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April 27 - June 23, 2023
Parsons’s preaching accented the “Steady Xn [Christian] Course” of the godly walk. He was, by all measures, an unremarkable parson living in an ordinary country town. No evidence suggests that his parishioners were dissatisfied with his labors.
Whitefield’s 1740 preaching tour of New England dramatically transformed the young clergyman’s pastorate.
Reynold Marvin’s acquittal during the summer of 1743 proved to be the decisive turning point.
The original complaint, drafted by Timothy Mather, Sr., charged Parsons with more than forty articles of clerical misconduct,
In addition to condemning unconverted ministers, Parsons began making “Unscriptural and unwarrantable” distinctions between “Chirch Members of Good standing.”
Four other church members signed Mather’s written complaint, including his son, Timothy, Jr., Edmund Dorr, Josiah DeWolf, and Samuel Southworth.
accused Parsons of barring qualified communicants from the Lord’s Supper, promoting grossly ignorant candidates to full church membership, and opening his pulpit to a motley assortment of disorderly and schismatical itinerants, including John Curtis, leader of the Shepherd’s Tent seminary in New London.
Parsons’s willingness to sanction the charismatic gifts of his parishioners.
the Lyme revivalist went a step further than nearly all of his fellow Whitefieldarians. In a manner that anticipated the unusual ministry of layman Richard Woodbury, he arrogated to himself not only the ability to judge the eternal estates of others but also the power to save and damn.
Parsons once said that he had the authority to kill or keep alive whomever he chose. “I will Increase your Damnation in hell,” Higgins heard him exclaim. “I Expect to be a Witness against the Worst of you in the Day of Judgment.”
Parsons claimed to care nothing for denominational distinctions or the territorial boundaries of the established Congregational churches, and he welcomed anyone who could testify to the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, including Quakers, Baptists, and Anglicans.
designed to safeguard his reputation during a period of intense ecclesiastical discord and public scrutiny. The Five Brethren went a step further, denouncing Parson’s letter to the Christian History as “utterly false.”
In casting off the authority of the Connecticut religious establishment, Parsons hoped to convene an independent council of his own choosing to discipline the Five Brethren.
Jonathan Edwards minimized the “great uproar” that exploded during Whitefield’s second New England tour.
Unlike his first visit, in which Whitefield relentlessly accosted secure professors, he preached with a considerable degree of caution in 1744 and 1745.
By all accounts, Whitefield failed to capture the hearts of his New England audiences a second time. Edwards acknowledged that Whitefield had preached as often as he had done in 1740 to “commonly great and crowded congregations” but without “such remarkable effects, in awakenings and reviving religion.”
The difference was James Davenport.
During the peak years of the revivals between 1740 and 1744, the Southold itinerant and his fellow Whitefieldarians had stirred up thousands of lay men and women to believe and do extraordinary things.
As if to underscore the direct connection between the “grand Itinerant” and the “grand Enthusiast,” several ministerial associations tarred Whitefield with the same charge that Benjamin Colman had famously leveled against Davenport during the summer of 1742: “deeply tinctured with Enthusiasm.”
Like so many of his contemporaries, Davenport ultimately stepped back from the revivals, but a surprising number of lay men and women continued to testify to his powerful preaching in autobiographical conversion narratives penned during the next two decades. One factor united this eclectic cohort: all of them eventually separated from established Congregational churches.
All of the towns that he had visited during his 1744 reconciliation tour of eastern Connecticut—Canterbury, Groton, Mansfield, New London, Stonington, and Preston—suffered through bitter church schisms during the years that followed.
During the next two decades, his disciples organized scores of breakaway Separate Congregational and Separate Baptist churches in which they attempted to institutionalize many of the Southold evangelist’s most innovative, Spirit-centered beliefs, practices, and experiences.
Lowell’s was different. The aging clergyman purchased one of the first known figural compositions of its kind. Its subject was equally unusual: a council of ministers.
The right half of the painted wood panel depicts a group of six bewigged clergymen, each wearing the distinctive Geneva bands of their office.
a dense enclosure of trees recedes into a landscape scene that dominates the left half of the composition.
Despite the painting’s awkward execution, a sense of harmony pervades the whole and is reinforced by a Latin expression painted in capital letters across the stone arch.
the words comprise a “famous motto of Christian Irenics” that would have been familiar to Protestants throughout the British Empire: IN NECESSARIIS UNITAS. IN NON NECESSARIIS LIBERTAS. IN UTRISQUE CHARITAS, or “In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity.”
The overmantel that graced his study trumpeted the prestige and honor of his ministerial calling. As both a symbol of refinement and an icon of civic virtue, it signaled to all who entered Lowell’s parsonage that New England’s established clergy stood united, despite the recent ugliness of the Whitefieldian revivals.
On April 27, 1742, two of the region’s most aggressive riding ministers, Daniel Rogers and Samuel Buell, “formed a Party, and took Possession” of the meetinghouse without Lowell’s consent.
Although most clergymen eventually sorted themselves into discernible “Connexions”—liberals and conservatives, rationalists and evangelicals, Unitarians and New Divinity men—the process took decades to complete.
The transformation of New England Congregationalism during the second half of the eighteenth century mirrored broader forces of social change, as the once-puritan commonwealths took their place in a world marked by partisan politics, intellectual ferment, expanding consumer choice, growing ethnic diversity, and increased geographical mobility.
across New England, churches of the standing order fell into steep decline, as the land of light devolved into a competitive marketplace of denominations and sects.
once-godly walkers turned “Strict” Congregationalists and Separate Baptists, Anglicans and “Orminians,” “Shaking-quakers” and Sandemanians, “new dispensationists” and “Nothingarians,” no controversy seemed too minor and no debate over the authenticity of their experimental religion non necessariis.
Perhaps as many as one hundred New England congregations fractured into competing factions between 1742 and 1760.
The origin of the “many unhappy Divisions and Contentions” that plagued Westborough and scores of other towns throughout New England lay in the peculiarly mobile nature of the Whitefieldian revivals.
To be sure, the schisms of the 1740s and 1750s sometimes erupted along preexisting socioeconomic fault lines, and the Separate movement later served as a proving ground for Revolutionary radicalism; yet dissenters seldom cited social, political, or economic issues to justify breaking fellowship with established churches. The roots of their ecclesiastical rebellion lay elsewhere—in the fertile soil of religious enthusiasm.
In parishes across New England, separatists rebelled against the preparationist theology of the godly walk, with its emphasis on stolid devotional duties.
At the heart of the separatist impulse lay the ideal of a pure church purged of its mixed multitude of lukewarm professors and godly walkers.
No single socioeconomic or demographic variable explains why some people remained within the churches of the standing order while others rebelled.
The one factor that united the Separates was their unwavering commitment to the most radical innovations of the Whitefieldian revivals.
The earliest dissenters were, without exception, zealous new converts who repudiated their once secure lives and experienced powerful conversions during the early 1740s.
On August 24, 1741, as he was mowing in the field, God “Shined into my heart,” and Backus was “Swallowed up” in the admiration of “Divine glories.”
On March 22, 1748, after listening to Backus narrate his conversion experiences and call to the ministry, several church members testified that they had received divine revelations endorsing him as their pastor. Ordained by a group of prominent Separate leaders from eastern Connecticut, Backus ministered to the dissenting community at Titicut for the next six decades.
more than 330 Connecticut Separates who signed a 1748 petition drafted by Canterbury minister Solomon Paine requesting the right to worship apart from the churches of the standing order in accordance with the 1689 Toleration Act.
One signer from Tolland, Shubal Stearns, later migrated to the southern colonies, where he emerged as the principal architect of the southern Baptist movement.
No issue fomented greater confusion among the Separates than infant baptism.
The rapid spread of antipedobaptist principles grew out of the Separates’ drive to purify their churches, but the transition was anything but inevitable.
Backus remained “Sensless and Stupid” over the issue for more than two years. Twice, he reversed his position.
Finally, in 1756, the Titicut congregation disbanded and was reconstituted as the First Baptist Church of Middleborough.
By 1770, half of all Strict Congregational churches had converted to antipedobaptist principles, and the number of Separate Baptist churches in southern New England had more than tripled.
