In 1671, John Bunyan was elected to the eldership of the Independent church at Bedford, by the prayerful agreement of the church members. The significance was that Bunyan, and many other leading figures in the Bedford church, were chosen by the assent of the congregation: a collective, and collectively empowering, decision. The church acted independently; it alone could appoint those who were to lead it, and it alone set standards of church attendance and personal morality. Church life for those in the dissenting churches could be liberating. It also came with certain demands and expectations.
In a collection of essays arising from the “Dissenting Experience” project and edited by Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb, the contributors to Church Life: Pastors, Congregations, and the Experience of Dissent in Seventeenth-Century England aim to address the often complex and complicated nature of “church life.” Between them, they consider three dissenting denominations—Baptists, Congregationalists (Independents), and Presbyterians—and cover a broad chronological sweep, from the gathered churches of the English Revolution to the post–Toleration Act churches of the early eighteenth century.
The essays are arranged chronologically, reflecting their focus on key moments in seventeenth-century history. Halcomb considers Congregational churches before the Restoration, including the importance of women within those congregations. It was a period in which issues of radicalism and respectability were debated as churches found their identity, sought to define their beliefs, and negotiate limits of toleration. In the same period, London's parochial religion in the English Revolution is the subject of Elliot Vernon's study. He finds that, with a full Presbyterian administrative system never being established, the structure of church life and worship remained dependent on the conditions of individual parishes.
Kathleen Lynch carefully contextualizes the subject of her study, a pamphlet justifying the letting of a room to a group of London Baptists in the 1640s, and uses it to consider questions of religious liberty and toleration. Chad Van Dixhoorn next examines the Westminster Assembly of divines and its debates on pastoral care. The importance of the pastor in bringing people into a right relationship with God was undeniable, but the boundaries of the parson's pastoral responsibilities were a contested issue.
The independence of expression that characterized much dissenting church life was not always conducive to harmonious relationships with other nonconformists. Freedoms of association and ecclesiastical independence, and the debates this generated, are examined by Polly Ha in a chapter exploring the sometimes tortuous and ambiguous arguments used to defend individual positions. The legitimacy of a church's position on infant baptism, in particular, was a potentially divisive issue; quite literally, as churches split over this and other doctrinal concerns.
Following the Restoration of 1660, and, for Presbyterians, the failure to be accommodated within the newly restored episcopalian national church, all three dissenting groups had to negotiate their way in a religious landscape in which they remained outsiders. Crawford Gribben considers the preacher John Owen and Congregational church life, with particular reference to his experience of defeat in the 1660s. Owen's active involvement in church life spanned forty years and eighty publications, but he died in 1683 pessimistic about the future of dissent.
N. H. Keeble considers the career of Richard Baxter after 1662's Act of Uniformity, a period in which Baxter largely retired from active preaching but continued to exercise his ministry through his writings. Baxter hoped nonconformists would achieve comprehension within the Church of England, but his long life meant he lived to see the passing of the Toleration Act in 1689, and the end of his hopes of inclusion within the national church.
Baxter had been far from alone in his belief that those of moderate Presbyterian views could be accommodated within the Church of England. In 1660, Presbyterian pastors could still hope that the Restoration's religious settlement would see them admitted into a national, episcopalian, church. That hope was not entirely dashed by the 1662 Act. In her study of pastors after the Restoration, Ann Hughes examines the different ways in which individuals negotiated their new reality as they found themselves outside the national church. The importance of print, in Hughes's study, is crucial to an understanding of these years. A distinction has been made between the older “Dons” who had been active during the 1640s and 1650s and who, post-1662, continued to work for comprehension within the national church, and the younger “Ducklings” who worked on establishing congregations outside the Church of England. Hughes challenges this distinction; she suggests that we have not yet reached “a nuanced understanding of the overall fortunes of Presbyterians” (169).
Davies examines the ministry of Ebenezer Chandler, who had the unenviable task of succeeding Bunyan, much-loved pastor of the Bedford Independent church. Chandler, though pastor for over half a century, never seems to have inspired the devotion accorded to Bunyan, nor the affection in which Chandler's own successor, Samuel Sanderson, would be held, perhaps due to what Davies depicts as Chandler's somewhat blunt management style.
Finally, in a study utilizing an impressively wide range of church records, Dunan-Page examines the sometimes complex relationship between the demands of church membership and reasons for absence in Baptist and Congregational churches.
This collection of essays does not claim to be the definitive work on the subject of dissenting church life. As the editors make clear in the introduction, “one aim of this volume is to invite further exploration” (9), particularly among underused manuscript church books and registers. Continued exploration among the records will provide further understanding of church life as experienced by the rank-and-file dissenters and their pastors, and it is to be hoped that Church Life will inspire other studies of the dissenting experience, particularly among the records of provincial churches outside London and its environs.
Well researched throughout, and encompassing a broad chronological span, Church Life is a welcome addition to the existing literature on dissenting churches.
