned today, is just how seriously this local assembly took the principle of using the touchstone of Scripture for everything they did, being admirably conscious of how easy it is for traditions and cultural assumptions to dilute Christian life. Of course they had occasional blind spots, like the Fifth Monarchism I noted in a previous post, but not for want of trying.
They didn’t re-invent the wheel. They certainly adopted the 1644 London Confession of Faith on their formation just a couple of years afterwards, and the more thorough 1689 Particular Baptist Confession actually had our senior elder, James Hitt, as one of its 39 signatories. What is ironic is that only the Glorious Revolution of William of Orange allowed Hitt to appear publicly, as he had apparently been on the run since taking part in the failed rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth a decade earlier. Fifth Monarchism died hard.
Even the dating of entries shows their care to avoid anything biblically doubtful – these early entries all refer to dates by the nth day of the nth month, instead of using the pagan names.
Lacking a pastor at first, but having elected elders and deacons on the New Testament pattern, they actually set a day aside to discuss whether it was scriptural for such an elder to take on the role of single pastor (and whether any such person existed in their own number). This is radical thinking when you consider how long the principle of a sacerdotal ministry validated by apostolic succession had been taken for granted by Christians. Eventually, just before the Conventicle Act stopped their pens, if not altogether their meetings in the wooded seclusion of Loughwood, they indeed elected their first pastor from among their own number.
Though most of the book has to do with matters of church discipline, elections and other such business, one entry gives the same kind of window on their meetings (never “services”) of the Church (always the people) at the meeting-house they built (never “in the church,” or “chapel,” or “sanctuary”) as Justin Martyr’s does for the second century Church. And it’s actually pretty similar.
For the summer months, in 1657, the whole first day was to be spent in fellowship. It began at 7pm, when brethren identified as potentially gifted in speaking were given their head on trial, in private with those already recognised, the time being “improved” with prayer and prophecy. The fact that two such people were rotated week by week shows that they were modelling the multiple speakers of 1 Corinthians 14, rather than the preacher “standing six feet above contradiction.”
In fact, their meetings had built into them space for congregational critique and discussion of what was said. For after two public sessions of a couple or three hours, with a break for lunch, the non-members were dismissed. Given the absence of music, at these public sessions Bible reading, teaching and open prayer must have predominated, with the Breaking of Bread once a month. The members stayed on for an hour or two for:
Communicatinge their Experiences; inquiringe after persons absent; Tryinge the gifts of those that spoke in the morninge; tryinge the things heard and dutys neglected.
Those multiple teachers must have spoken at length, but it was all steeped in Scripture, to judge from the numerous citations in the writings of half a dozen of them in the introduction to a 1667 book published by the church. And it was not high-flying oratory either, for another entry describes the procedure for members to challenge any doctrinal error immediately after the speaker stops, and for the Church to adjudicate accordingly and discipline offenders. Imagine that happening to Kenneth Copeland or Bill Johnson.
Now, not only does that sound pretty New Testament, but it’s exactly in line with the work of Tom Wadsworth, which I’ve recently referenced in three posts such as this one. Tom’s burden is that, in dramatic contradiction of most modern practice and especially the Charismatic model of “worship,” the New Testament pupose of meeting is not for worship at all, but for mutual edification. And the description above fits that model entirely. Nothing is mentioned about bringing people into the presence of God, so as to experience his supernatural power – and how could it be, without the necessary lengthy musical “worship session” or soft keyboard pads behind the “apostle’s” rambling address? Instead, for all that we might baulk at the idea of spending eight hours in church, the picture we see is of God’s people building each other up as (rather than “in”) the presence of the Lord.
That explains why Deborah Huish, the subject of the above-mentioned book, in describing her spiritual life, always speaks of going to church to “hear,” rather than to worship, and also why the Church was so firm in its discipline on members who failed to attend for long periods. It wasn’t because they were failing to encounter God, but because they were neglecting their duty of being built up, and building up others.
Transcribing the Church Book, it is interesting to see the gradual dilution of this focus on the communal consultation of Scripture for every question. As one minor instance I noticed one stray reference to “Saturday” in 1659, but by the following century the Church had abandoned its scruples on pagan names and used the usual day and month names, rather than numbers, for entries. “Lord’s Day” tended to have become “Sabbath.”
But most of all, the central role of the Pastor (and later “Minister”) becomes very obvious. When there is difficulty finding a suitably qualified and credentialled Pastor, the Church is seen to be struggling rather than, as at first, managing happily and growing without one. A book of sermons by our most celebrated and long-serving Pastor in the eighteenth century, Isaac Hann (he that lived at “Copain”!) recently came up for sale at a rear-books dealer. Sadly I missed the chance to repatriate it for the Church (thus saving two and a half grand). But good pictures of sample pages show carefully structured, literary and long-winded lectures, rather than the homespun biblical discoveries by members suggested by the 1657 pattern. It may be coincidental that of two elders signing an entry in that period, one is illiterate, and the other can barely scrawl his name. A century before the elders were publishing books.
It appears, from what I can glean without the opportunity to plough through that sermon book, that Hann faithfully adhered the theology of the 1689 Baptist Confession. But that was actually deeply unfashionable, which is why a small-church pastor is celebrated now. It may also explain the church’s small membership then, but also the apparently orthodox evangelicalism throughout its history.
For despite the foundational importance of Puritan Reformed teaching to the Non-conformist denominations, by the middle of the eighteenth century many or most Presbyterian churches had become Socinian, the Independents and Arminian Baptists became Arian or frankly Unitarian, and the Particular Baptists adopted the Hyper-calvinist aberration. Ironically, all these were introduced by the credentialled ministers who had adopted these heresies during their theological education. They came from various flavours of Enlightenment rationalism, trumping the Bible.
And so, with rare exceptions like Loughwood, we see the torch of biblical Christianity being kept alive in the eighteenth century not by the denominations arising from the Puritans, but by the Methodist revival originating in Anglicanism, which set the course for British Evangelicalism to become Pietist and (in the larger Wesleyan branch) Arminian, rather than Reformed. The original Non-conformist denominations also missed out on the “Second Awakening” that started in 1859, their churches having either died or been rendered moribund by their previous heresies, or latching on to the new liberalism of Higher Criticism.
But the untrendy Calvinistic Baptists like those at Loughwood did better than most, encouraged by leaders like C. H. Spurgeon, whose portrait hung on the wall of the “new” chapel of 1844 until it was destroyed by fire in 2009. Spurgeon’s secret, although in my view lacking the radical thoroughness of our 17th century founders, was to go back to the Bible.
It’s an old trick, but it might just work even now.
