Church Life: Pastors, Congregations, and the Experience of Dissent in Seventeenth-Century England

by Michael Davies (Editor), Anne Dunan-page (Editor), Joel Halcomb (Editor)

Church Pastors, Congregations, and the Experience of Dissent in Seventeenth-Century England addresses the rich, complex, and varied nature of 'church life' experienced by England's Baptists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians during the seventeenth century. Spanning the period from the English Revolution to the Glorious Revolution, and beyond, the contributors examine the social, political, and religious character of England's 'gathered' churches and reformed how pastors and their congregations interacted; how Dissenters related to their meetings as religious communities; and what the experience of church life was like for ordinary members as well as their ministers, including notably John Owen and Richard Baxter alongside less well-known figures, such as Ebenezer Chandler.

Moving beyond the religious experience of the solitary individual, often exemplified by conversion, Church Life redefines the experience of Dissent, concentrating instead on the collective concerns of a communally-centred church life through a wide spectrum of from questions of liberty and pastoral reform to matters of church discipline and respectability. With a substantial introduction that puts into context the key concepts of 'church life' and the 'Dissenting experience', the contributors offer fresh ways of understanding Protestant Dissent in seventeenth-century through differences in ecclesiology and pastoral theory, and via the buildings in which Dissent was nurtured to the building-up of Dissent during periods of civil war, persecution, and revolution. They draw on a broad range of printed and archival from the minutes of the Westminster Assembly to the manuscript church books of early Dissenting congregations.

242 pages, Hardcover

Published July 15, 2019

About the author

Michael Davies is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool and one of the founding members of the 'Dissenting Experience' project. Among his publications is Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the Works of John Bunyan. He is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan and Church Life: Pastors, Congregations, and the Experience of Dissent in Seventeenth-Century England.

Reviews

[Joel Zartman · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a lot of these anthologies.

[Farah Mendlesohn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this. Essentially a number of articles looking at what evidence we have for the Church Life of Dissenters. If at times it's like reading the minutes of your local budgie fanciers' club, well that's all the more endearing. The authors succeed in making these distant and on the surface austere figures, into very real characters.

[Michael Beatty · Rating 5 out of 5]

This volume provides greater detail to the dissenting experience. It’s terrific to see further light being shed on the dissenting brethren and their experiences during the seventeenth century.