I. The Conversion of Lydia: Gentiles in Acts and Indian Missions

The chronological gap between the puritans’ arrival in New England in the 1630s and early missionary activity by Thomas Mayhew and John Eliot in 1643 and 1646, respectively, has fostered the notion that missions served to placate Parliamentary ire because colonists had failed to civilize and Christianize Indians according to their colonial charter. Jesuit successes in New France, publicized by the Jesuit Relations, further highlighted the humiliation and cemented this as a scholarly truism.Footnote ²² By contrast, Richard Cogley suggests that the initial period of puritan neglect stems from their recognition that independent Indian communities remained outside English political authority. Mainstream puritan eschatology also assumed that Indians, as Gentiles, would not convert as a people until the “middle Advent” following the Jewish conversion and Christ's final return. Thus, the submission of Sacononoco and Pomham in May 1643, and the more famous submissions of Cutshamekin, the “Squaw Sachem,” Mascononomo, Nashowanon, and Wossamegon on March 8, 1644, obligated the Massachusetts Bay Colony government to begin promoting Indian missions. Cogley and other scholars concur that the sachems sought protection from an English alliance because of Narragansett hostility toward the weakened Pawtucket and Massachusett communities. The Indian “desire” for English civil government, as Governor William Bradford and Deputy Governor John Endicott saw it, represented a necessary predicate in an affective model for missions because it demonstrated a stirring of the heart toward Christianity and away from heathenish complacency.Footnote ²³

Civilization preceded conversion within virtually all contemporary treatments on the process as writers speculated on the nature and viability of Gentile conversion within a Calvinist soteriology that disparaged human efforts or “works.” The two lines in Acts 16 devoted to Lydia, a female cloth dyer and possible Jewish convert who served as a founding leader of the church in Thyatira after listening to the apostle Paul and converting to Christianity, proved sufficiently vague and malleable for puritan exegetes. While puritans like Peter Bulkely, Thomas Hooker, and Richard Rogers read Lydia's account and interpreted the text as a sign of a quick—and exceptional—conversionary account, other ministers like Thomas Shepard and Richard Sibbes interpreted her story in support of a doctrine of spiritual preparation.Footnote ²⁴

According to Sibbes's treatise on Lydia, spiritual preparation “is to remoove the hindrances and to fit the soule for conversion,” for “there is such a distance between the nature, and corruption of man, and grace, that there must be a great deale of preparation, many degrees to rise by before a man come to that condition hee should bee in.” Sibbes believed a “rude wild, and barbarous soule, in men that are not men” served as a poor repository for God's spirit, “therefore they must bee brought to Civilitie, and not only to civilitie, but there must be a worke of the law, to cast them downe, and then they are brought to Christianitie thereupon.” Natural man, an ethnological category including unconverted Native Americans, “is like a wild asse-Colt” and must understand his natural corruption before conversion could occur.Footnote ²⁵ Puritans like Sibbes believed that man's natural state and Satan's interference (which altered the senses) made unconverted people incapable of fully discerning and appreciating God's grace. Indeed, puritan soteriology credited God with the sole power to bring men out of a corrupted state through election and the mysterious workings of the spirit; yet missionaries like Paul played a crucial role in God's unfolding plan of worldwide redemption. Through “their indeauour that labour,” the Lord “would set vp lights in all the darke corners of the kingdome, and every where to those that are in darkness, and in the shadow of death.” As God's word spread, it would bring faith to the Lydias who listened and repented.Footnote ²⁶ To missionaries like Eliot and Mayhew, Sibbes's appraisal of preparation, conversion, and the role of missionaries served as optimistic validation for their initial efforts in converting Native Americans. An even greater sense of urgency to effect native conversions stemmed from speculation that they existed as the remnant of one of the fabled “Lost Tribes of Israel,” a point addressed in the context of Eliot's work below. Nevertheless, civilization and barbarism were not discrete ethnographic categories in the minds of seventeenth-century Europeans, forcing New England missionaries to advance claims of Indian progress toward civility and Christianity in the face of serious skepticism.

Of the body of first-generation ministers in New England, John Cotton, who ministered alongside John Wilson at Boston's First Church until his death in 1652, wrote extensively about the millennium. His series of sermons on the Book of Revelation, preached between 1638 and 1641, and a later collection of lectures casting the Song of Solomon as an allegory for redemptive history serve as the best contemporary examples of New England thought on the millennium. Cotton inadvertently dampened hopes of a grand conversion of Native Americans when he placed Gentile conversion at the end of the eschatological sequence, suggesting that isolated conversions of individual pagans might occur before that point. Cotton also placed the epicenter of the “Middle Advent” in Jerusalem, contending that only after the restoration of primitive church practices and the creation of a godly magistracy—with Jerusalem as the prototypical example—would missionaries spread across the globe to convert the remaining pagans.Footnote ²⁷ Nevertheless, Englishmen like Roger Williams made occasional efforts to convert individuals like the Niantic sachem Wequash in their efforts to learn more about indigenous customs and language.

Though Williams's A Key into the Language of America (1643) demonstrated ethnographic interest in Native Americans and suggested the text could serve as a handbook for potential missionaries to convert people like Wequash in their own language, he pivoted after securing a patent for Rhode Island to suggest in Christenings Make Not Christians (1645) that indigenous languages were too difficult to master and the church lacked an apostolic commission to convert Indians until the “Middle Advent.” Voicing concerns similar to those of Thomas Shepard, he worried that Indians’ outward behavior did not reflect an inward change of heart, suggesting that most Indians falsely converted and entered the church as heathens. A recently discovered essay by Williams in the margins of the “Mystery Book” (so-called due to its missing title page) at the John Carter Brown Library, written in a shorthand cypher near the end of his life, suggests that he did not deviate from his thinking in the middle of the 1640s and doubted Eliot's successes—directly accusing the Apostle to the Indians of “treachery and seduction” in his tactics—along with the veracity of Indian conversions because of the great difficulty they faced in bridging the cultural gap.Footnote ²⁸ While the question of Williams's veracity and cultural open-mindedness is a continued subject of scholarly debate, the consistency between Christenings and his final draft essay demonstrate the challenge Indian Christians faced in meeting English expectations with any degree of satisfaction. That Williams, a colonist with extensive indigenous interactions and a history of Indian advocacy amidst intercolonial politics, would display such pessimism toward the possibility of Indian conversion to Christianity further underscores the point.

II. A Body of Visible Saints: Early Praying Town History

Throughout the 1640s and 1650s, the Indians who had served as the founding members of Natick and the growing number of Praying Towns increasingly participated in the wider ecclesiastical and social activities of English life. This visible participation, along with the circulation of promotional tracts within the colony publicizing the progression of Indian conversion, directly confronted the dominant attitude toward Indian evangelism and forced colonists to consider the possibility of conversion on a wider scale. Kathryn N. Gray suggests that a sermon delivered by Eliot in Algonquian before a mixed Indian and English audience at Cambridge in 1647 was part of the synod deliberations that produced the Cambridge Platform of 1648. If so, this placed potential Indian converts squarely before the intellectual elite of the colony while highlighting the colony's failure to make missionary activity a priority before 1646.Footnote ²⁹

Nonantum and Natick Indians sought to strengthen their ties to English communities, most often by sending their children to live with the English in anticipation of reciprocity—an Algonquian cultural value—and as a pragmatic means of survival. Eliot's first convert, a Nipmuc named Waban, sent his son to the English school at nearby Dedham to build rapport with settlers and gain English literacy.Footnote ³⁰ A member of the Natick church, Anthony first lived with the English to learn blacksmithing. After hearing Eliot preach at Nonantum, Anthony spent a year in Roxbury learning about English faith despite the frustration of struggling to understand the sermons in English.Footnote ³¹ During his December 9, 1646 visit to Nonantum, Eliot recorded that his audience offered their children for education, prompting Eliot to begin “setting up a Schoole among them or very neare unto them,” demonstrating how Indian initiatives and desire for valuable knowledge and skills occasionally shaped English responses.Footnote ³² The Wampanoag at Martha's Vineyard similarly organized a community under a civil covenant and began a school for their children in partnership with Thomas Mayhew, which served about thirty children in 1651.Footnote ³³ This new form of association forced English ministers to confront the issue of church membership for Algonquian men and women as they adopted aspects of European civility.

Indian interest in Christianity thrust men like Waban and Anthony into the heart of the paradoxes inherent to the English faith. The Protestant emphasis on sola scriptura gave primacy to Biblical knowledge, making it the bedrock of religious faith and conversion, yet Algonquian was their lingua franca. They similarly lacked the biblical text necessary for study, meditation, and spiritual transformation. Culturally, their daily lives looked different from the English in terms of dress, gender roles, and societal arrangements—forms of outward behavior deemed aberrant by puritans. Furthermore, New England puritans experimented with stringent requirements pertaining to church covenant and membership, codified at the Synod of 1648 (also known as the Cambridge Synod), which plagued the formation of a visible Indian church throughout the early years of English missions by insisting on “visible sainthood” as the key component to membership. Individuals from the Wampanoag, Nipmuc, Massachusett, and other communities who joined early Praying Towns entered contested religious terrain and prompted innovation on the part of their English supporters like Eliot and Mayhew who struggled to determine how an indigenous form of Christianity might manifest itself.Footnote ³⁴ Indian Christians faced the challenge of filtering English teachings through their own worldview. For example, Eliot's letters and Iroquoian missionary writings suggest that Indians frequently believed rituals like baptism contained mystical or protective elements—a view held by many English colonists, too, who sought baptism regardless of their own status of visible sainthood to protect infant children and loved ones.Footnote ³⁵ This thus helps elucidate one of the central questions facing early missionaries like Eliot and Mayhew: To what extent did residents at experimental towns like Natick need to conform to English practices, and what aspects of their culture were acceptable variations of civilized living?

Remembered historically for their rigorous admission practices, puritans were initially even more willing to keep these new “Praying Indians” at arm's length than they were to exclude their own children. The tract Tears of Repentance (1653) chides its audience: “Surely it were great uncharitableness, and derogatory from the glory of God, to think that none of these [Praying Indians] are truly changed.”Footnote ³⁶ In A further Account of the progress of the Gospel (1660), Eliot suggested that the principal leaders of the Praying Towns should “be seasoned in Church-fellowship, in communion with our English Churches” as a preparatory step to forming their own church covenant. Magistrates and ministers unanimously objected, preferring that each retain their own church, allowing Praying Indians to join with them on occasion “for participation of the Seals, the Sacraments of Baptism, and the Lords Supper, and for any special Exercise of Discipline.” For these events, the ministers stressed that Roxbury should be the sole religious location where Indian Christians and puritans rubbed shoulders. Eliot admitted that even in Roxbury there were some objections to allowing Indians into their religious body, though debates on Indian membership and the public confessions of the Praying Indians eventually silenced the objectors.Footnote ³⁷ In the early years of missionary activity, exclusion and religious segregation appear to have been the preferred stance of most Englishmen.

Antipathy or nascent racism toward Indians is not the sole explanation for this trend. In Church Government and Church Covenant Discussed (1643), Richard Mather used “Turkes” and “Indians” as examples of groups who were “not fit materialls for such a building as a Church of God, which is the house of the living God.” Gentiles and followers of rival faiths merited exclusion under puritan ecclesiology. Mather continued to stress the gravity of the “solemne Covenant” in light of Israel's idolatry and God's punishment, drawing on the biblical story of Achan in the Book of Joshua to argue that his failure to destroy all of the Canaanite cities the Israelites attacked “was the sinne of all the Congregation, and brought judgement upon them all.”Footnote ³⁸ The bible also held numerous examples where communities suffered collective punishments for individual sins which were used to instruct communally minded puritans. The ministers of the New England congregations would likewise be responsible for any failure to maintain high standards of church membership because their approval of the Natick congregation fell within their duties under church covenant. Thus, ministers like Mather urged caution in admitting Native Americans into their churches, insisting on adequate demonstrations of faith that were even more stringent than those in English churches. As a participant in the Natick examinations and contributor to Tears of Repentance, Mather's concern for upholding the purity of the universal church and his own personal responsibility for authorizing the creation of an Indian church under a formal covenant undoubtedly contributed to his recommendation to delay in 1652. At the same time, Natick's later validation and the creation of an Indian church there underscored the efficacy of preparation amid the theological debates surrounding the Halfway Covenant, demonstrating that Gentiles far removed from Christianity could effectively prepare themselves to receive salvation. When reformers seeking to extend baptismal practices to the third generation of puritan children refined the genealogical understanding of the church covenant, it suggested that preparation and conversion might be even more effective if the church nurtured the children rather than cast them out. In this line of thinking, English children stood much closer to conversion and benefitted from God's special favor under the federal covenant.

Throughout his tracts, Eliot demonstrated awareness of this issue and the prevailing attitudes toward Gentile conversion when he stressed the progression of Indians toward English standards of civility. In 1650, Algonquians founded Natick near neighboring Dedham as a hybrid community boasting Indian wigwams, an English-style dwelling that served as Eliot's home and the meetinghouse, and a sturdy footbridge crossing the town's river. English observers commented extensively on the superb construction of the bridge and Indian prowess in constructing the building with minimal instruction from an English carpenter.Footnote ³⁹ Framing this development in providential terms, Eliot observed that a smallpox outbreak during the winter of 1650 decimated Indian opponents to the town while claiming the lives of only three Praying Indians.Footnote ⁴⁰ Richard Cogley has convincingly argued that Eliot adopted many of the eschatological beliefs common to the Fifth Monarchist movement during the English Civil War and Interregnum, joining a small cohort of Englishmen who speculated that Indians in North America were part of the Lost Tribes of Israel. In his correspondence with Thomas Thorowgood, whose Jews in America, or, Probabilities that the Americas are of that race (1650) represented one of the most prominent treatises on the theory, Eliot agreed that Indians descended from Noah's son Shem but posited that they were also the degenerate descendants of a lost tribe that mingled with Eber's Gentile son Joktan. Combining Noahic origins served as the basis for Eliot's unique belief that New England would serve as the birthplace of an eastern branch of the millennium. Merging these theories allowed Eliot to circumvent Cotton's Jews-then-Gentiles formula by placing Native Americans at the beginning of the sequence.Footnote ⁴¹ Eschatological urgency helps to explain the rapid pace Eliot sought in guiding the residents of Natick from civil polity to church membership and his belief that Indians made astonishing progress in civility and Christian knowledge.

In Strength out of Weaknesse (1652), Eliot emphasized the link between civil and religious covenants. First, he laid out his ideal model of civic government, repeating what he had previously outlined at a 1650 gathering for the residents of Natick: a political division under the leadership of a ruler of one hundred and two subrulers of fifty, and then rulers of ten in accordance with Exodus 18, formalizing the town's polity with a covenant to follow God's civil orders and the religious instruction of lay Indian preachers.Footnote ⁴² Eliot immediately followed this vision for civic organization in Strength out of Weaknesse by laying out the next task in his project: “To prepare them for Church-estate, to which end I doe instruct them, that the Visible Church of Christ is builded upon a lively confession of Christ, and Covenanting to walke in all the Administrations of the publique worship of God.”Footnote ⁴³

By 1653, the civil and ecclesiastical development of Natick had unfolded largely in line with many New England communities. Though towns like Boston had formed a visible church almost immediately upon arrival when they chose John Wilson as pastor in 1630, this pattern was not uniform throughout New England. The citizens of Roxbury waited two years before gathering a church, and the dissenting community of Northampton waited almost five years to hire a temporary minister after petitioning for township status in 1653. It took three more years before Northampton settled on a full-time offer to Eleazer Mather in 1661.Footnote ⁴⁴

Despite its fairly typical civil and ecclesiastical development, Natick was still treated with greater suspicion regarding its potential for progress than other nearby communities. For example, while Natick's civil organization and the piety of its Indian residents received accolades from Governor John Endicott, Boston minister John Wilson, and other notable leaders who visited in 1650, even these positive reviews were accompanied by caveats. Wilson, compelled to speak to the Indians (with Eliot acting as translator) by his positive impression of them, later recalled “warning them of the great danger if they should decline from what they had already come unto, either in their knowledge, affection, or Christian practice, incouraging them against what might dampe or deterre.”Footnote ⁴⁵ His emphasis on the consequences of violating a previously established civil covenant is significant in light of the long period between polity formation and visible church formation in Natick's early history, suggesting that Wilson remained cautious of Indian conversion. This also conforms to the attitude most Englishmen held regarding Gentile conversion, particularly that progress or preparation could occur with a transformation of intellect, but an infusion of grace into the will and affections necessarily predicated true conversion. It was in this transitory state between an awareness of sin and full surrender to God that the Devil could most easily recapture the potential convert.Footnote ⁴⁶

Progress within Natick convinced Eliot that his potential converts demonstrated maturity in faith sufficient to form a church covenant, so he invited a group of colonial ministers—which included Richard Mather of Dorchester and John Allin of Dedham—to Natick in 1652. There the guests witnessed a confession of faith from community leaders. In the introductory material to the printed confessions, Richard Mather wrote that the Praying Indians “may justly be looked at (if not as a full and through Conversion, yet) as an hopeful beginning and preparation thereto, if the lord be pleased to go on with what he hath begun.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Anticipating that his English readers might question Praying Indian shortcomings in failing to form a visible church at this point if grace and transformations were evident, Mather compared their situation to the building of Solomon's temple: both represented a slow spiritual process that necessitated caution. If Praying Indians were “to be invested with all Church-power as a Church when yet they are not furnished with any to be an able Pastor and Elder over them” for guidance, then they ran the risk of deviating from orthodoxy. By prematurely validating their covenant, New England's ministers would also be complicit in this wrongdoing and would face God's wrath: a viewpoint consistent with arguments in Church Government and Church Covenant Discussed.Footnote ⁴⁸ The caution Mather and other examiners displayed stemmed in part from the unpolished nature of Indian confessions when compared to the English morphology of conversion and their emphasis on distress and disbelief. For example, when Waban stated, “I dislike my sins, yet I do not truly pray to God in my heart,” the inherent pessimism suggested an incomplete spiritual transformation.Footnote ⁴⁹

The pace of the examination languished since Eliot faced the task of translating each confession and the corresponding questions from the ministers. By the time Monequassun (the town's schoolmaster) and Ponampam (a lay preacher) delivered their confessions, the crowd had become listless and “many of them went forth, others whispered, and a great confusion was in the House and abroad.” Mather and the other ministers agreed to postpone their ruling for “a more fitting time.” Sheer boredom cannot fully account for this decision, as ministers also delayed based on their theological convictions, which resurfaced amidst the debates over extended baptism in 1662. In continuing to rationalize this setback to his transatlantic audience, Eliot reiterated the care he took in “investing these young Babes in Christ, with the highest, and all the external priviledges of the Church,” falling back on the delay as an example of God's providential timing.Footnote ⁵⁰

III. Praying Indians, Theological Preparation, and the Halfway Covenant

The ecclesiological challenges faced by Indian and English congregations intertwined more visibly in the 1650s as John Eliot aggressively publicized the progress made by Indians at Natick through promotional tracts aimed at both a local and broader transatlantic readership. A parallel reading of the development of an Indian church at Natick and the puritan debates that culminated in the Synod of 1662 reveal significant overlap between missionaries and future reformers. Prominent advocates of extended baptism, including John Eliot, Richard Mather, and Jonathan Mitchel, participated in evaluating the Indian Christians at Natick and considered the limits of spiritual boundaries in multiple contexts. While ministers fail to cite Indian progress as the deciding factor informing their support for the covenant, it is hardly coincidental that they supported both widening the communal boundaries of the church to allow Indians to enter as fellow members along with efforts to include third-generation “children of the church.” Conservatives like John Davenport, the most prominent opponent to extended baptism, subtly hinted at the link between the widened church polity and the dangers of admitting Indians into their midst by highlighting the absurdity of including barbarous outsiders under a broad genealogical covenant during later printed debates.

Richard Mather had broached extending baptism within the Dorchester congregation to include the community's children under church discipline as early as 1645, but he found his desires frustrated by Davenport's efforts in 1646 to push the Massachusetts General Court to promote a strict view of baptism and church membership. Mather similarly found his broad language on baptism removed from the 1648 Cambridge Platform, with Davenport acting as his chief interlocutor yet again.Footnote ⁵¹ Mather's 1650 catechism outlined a charitable view of grace, declaring that God's infinite mercy and wisdom allowed Him to “finde out some way and means of deliverance” making salvation possible for the elect. Mather defined faith as “that grace of the spirit whereby we receive Christ, which is wrought in our hearts in our effectual calling,” though his limits were clearly displayed in his 1652 recommendation to defer Indian admission after witnessing the October examination.Footnote ⁵² Mather and Eliot's relationship produced fruitful collaborations prior to the advent of Indian missions, such as their coauthorship the Bay Psalm Book (1640), and continued throughout this period. During the formative decade of the 1650s, Mather maintained continued correspondence with Eliot, Windsor's pastor John Warham, and Hartford minister Samuel Stone regarding extended baptism and how to cautiously proceed, concluding that a formal synod would offer definitive validation once they became fully committed to the theological position.Footnote ⁵³

Eliot retained a radical eschatology at this time and considered implementing extended baptism within his own congregation at Natick, writing to Jonathan Mitchel, Daniel Gookin's pastor at Cambridge and replacement to Thomas Shepard, for advice. Robert Pope concludes that Mitchel remained cautious or unsure at this point and convinced Eliot and the Roxbury elders to delay until 1658 when five principal church members expressed approval. Cotton Mather's Ecclesiastes (1697) attributed this prescient understanding of “the Churches, as the Nursery, from whence a successive supply of Communicants, was to be expected” and applied this thinking to the Roxbury congregation and considered their example instrumental in changing Mitchel's thinking.Footnote ⁵⁴ Though Mitchel left no documents indicating the reason for his decision to embrace extended baptism, correspondence and discussions with Eliot and Gookin—perhaps even at Natick or at one of the many Indian Christian examinations—may have convinced him to broaden membership within his own church. This is plausible given Eliot and Gookin's advocacy for Indian church membership as a crucial element of the mission and Mitchel's close relationship with both of them.Footnote ⁵⁵

Having allowed Tears of Repentance to circulate around New England and inform colonists of the progress of Indian Christians, Eliot decided that the Natick Indians had sufficiently deferred by early 1654 and arranged another examination of eight exemplary converts who represented the Natick community. At the June gathering at Roxbury, Eliot also sought to mitigate mistakes from the first demonstration of Indian piety by arranging for additional translators and a longer, more thorough opportunity for ministers to question his converts.Footnote ⁵⁶ For this second day of examination—or natootomuhteáe kesuk, as the Praying Indians called it—Eliot, Samuel Danforth, Ezekiel Rogers, Isaac Heath, and William Walton of Marblehead each subjected the Indian speakers to a series of free-form questions covering a range of theological topics: God's nature, sin and its effects, the fall of man, and the importance of religious belief. Eliot, Mayhew, and two unnamed assistants translated and took notes on the exchange.Footnote ⁵⁷ After the examination, Eliot wrote in A Late and Further Manifestation of the Progress of the Gospel Amongst the Indians in New England (1655) that the English ministers were pleased with the ability of the Praying Indians to explain “how far the Lord hath let in the light of the good knowledge of God into their soules, and what tast they have of the Principles of Religion, and doctrine of salvation.”Footnote ⁵⁸ This complemented the previous examination, yet it still failed to satisfy the colony's minsters that Eliot had adequately prepared the Praying Indians to adopt a church covenant. Chastened yet again, Eliot capitulated on the gravity of the church covenant when Natick's residents “have so little knowledge and experience in the ways of Christ, so newly come out of that great depth of darknesse, and wild course of life.” To Eliot, the precedent set by the formation of the first true Indian church would establish the tenor of Indian conversion in the future, so he again deferred to the judgment of the colony's ministers and to God's timing, reinforcing the importance of theological preparation.Footnote ⁵⁹

Given the gravity of the adoption of an ecclesiastical covenant and the importance of spiritual fidelity, it is no surprise that puritans stressed caution in granting this status to Praying Indians. By adopting Indians into their spiritual family, they joined each other in a shared fate and ran the risk of allowing partial or incomplete converts into the church. Richard Mather's 1650 catechism charged that apostates never truly converted “because the fallow ground of their hearts being never broken up, they doe but sow among thornes, & so the stoninesse of their hearts . . . they are like to be but temporary beleevers, and in time of temptation fall away.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Ministers found this doubly relevant in the case of Gentile converts like the Indian Christians at Natick who had no previous experience with Christianity. Still undeterred in his aspirations, Eliot continued the work of translating the Bible into Algonquian, along with several devotional works to encourage individual piety within Indian communities. This included Abraham Peirson's Quinnipiac Indian catechism, which Eliot translated into Algonquian in 1658 as Some Helps for the Indians Shewing Them How to improve their natural Reason. The Quinnipiac catechism explained the origins of the world, the nature of God, and his sovereign punishment of sin.Footnote ⁶¹ Eliot also instituted a series of fasts where Indian ministers exhorted the community and their piety, their eloquence moving his son John Jr. to tears. Eliot included these details in A further Accompt of the Progresse of the Gospel amongst the Indians in New England: With Some Helps for the Indians by Abraham Peirson as evidence that Indian piety mirrored that of their English counterparts. He thus suggested that they understood the causal relationship between sin and divine punishment, along with the importance repentance played in averting God's wrath, and that their fasting was both a spiritual endeavor and a reflection of how English civic fasts were implemented in the colony as part of the “New England Way.”Footnote ⁶²

Prompted by an inquiry from the Connecticut General Court in 1656 desiring clarification on extended baptism, the Massachusetts General Court responded by calling a ministerial assembly in 1657 to consider the issue. Thirteen Massachusetts ministers convened alongside four of their Connecticut brethren and Harvard president Charles Chauncy to debate Connecticut's questions on infant baptism. Richard Mather and Jonathan Mitchel dominated this assembly as the leading reformers and authored a public response to present a united, reforming front in Disputation Concerning Church Members and their Children in Answer to XXI Questions, published the following year.

The Synod of 1662 was arranged in the same vein. It involved over seventy ministers from throughout the Bay Colony and, as a formal synod, carried more weight than the earlier 1657 gathering.Footnote ⁶³ As they had during the ministerial convention called in 1657, clergymen at the Synod of 1662 grappled with the nature of church membership and covenant by affirming: “A people that are in that Covenant, are thereby the visible People or Church of God.”Footnote ⁶⁴ They further determined that the divine institution of membership, created with the church covenant, extended to one's immediate kin and remained as long as that lineage continued in good faith and observance of the covenant—and thus, the church covenant extended not only to the children of the founding members, but also to “adopted Children and bond servants” within the household. This is an interesting decision considering the many colonial elites and ministers who had incorporated Indian women and children like Waban's son into their households as servants (or slaves) in the wake of the Pequot War of 1636–1638—a connection impossible for elite ministers at the convention to overlook.Footnote ⁶⁵ This decision to adopt said individuals into their homes was seen to parallel the act of adoption in the workings of grace, as Richard Mather wrote in his catechism that “the Elect being in themselves aliens & strangers from God, are upon their believing in Christ admitted for Christs sake, on whom they doe believe, into the household of God, and to the dignity and priviledge of children.” Believers thus gained “title to the heavenly inheritance” as adopted children within Christ's family.Footnote ⁶⁶ Synod participants used this understanding of God's household to articulate a broader genealogical understanding of church membership which went beyond the natal family to include the adopted members of New England households and the Indian Christians involved in the New England missionary project.

Bookended between the 1658 assembly and the Synod of 1662, Eliot's successful 1659 examination leading to the creation of the colony's first Indian church was discussed in print in time to circulate within the colony before the later synod. Joseph Caryl, dissenting pastor of the church of Saint Magnus the Martyr until he was ousted in 1662 following the Restoration, contrasted the faith of Praying Indians with the majority of English Christians in the introduction to A further Account of the progress of the Gospel Amongst the Indians In New England (1660). Caryl's observations were novel in portraying Praying Indians as true believers and Englishmen as apathetic in faith. Next to Englishmen “who have been born and bred up in the aire and sound of the Gospel all their dayes,” advancements at Natick were remarkable. Within England, few were “able to give any passable account of their conversion to God,” yet many found the stringent membership and communion requirements in New England offensive. A further Account included the final successful examination of the Praying Indians introduced at the beginning of this article, and Caryl hoped that “the practise and example of our native Brethren, yea, of the native Indians in New England might kindle in us the fire of a blessed emulation in this matter.” Following this model of spiritual preparation would create churches that were “beauties of Holiness, and the fruits of the presence of Christ would be more gloriously visible in them.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Indian Christians thus validated the “New England Way” and its efficacy. Their ability to enter full ecclesiastical communion signaled a limited measure of acceptance for Praying Indians and affirmed the power of theological preparation in its most extreme case: the conversion of Gentile people long after the Apostolic Age. Their experiences proved that this method of preparation worked within the context of a people with no prior exposure to Christianity and the Christian God. It is also probable that Algonquians sensed this avenue for affiliation opening to them as the mission project grew from 1660 to 1674 and expanded to form a network of Praying Towns.

IV. Halfway Covenant Debates and Indian Implications

While the decisions made at the Synod of 1662 represent a conceptual victory which unfolded slowly in the coming decades as ministers and their congregations followed meandering pathways to the full implementation of the synod's decisions, the considerable opposition to extended baptism and the redefinitions of church membership are worth exploring in some detail. Connecticut churches devolved into rancorous schisms over the issue of implementation as they lacked their own synod platform. Similarly, Bay Colony ministers failed to recognize the brewing controversy that would develop after the documents produced by synod reformists entered publication and set off a pamphlet war that swayed some congregants’ opinions against the changes. Adherence to the traditional model of church membership led New Haven minister John Davenport to launch a sustained attack against any change in church demography until his death in 1670.Footnote ⁶⁸ In the years following the publication of the 1662 platform, he and other ministers debated the extent of the genealogical covenant, its historical legitimacy, and the effects innovations in religion might have on the spiritual health of the colony. Supporters of extended baptism reinforced the efficacy of the federal covenant as complementary to the experiential grace of the founding generation.Footnote ⁶⁹ At stake in these debates was the notion of a genealogical lineage under the federal covenant and the role that preparation played within conversion, both of which directly affected Praying Indians and their reception within the wider ecclesiastical body of New England.

John Davenport's attitude toward the synod waxed from cautious misgivings to righteous indignation over the course of the decade as he assumed the mantle of the conservative resistance to both reformers and the policies emerging from the Synod of 1662. In a 1661 letter addressed to William Goffe, one of the regicides who fled to Massachusetts after the Restoration, Davenport linked his suspicion of the king's promotion of episcopal uniformity to the ongoing synod and his belief that Massachusetts might follow this path by forcing ministers to conform to their decisions. Davenport recognized a parallel concern in the 1661 Corporation Act, which excluded nonconformists from office in England. He concluded his letter: “I hear, that the Synod, in the Baye, is broken up, without doeing any thing, and have adjurned the meeting, till Octo[ber] or Nov[ember] next.” Any hopes he had that the ministers might disagree and default to the positions outlined in the 1648 Cambridge Platform proved short-lived. In a 1665 letter on the apocalyptic nature of present times addressed to fellow Hartford resident William Goodwin, he wrote: “N[ew] England allsoe hath cause to tremble, whose day is coming, if speedy repentance, and reformation prevent not, for our backsliding, and changing our waies, from the ancient pathes to comply with Old England, in theire corruptions.”Footnote ⁷⁰ His warnings in this letter and later publications seemed prophetic in 1675 with the onset of King Philip's War.

Davenport offered one of the most scathing critiques of extended baptism in a 1663 essay attacking the fifth proposition laid out by the synod concerning infant membership. His tract also challenged the synod's authority to implement these practices under traditional Congregationalist autonomy. To make the case that “infants are not capable of personal church-membership” and that excommunication removed all members of a family from the church, Davenport drew on the illustration of a “Turk” who was English by birth, baptized into the church, and converted to Islam as a captive. Davenport argued that the “Turk” was part of an Islamic lineage and “to say that Turks are Members of the Church of Christ is in truth to speak Daggers.”Footnote ⁷¹ Baptism clearly did not provide safeguards to protect his hypothetical figure from conversion later in life and offered no assurance to New England children either when they failed to own the covenant and demonstrate sufficient evidence of spiritual transformation as adults. This insular view of covenant membership excluded all but the founding members of the New England colony, as Davenport pressed the point that the covenant required maintenance through succeeding generations. A breached lineage was essentially irreparable, so the application of baptism to children based on a grandparent's faith represented a grievous sin and pollution of the visible church.

Ministers who shared Davenport's high view of church covenants essentially excluded Indians who, as part of the “lost tribes of Israel,” fell under the category of “Abraham's Children” who broke their covenant sometime in the distant past. Ministers who ascribed to the theory that Indians were Gentiles might still afford them the opportunity to forge a covenant, but Davenport's admonition “to keep out the Heathen uncircumcised in flesh who never were Members” suggested that ministers should continue barring Indians from churches.Footnote ⁷² Here Davenport tread a thin line between Congregationalist exclusivity and accusations of Anabaptism when he endorsed only adult converts as church members and an unbroken covenant lineage.

Finally, Davenport argued against the covenant's clauses on synods for fear that this might force ministers to carry out directives that contradicted scripture, instead arguing “the manner of their communion must be social, as between equals, none exercising jurisdiction and authority over another” to defend Congregationalist autonomy.Footnote ⁷³ While not directly aimed at the Indian churches founded at Natick and Martha's Vineyard, the presence of autonomous Indian churches surely amplified Davenport's fear of synodic corruption, for in theory they held equal respect and authority through the principles of Congregationalist communion. Natick's fledgling status as an experimental community of Indian Christians could bring God's wrath on New England if members slipped into apostasy, given their linked status under the covenant and the notion of the communion of churches. Similarly, the notion that Indians might surpass their English neighbors in piety gave cause for unease given European uncertainty regarding a people's proclivity for degeneration in the New World.

In his correspondence with Connecticut governor John Winthrop Jr., Davenport continued to lament the theological laxity promoted by the Massachusetts synod. Schisms sundered churches throughout Connecticut as congregants failed to ameliorate these theological concerns, including towns like Hartford where the church eventually split in 1669.Footnote ⁷⁴ Contrasting the steadfast attitude of Thomas Hooker, who refused to baptize children under their grandparent's membership, he decried new ministers who advocated “the baptising of Adopted children, by theire Adoptants right.” Even more absurd was “the baptising of servants borne in the house, or bought with monie.” To Davenport, pure Congregationalist ecclesiology specified that nobody deserved membership “unles they had a spiritual right, by being regularly joined to the church, by theire owne personal faith, held forth to the satisfaction of the church, according to Gospel-rules.”Footnote ⁷⁵ His use of the admission of purchased servants as the ultimate absurdity highlights the Indian connection to the synod's decision most clearly. Since the Pequot War of 1636–1638, English families had integrated hundreds of Pequot captives into their households as a source of labor. Winthrop Jr. undoubtedly understood this specific connection because in each letter Davenport sent him he offhandedly noted that one of Winthrop Jr.'s many Indian slaves had facilitated their correspondence by reaching him with the letters. Furthermore, by this point Winthrop Jr. had amassed sizeable holdings to augment his Naumeag plantation in Connecticut and traded extensively in both Indian and African slaves to develop an estate reminiscent of a Spanish encomienda, so Winthrop would have understood the absurdity of including his servants and slaves based on adopted patrimony.Footnote ⁷⁶ Davenport's concern for church practices and his use of Indian admissions as the most egregious example of ecclesiological pollution add a new dimension to concerns voiced during the pamphlet war following the publication of the synod's decisions.

In 1664, Richard Mather (with authorial assistance from Jonathan Mitchel) published A Defence of the Answer and Arguments of the Synod Met at Boston in the Year 1662 as a rebuttal of Davenport's arguments, critiquing his understanding of baptism by clarifying that the synod intended for ministers to only baptize “Children of All that are named Christians” and that this was “farre neerer the Rule and Mind of Christ” than to withhold baptism entirely—a position akin to Anabaptism. Mather chided Davenport for accepting the 1648 Cambridge Platform while promoting a rigid standard for excommunication, appealing to arguments by John Cotton to defend the synod.Footnote ⁷⁷ He also explicitly defended sanctification as a gradual process, marked by a temporal distance between the beginning of faith and the maturation of religious belief. In his defense, he cited the biblical practices of Jesus's disciples and their administration of baptism and communion because the primitive church made no distinction between the convert and members of his household. Mather similarly recognized the spiritual benefit of the covenant, along with baptism, prayers, and the blessing of the church, “to excite them [converts], and encourage them to, and in good, and to reclaim them from evil.” Within Mather's conception, the church's supporting role was of the utmost importance and outweighed desires to restrict membership to covenanted adults in an effort to preserve ecclesiastical purity.Footnote ⁷⁸ Taken together, the third and fifth propositions of the synod reinforced the importance of church discipline and the positive role that the church played in the spiritual preparation and growth of infants and young children. Mather and other reformers believed this to be the best way to maintain their covenant with God, as “to keep in the line, and under the influence and efficacy of this covenant of God, is the true way to the Churches glory: To cut it off and disavow it, cuts off the posterity of Sion, & hinders it from being . . . an eternal excellency, and the joy of many generations.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Supporters like Mather also argued that the Lord's Supper remained exclusively the purview of visible saints, promoting baptism and this new membership status as a preparatory means of conversion and sanctification buttressed by the spiritual benefits of the federal covenant.

Similarly, in Church Membership of Children, and Their Right to Baptisme, Thomas Shepard argued: “It is a miserable mistake to think that inward reall holiness is the only ground of admission into Church-Membership . . . but it is federal holiness, whether externally professed as in grown persons, or graciously promised unto their seed.”Footnote ⁸⁰ In the only direct reference to Indians within the text, Shepard drew on the example of Indian children adopted by Englishmen in the colony, arguing that they merited inclusion within the church covenant because they had received some degree of godly instruction, as Abraham did with his servants in Genesis 17. Even in lineages that extended beyond direct bloodlines, Shepard argued in favor of a broad federal covenant and evidentiary signs to test inward conditions. This raised the possibility of conversion for Gentile Indians serving in English households, while also tacitly elevating the status of Praying Indians who owned the covenant by their own accord after rigorous preparation.Footnote ⁸¹ Shepard also recognized that membership within the church consisted of a series of preparatory stages. While the standard examination characterizing the “New England Way” was “indeed required of all those members who should partake of the Lords Supper, but it is not required (as you seem to say) of every one to make him a member” because of the lineage established by the federal covenant and puritan support for infant baptism.Footnote ⁸² John Allin highlighted the continuity between the 1662 decision and the 1648 Cambridge Platform in Animadversions Upon the Antisynodalia Americana (1664) to stress that membership began in childhood and matured once young adults owned the covenant.Footnote ⁸³ Drawing on the example of the “Primitive Churches” created by the Apostles, Allin argued that the repentance of the Gentiles made them “Believers in Ecclesiastical account” and brought their families into the covenant, citing the famed Gentile conversions of Lydia and Jairus in Acts to promote a familial understanding of holiness extending through subsequent generations.Footnote ⁸⁴

The debates regarding the Halfway Covenant reveal a profound concern for upholding the spiritual linage and purity of the covenants formed by the founding puritans. References to Indians, Turks, heathens, and infidels in the ongoing debates from 1645 to 1670 suggest a concern for theological developments and their implications beyond the English population rather than a purely insular debate. Denigrating Indians for rhetorical effect served an important purpose for opponents to extended baptism by portraying broader church membership as an ecclesiological error, though positive portrayals in the case of Indian adoption and household servants or slaves by Shepard and Mather suggest that reformers envisioned a broader and more diverse ecclesiological landscape than scholars have previously recognized. A widening vision of membership for the ecclesiological body paralleled the plight of Indian Christians at Natick and directly affected their journey on the long road to sainthood. By authorizing the formation of an indigenous church at Natick in 1659, ministers expressed the belief that the potential members demonstrated adequate civil and religious preparation and counted them among the “visible saints” in New England. As Richard Mather, John Eliot, and Jonathan Mitchel debated the boundaries of the church vis-à-vis Indian Christians, they simultaneously engaged in the discourse surrounding their own children and grandchildren under a federal covenant. While setting a high bar for the initial Indian Christians, New England ministers could also reasonably expect the visible sainthood of Waban, Nishohkou, Totherswamp, and other high-profile converts to serve as the foundation for a new genealogical lineage under the covenant that continued for subsequent generations, provided they continued to grow in faith and their own knowledge of Christianity.

V. Indigenous Preparation and John Oxenbridge's Conversion of the Gentiles

John Davenport continued to denounce extended baptism when he moved to Boston in the spring of 1668 to assume First Church's pulpit after John Wilson's death the previous year. While his tenure at First Church was short-lived (ending when he died on March 16, 1670 after suffering a debilitating stroke two days prior), it was also impactful for its divisive nature. Davenport attempted to use his authority to bring the supporters of extended baptism in the congregation to heel, resulting in a schism and the creation of Third Church.Footnote ⁸⁵ After Davenport's death, conservative members of the First Church congregation sought to continue their stand against extended baptism and thus put out a call to missionary John Oxenbridge to fill the vacant pulpit.Footnote ⁸⁶

Oxenbridge had traveled to the Bahamas in 1653 to serve as a commissioner during the Interregnum before returning to England, where he stayed until church authorities expelled him in 1662 under the Act of Uniformity. He then traveled across the Atlantic again to serve as a missionary in Suriname and Barbados. He immigrated a final time in 1670 and answered First Church's call, assuming the pastorate over a congregation embittered by years of strife revolving around extended baptism. Oxenbridge and his new congregation shared common ground in opposing extended baptism, though Louise A. Breen has argued that Oxenbridge's opposition stemmed from his awareness as a missionary that genealogical thinking created a new barrier to Indian conversions—a concern shared by Daniel Gookin despite his support for extended baptism as a member of Jonathan Mitchel's Cambridge congregation.Footnote ⁸⁷

Oxenbridge wrote an unpublished treaty entitled Conversion of the Gentiles in which he integrates preparation into a framework for indigenous missions by rebutting potential objections to the viability of a long-term conversionary project and responding to common opposition to Indian conversion. While the date of the treatise's composition is unknown, Oxenbridge published an unrelated book, A Seasonable Proposition of Propagating the Gospel by Christian Colonies in the Continent of Guaiana, in 1670, thus suggesting that he composed Conversion of the Gentiles between 1662 and 1670—though it is equally possible that he continued to develop its manuscript based on his interactions with Indian Christians in New England after his arrival there in 1670.Footnote ⁸⁸

It is possible that, after he arrived in New England, Oxenbridge discussed the content of Conversion of the Gentiles with church members or allowed friends to read sections for critical feedback, promoting his ideas to a wider New England audience. The final item listed in Oxenbridge's will specified that he left his manuscripts at the disposal of his widow, but also included “in particular the plea for the dumb Indian [Conversion of the Gentiles], and Colonye to Mr. Eliott, or any other they shall so meet.” This notation suggests that family members or those carrying out the inventory and disbursement of his estate were familiar with the text and its relation to Eliot's work.Footnote ⁸⁹ This raises the possibility that Eliot knew of the treatise and may have read the draft himself or that he had discussed its contents with Oxenbridge. It is also reasonable to conclude that he or others may have hoped or planned for its publication—similar to Daniel Gookin's aspirations for the publication of his manuscript, Historical Collections of the Indians of New England, when King Philip's War erupted in 1675 and sabotaged his literary efforts, along with the missionary project as a whole. Given Oxenbridge's interests, it is also plausible that he read the Eliot Tracts prior to his final exile from England, and reports from Eliot and possible visits to Natick once he arrived in the colony would have confirmed that Gentile conversions of eschatological significance occurred at Natick.

Though Conversion of the Gentiles remained unpublished, it represents an important outsider's view on the efficacy and nature of indigenous conversion based on Oxenbridge's firsthand experience interacting with unconverted people in South America, the Caribbean, and (potentially, given its undetermined date of composition) through his brief involvement in the New England missionary project before his death in 1674. It begins with an introduction on the imperative for contemporary missionary work, followed by eight chapters that systematically cull the Bible for scriptural imperatives to convert Gentiles in order to demonstrate irrefutably that Indians were among God's chosen people and required conversion in accordance with millennial eschatology.Footnote ⁹⁰ Oxenbridge declared that even though Protestant churches had cooled in their evangelical fervency, prophecy in Revelation 5:9 ensured that God would establish indigenous churches among the Elect within their wider population.Footnote ⁹¹ He also drew on the genealogy of Jesus, recorded in Matthew 1:3–5, to highlight the inclusion of Rahab and Ruth within Christ's lineage. The grafting of Gentiles into the literal genealogy of Jesus served as a powerful biblical imperative for integrating them in Oxenbridge's own day. He surmised that “heathens” might learn this and know that “they have an interest in him as coming from and for them.” Furthermore, the adoration of the Gentile magi, Christ's retreat as a child to sanctuary in Gentile Egypt, and Jesus's decision to preach his first sermon in Matthew 4 to a Gentile audience suggested to Oxenbridge that puritans shared an intimate prophetic connection to their indigenous neighbors.Footnote ⁹²

The remainder of the treatise dealt with “exceptions against Indian conversions,” beginning with the notion that God had saved all of the Gentiles predestined for conversion during the Apostolic Age. Oxenbridge rejected this notion because it cast Indians as a race of damned beasts and instead countered: “The same blood run's in ye veins of an Indian as in thine. Whatsoever thou makest of them God hath made of one blood all nations of men.”Footnote ⁹³ Oxenbridge's reliance on biblical prophecy and his use of ecclesiastical history to highlight the westward movement of the Gospel positioned contemporaneous Indian missions within the ecclesiastical history of Christianity rather than at an eschatological endpoint after Jewish conversion—a position Eliot shared. Relying on England's own relationship with Christianity and the legacy of missionaries served as a powerful invective against arguments that Indian conversion was a hopeless venture. Faced with this historical evidence, he asked potential readers to draw on the memory of England's barbaric past and show compassion for fellow men and women who faced a long journey on the path to civilization and Christian transformation.

However, there remains a final point of irony: As pastor of Boston's First Church, Oxenbridge embraced this detailed missiology while siding with the congregational majority against extended baptism, perhaps because he recognized that under the narrowest interpretation it promoted an insular ecclesiology that circumvented Indian participation. Obedience to the synod's directives also smacked of clericalism to a pastor scarred by his ouster during the Restoration and committed to the ideal of congregational independence.Footnote ⁹⁴ The commissioner of Indian missions, Daniel Gookin, was by contrast a stalwart promoter of the synod's decisions because he believed that a broader ecclesiology might also encourage colonists to welcome Indians into their communities.Footnote ⁹⁵ Nevertheless, the two men disagreed on the potential impact extended baptism might have in relation to missions, adding further weight to the notion that this remained an ongoing (albeit tacit) concern throughout the ministerial debates regarding extended baptism that lasted far beyond 1662. The ongoing concern Oxenbridge had for genealogical exclusion highlights the intersection of religion and race in these debates, along with the multivalent interpretations present in the Synod of 1662. In his Historical Collections, Gookin noted that “there are some persons, both in Old and New England, that have low thoughts of this work” of Indian missions “and are very prone to speak diminutively thereof.”Footnote ⁹⁶ The ecclesiastical history of Indian Christians after 1660 offers some indication of the legacy of these debates and the overall reception of Indians within New England's religious spaces.

VI. Conclusion

A ten-year gap exists between Eliot's 1660 tract and his A Brief Narrative of the Progress of the Gospel amongst the Indians in New-England, in the Year 1670. In the interim, Praying Indian communities took on a life of their own and expanded far beyond Eliot's initial expectations. During this decade, the Mashpee community gathered a church under an ecclesiastical covenant and organized an examination before colonial magistrates and ministers. The magistrates tellingly approved of the examinants without further delay and appointed Richard Bourne as the English pastor and “Jude” as the Indian ruling elder, suggesting that Indian conversion and church-building had lost some of its earlier stigma. Parents who owned the covenant brought their entire household to baptism, in keeping with the methods established by the 1648 Cambridge Platform as part of the ceremony. The church gathered at Martha's Vineyard replicated this practice in an expanding web of kin and civil connections.Footnote ⁹⁷ A group of Nantucket Indians expressed a desire to form a similar community, prompting missionaries to arrange for exemplary members of the Martha's Vineyard church to assist in founding a Nantucket church. Members of the Natick congregation helped settle a town on their western border called Magunkukquok and sent one of their own, Monatunkanet, to serve as a teacher for the new town of Hassanamesit. Eliot estimated that forty or fifty full communicants worshipped at Natick by 1670, not counting their baptized children, under the indigenous ministers John Speene and Anthony—a size roughly comparable to contemporaneous English congregations.

By 1671, Natick church members began organizing a mission among the Nipmuc, again emphasizing the importance of the indigenous church within an expanding web of connections.Footnote ⁹⁸ Since Eliot's petition to secure land at Hassanamesit in 1654, the community had grown, ultimately gathering an Indian church in 1671 under the unofficial pastorate of Joseph Tuckawillipin with sixteen full members and thirty baptized children—though the church also served as a meeting place for nearby Indians who attended regularly.Footnote ⁹⁹ Gookin observed that “there is none of the praying Indians, young or old, but can readily answer any question of the catechism” and twice-daily prayer took place “with much affection and reverence” compared to English lapses on both counts.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ He also stressed “visible sainthood” as the sole qualification for sacramental access to Indian Christians and that progress alone did not qualify them “to partake in the ordinances of God, proper and peculiar to the church of Christ; which is a garden enclosed, as the scripture saith.” Visible sainthood did allow Indian Christians to baptize their children like English peers under the federal covenant—a practice that theoretically established their lineage within the wider Christian community.Footnote ¹⁰¹ By upholding orthodoxy in church ordinances and covenants, these Indian Christian churches and their English supporters positioned themselves as peers within Christendom.

The extent to which Englishmen recognized and reciprocated Indian Christian overtures reveals much about the reality of church fellowship between Native and English communities. Indian Christians faced several provisional hurdles to church membership and Congregationalist autonomy that were unparalleled in English circles. For example, the decision by their clerical peers to appoint John Eliot and Richard Bourne as ministers of the Natick and Mashpee churches suggests an uneasiness with releasing each church into a fully autonomous state. Refusal to integrate Indian converts within existing churches at Dedham or other nearby towns and the delegation of interacting with Indian converts to set congregations and individuals also represents a significant deviation from the typical association between churches. Unlike English converts, Massachusett, Wampanoag, Pawtucket, and Nipmuc men and women also faced the lingering assumption that they existed in a state of heathenism and needed to achieve an unspecified—and decidedly ambiguous—degree of civilization necessary for lasting conversions to Christianity. As a result, English magistrates and missionaries stressed the importance of theological preparation far more stringently than in English congregations yet often balked at missionary requests for validation of Indian progress and initiatives that promoted Indian parity. Around 1670, Eliot raised the possibility of pairing bilingual Indian Christians with nearby English missionaries to further their theological training since ministers continually refused to preach at Praying Towns, but the colonial clergy refused and missionary work continued on a limited scale.Footnote ¹⁰² Nevertheless, the efforts undertaken by missionaries and their English benefactors to publicize and validate Indian conversions as authentic offered tentative empirical evidence that preparation beget conversion in even the wildest and most barbarous men. This underscored its efficacy within the English church at a time when reforming ministers and congregations sought a means of ensuring that their children and grandchildren did not fall outside the church covenant into heathenism.

Another unintended result of this intertwining of Indian and English concerns regarding church membership was the tendency to treat adult Indian converts—members in full communion within the Natick or Mashpee churches—as if they were “children of the church” within English congregations. To discerning ministers, both cohorts presumably lacked doctrinal knowledge and long-term evidence of spiritual transformation, causing them to face increased scrutiny. Again, the treatment of adult English men and women who publicly owned the covenant and recounted their conversion diverged significantly once the congregation affirmed the applicant as a full member. Adult men and women in Indian congregations faced continued scrutiny and suspicion regarding the depths of their faith. Theological preparation remained a mainstay for the expanding network of missions during this decade, according to the letters between missionaries, colonial commissioners, and their English benefactors. Though complaints regarding a lack of funds and missionaries pepper these accounts, Eliot optimistically wrote to Henry Ashurst, treasurer of the New England Company, that despite these hardships: “It is a liberal & gloryous seed time, the word of grace mixed with the crosse, will be exceeding fruitfull unto conversion . . . to bring forth the greater harvest of saints & believers.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Diminished funds pushed the English directors to halt publication of Indian language works in 1669, yet Eliot and Bourne convinced the New England branch to authorize a local publication of an Algonquian primer and small catechism because “the instruction of the Indians [was] greatly obstructed” without the texts. Thus, Eliot continued to promote indigenous piety through Algonquian literacy as part of the progression of spiritual development leading to conversion. New converts similarly relied on these printed texts for continual spiritual growth to demonstrate proof of genuine conversion, yet the linguistic gap continually reinforced the distinct—and fragile—state of Indian Christians.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

While John Eliot, Daniel Gookin, and Jonathan Mitchel advocated in support of extending baptism in 1657 and 1662, John Oxenbridge recognized this theological innovation's darker conceptual implications by promoting a genealogical understanding of salvation. Extended baptism offered a short-term concession regarding the boundaries of church membership and conversion that worked in the favor of Indian Christians by challenging the principal impediments initially faced by Natick's congregants. Perhaps Gookin and Eliot optimistically assumed that a growing network of Indian churches filled with visible Indian saints would silence the transatlantic body of skeptics and produce integrated Indian-English churches. But extended baptism reached its darkest potential by validating a genealogical soteriology when ministers (including Eliot on occasion) observed that conversion and sainthood functioned on a hereditary basis under the covenant in Genesis 17. For critics of missions, this underscored the notion that Indian conversion remained exceptional and unlikely when contemporary eschatologies prioritized mass Jewish conversion.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This may have been a reason for Oxenbridge's opposition, though he was undoubtedly aware of the recent imbroglios involving Boston's First Church when he assumed the pulpit in 1671 and may have opposed extended baptism simply to keep the peace. In contrast to colonial Virginia—the case study in which Rebecca Anne Goetz coined the term “hereditary heathenism”—in New England, the roots of this “hereditary heathenism” are paradoxically found in the 1662 synod after which most colonists embraced genealogical inclusivity for the English community while maintaining an exclusive attitude toward Indians. After King Philip's War, Solomon Stoddard's open table policy took the issue of 1662 to its logical conclusion with the Eucharist (untouched in the 1662 debates) and fully internalized conversion as a gradual process aided by church sacraments.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ By the eighteenth century, Indians within colonial rhetoric functioned more as objects of pity destined to vanish, given the realities of the state of their souls and depraved living, rather than as a large community of potential converts—though this belies the lived reality of indigenous communities throughout the century.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

During the seventeenth century, when racialized understandings of cultural difference remained embryonic, Eliot's correspondents continued to treat Indian churches as novelties and expressed curiosity regarding converts’ piety and day-to-day religious practices. He answered an inquiry from Thomas Shepard Jr. in an August 1673 letter inquiring about the nature of the six congregations within the colony by reporting that their services closely approximated the English style. Eliot was unable to provide figures regarding the total number of covenant members spanning the network of churches, but he stated that all baptized members, along with their children, registered membership at Natick. Additionally, indigenous ministers delivered the sacraments to their members and church officers administered ecclesiastical governance in all the churches except for Natick, where the congregation insisted that there was no need for officers.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Eliot observed that the Indian churches also “have communion in the Sacraments & send messengers to gatherings of churches” without directives from a governing synod. In matters of instruction and discipline, Eliot noted that literacy progressed slowly, although “all learne & rehearce catechise,” and that their order of church discipline mirrored English practices, slowly populating their churches with visible saints. In a similar letter to the New England commissioners, Thomas Mayhew concurred that the Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard churches “uphold the publique worshipp and service of God” in accordance with orthodoxy and that he met weekly with the two pastors and one of the elders to discuss religious instruction and the expansion of the missions.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Intensive spiritual practices and the ordeal of oral examinations also aided in the persistence of indigenous cultural practices within the context of Christianity long after the deaths of the founding missionaries of the seventeenth century. Cotton Mather observed in India Christiana (1721) that the Indian Christian communities on Martha's Vineyard continued to require “Affectionate Confessions of such as are admitted into the Church,” for their admission practices were “more according to the manner of the Churches in the Primitive Times, than is now practiced in most parts.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ John Eliot, Thomas Mayhew, and other seventeenth-century missionaries continually conveyed the importance of spiritual preparation to potential converts on their journey to sainthood, with undoubtable analogues to Algonquian spiritual practices requiring young men and women to undergo similar preparatory measures before participating in traditional rituals. Ironically, this resulted in a situation where indigenous churches retained membership practices typical of the “New England Way” long after English ministers and their congregations embraced extended baptism and came to see Indian Christian religiosity as antiquated.

Waban, Nishohkou, Monotunkquanit, and many other Indian men and women intent on mastering the rituals and theology of English puritanism faced a long and difficult path to visible sainthood and church community. When ministers balked at the initial evidence for Indian civility and theological acumen presented by John Eliot, it forced missionaries to rely on catechesis, lengthy instruction, and theological preparation to prove that Indians were prepared to formalize church covenants. Indian interest and pursuit of church covenants also revealed the boundaries of church community. Going to such extremes subjected Indians to a taxing spiritual process, yet they emerged with an institution—the town church—that ostensibly granted them a level of religious parity within the colonies. The creation of an Indian church added to the network of churches populated by visible saints within puritan theology, creating what Benedict Anderson calls an “imagined community” and theoretically integrating the new Indian church members into a shared spiritual lineage.Footnote ¹¹¹ That English ministers often failed to treat them as equals reveals the lingering skepticism toward Indian converts and diminution of their cultural and spiritual journeys. Indian interest is most evident in the expanding network of Indian-led churches and communities that preceded King Philip's War, yet missionaries who knew these men and women intimately remained the primary advocates for reorienting ecclesiology toward a greater degree of inclusivity. During the 1650s and 1660s, these spiritual pursuits converged with the central issue at the heart of the debate over extended baptism: how to create and foster these spiritual lineages in the long term. Envisioning the church as a sacred space in which the unconverted children would grow in their faith through obedience and instruction to own the covenant as adults intersected with the lived history and example of the Indian Christians who covenanted together at Natick.