A Primer of Early New England Congregationalism

In order to fully grasp the purpose, meaning, and significance of these documents, it is important to achieve a general understanding of the basic principles and practices of Congregationalism in early Massachusetts. The most fundamental goal of the Congregationalists, as expressed in their written “covenants,” was to operate their churches in strict accordance with scriptural warrants. The Reading church vowed in their covenant of 1644 to “give up our-selves to y^e L^d Lord Jesus Christ, to be ruled & guided by him in y^e matt^rs of his worship, & in our whole conversation.”4 In matters of church government, the doctrine of “sola scriptura,” or dependence on the direction of the Bible, stood in contrast to Catholic practices and those in the Church of England, which, the early Congregationalists believed, had been corrupted with “humane inventions” not found in the Scripture.5

The Congregationalists expended tremendous time and energy in the 1630s and 1640s discussing larger principles and hammering out specific provisions of their form of church organization, formally codifying their practices in the Cambridge Platform of 1648, a document composed by ministers and lay delegates from throughout Massachusetts and ratified by every local church in the colony.6 Churches repeatedly reviewed and affirmed their commitment to the Cambridge Platform in the colonial era, and frequent references to the document are found in the records presented in this volume. At the suggestion of the “Reforming Synod” of 1679, for example, the Reading church “had Some time of perusing the Booke Called the platforme of Discipline” and they unanimously reconfirmed that the church “approved of it for the substance of it to be the word of God.”7 Originally, the Congregationalists intended the Platform to be a simple description of church practices as they had evolved over the first two decades of settlement. Some issues of greater import, such as baptism, as well as many lesser procedural details, would continue to evolve over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In time, the Platform took on increasingly greater significance as a document that not only established and justified, through Scripture, the duties and privileges of church officers and lay members, but even defined the larger Congregational mission in the New World. Eventually, the Platform gradually became vested with a sacred “constitutional” status.

Within local churches, the Platform confirmed the Congregationalists’ efforts to establish a “mixed form” of government, in which decision-making authority was shared by the members and the church officers. Congregationalism limited voting in church meetings and affairs to male members in full communion, that is, those converted “saints” who had been admitted to partake of the sacraments. Lay full members elected all of their church officers (later, all churchgoers, in addition to those who qualified for full church membership, would have a say in the selection of ministers). Typically, the minister served as the moderator in church meetings, setting agendas, supervising debates, and guiding the decision-making process. Ministers enjoyed positions of considerable authority: candidates for church admission, for instance, could not stand “propounded” before the church for membership until they had demonstrated their “election” or spiritual conversion in private before their local minister. Similarly, as we shall see, ministers typically decided whether disciplinary complaints among churchgoers ought to be resolved privately, or whether they were “ripe” for a more formal hearing before the church.

The Congregationalists also believed in strict limitations on human authority; consequently, they allowed ministers to conduct little church business entirely on their own. Indeed, ministers enjoyed almost nothing in the way of unilateral church power. Congregationalism thus included a sophisticated system of checks and balances that granted specific powers, liberties, and duties to lay officers and voting members in addition to the “authority” granted to ministers.

Every church, for instance, elevated a small number of “worthy laymen” whom they elected as lay officers to assist their ministers in matters of church government (see Table 1). At first these figures often served as “ruling elders,” who had the power to perform nearly every ministerial function except administer the sacraments. This office eventually fell largely (though never entirely) into disuse in the Congregational churches, partly due to clergy who questioned its scriptural basis. More commonly, ministers received assistance in governing their churches from deacons. Among other duties, deacons accompanied ministers in witnessing lay conversion testimonials and assisted ministers in determining whether disciplinary cases ought to come before the entire church.

The Congregationalists sought to balance these “managing powers” of the church officers with the “liberties” of the brethren. Churches allowed members to vote on virtually all church decisions and no formal church action became “official” without the approval of the membership. For example, though ministers and lay officers determined who stood before the church as candidates for admission, Congregational provisions required candidates to offer their conversion testimonials before the entire congregation. Members could and sometimes did “veto” the applications of candidates of questionable character.

Table 1: Deacons and Ruling Elders of Reading and Rumney Marsh, 1648-1769

(*=ruling elder)

The same balance and limits extended to church discipline, which required the carefully coordinated participation of both ordinary members and church officers. As both the Reading and Rumney Marsh records make clear, the Congregationalists sought to resolve most complaints over misbehavior among churchgoers privately, meaning that ordinary lay people conducted much church discipline on their own. One provision found in every local church covenant obligated members to enter into a system of “mutual watch,” which required them to privately admonish one another when aware of transgressions. In Reading, churchgoers offered the “promise by y^e help of Christ to walk with our brethren & Sisters of y^e Congregation, in y^e spirit of brotherly love, watching over them & caring for them . . . yet seasonably Admonishing & restoreing them by a Spirit of meekness; And Sett them in Joynt again that have been thrû infirmity overtaken in any fault among us.” Even when more serious or irresolvable complaints came to the attention of the church officers, efforts were made to avoid formal hearings. In 1659, Reading’s George Davis suffered a formal censure from his church but, the records show, it occurred only after efforts to rectify the matter in private had failed.8 In general, the Reading records are unusually valuable for their numerous references to mutual watch and private disciplinary hearings, topics that ministers often omitted from their church records in order to keep them private. Conscious of the public nature of the records, they undoubtedly left out certain information such as the names of the parties or the exact natures of the complaints in order to safeguard the reputations of the individuals involved.

The records also demonstrate that some disciplinary cases, because of their seriousness, their public nature, or because of an offender’s “obstinacy,” inevitably required formal church hearings. Ministers and lay officers generally determined whether unresolved cases were “ripe” for consideration by the entire church.9 In formal church disciplinary hearings, the officers and lay witnesses laid out the case before the members. Typically, the pastor then invited the membership to debate matters and to discuss disciplinary alternatives. As with nearly all formal church decisions, discipline was thus a negotiated process. Often ministers weighed in with their views, and congregations typically took very seriously the suggestions of their officers. But frequently, ministers simply presented the issues before the congregation and stood back while the members decided a course of action (or inaction) on their own. Usually, after a full hearing of the case, ministers attempted to determine the “mind of the church” or a “sense of the meeting,” and they then called for a vote. The Congregationalists believed in the ideal of unanimous consent, and most votes, whether disciplinary or otherwise, passed without dissent. But as the passage of time brought greater diversity of opinion and complexity of issues, churches increasingly rendered decisions by majority vote.

The 1653 disciplinary case of Elizabeth Hart in Reading nicely illustrates both the mechanics of church disciplinary procedures and the nature of the larger decision-making process. Hart faced disciplinary charges for “Sundry offences” such as “Contempt of Authority” and “Evil surmising.” According to witnesses, Hart had boasted that “all y^e wit y^e church had could not keep hir out nor beigin [to] cast hir out” of the church and that “she never had y^e worst of it befor^e Minister or church.” She only made matters worse for herself by expressing her determination to “teach old fooles more wit.” Numerous churchgoers labored with her in private, but she failed to display contrition to the contrary, she put on a “shew of much hotienesse” and demonstrated a “proud high spirit.” The officers consequently haled Hart before the entire church for a formal hearing. She offered only a weak apology for her offenses, forcing the church to decide whether or not to formally admonish her. Debating their alternatives, pastor Samuel Haugh observed, “one or two [members] Exp^rssed themselves Content to Sit down” and drop the matter. “[B]ut others,” he noted, “thought y^mselves unsatisfied.” The pastor and membership concluded that “without fully Understanding y^e churches mind,” or in the absence of a sufficient degree of unanimity, they had best defer the case. A week later the church reached a general consensus that Hart had shown “Little signs of Repentance” and administered a censure, which denied her access to the Lord’s Supper and required other church members to avoid her.10

The ultimate disciplinary penalty a church might administer was excommunication, which churches generally reserved for cases of great public scandal or incorrigible stubbornness on the part of the offender. Excommunication barred offenders from communion and subjected them to ostracization in the hope that the offender would see the error of his or her way, repent, and return to the church. In 1750, the Reading Church had to execute the awful sentence of excommunication “in face of y^e Congregatⁿ” upon Ebenezer Parker for his “habitual Drunkenness.” The church did not find any of Parker’s particular offenses outrageous; rather, the problem rested with his ongoing refusal to repent and to reform himself. The members resorted to the drastic measure of excommunication only after twelve years of trying to reclaim him.11

Churches rendered these sorts of decisions entirely at the local level and without outside interference. Another central tenet of the Congregational system one which lasted throughout the colonial era was the concept of congregational independence. In contrast to churches with hierarchical structures, such as those found in the Roman Catholic, Anglican, or Presbyterian systems of organization, Congregationalists vested final decision-making authority within each local church. In local, internal affairs, no neighboring church, group of churches, or body of church elders maintained binding authority over any local congregation. This understanding meant that, theoretically, each church was free to develop and practice its own form of Congregationalism, and historians have generally made much of the variability of practices from church to church. Still, as the records in this volume demonstrate, Congregational churches harmonized their practices by communicating regularly with one another about issues of church government. Even more, all of the churches attempted to adhere to the Cambridge Platform as a general blueprint for practice including many in Connecticut, even after the institution of the Saybrook Platform in 1709, which attempted to establish a distinct and more hierarchical ecclesiology for that colony. While Congregationalism was by no means static, and while some variability did exist from church to church, larger surveys of Congregational government point to the similarity of practices in the churches of colonial Massachusetts, especially during the first several decades of settlement.12

The Evolution of Colonial Massachusetts Congregationalism

While continuity represented one major theme of Congregationalism in colonial Massachusetts, many settlers of the founding generation would scarcely recognize some aspects of church government practiced by their successors in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Indeed, early seventeenth-century churchgoers vilified one another for suggesting modest changes in Congregationalism that pale before some of the innovations evident a century later. Some of these changes were narrowly procedural, but others were more fundamental. By the third and fourth decades of the seventeenth century, for instance, the vast majority of churches practiced the “Halfway Covenant,” a significant revision in church admissions requirements. This innovation, recommended to local churches by the “Halfway Synod” of 1662, allowed adult, non-scandalous, unconverted children of full church members to “own” the church covenant and have their children baptized. This arrangement thus brought “Halfway” members into the system of church discipline and under mutual watch, though the new requirements did not extend voting privileges or participation in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. Many churchgoers, long accustomed to traditional practices, resisted this change, and historians have closely studied the internal church struggles that accompanied efforts to adopt the Halfway Covenant. The innovation may indeed have represented the most significant church controversy of the colonial era in Massachusetts.

The actions of the Reading and Rumney Marsh congregations confirm the churches’ varying responses to the Halfway Covenant, as well as increasing variety in church practices. During the long pastorate of Thomas Cheever, which extended from 1715 to 1749, the Rumney Marsh church was one of a significant minority of churches that refused to implement the Halfway Covenant. Indeed, the Halfway Covenant failed to stimulate much even in the way of debate among the members. Only one churchgoer member offered protest to the church’s refusal to implement the innovation. In 1717 one Edward Tuttle was called before the church because, Pastor Cheever noted, he “absented [himself] from the Lords-supper three several times one after the other.” A full member himself, Tuttle justified his behavior, explaining that “he was dissatisfied” because Cheever “refused to baptize one of his Grand Children” in accordance with the Halfway Covenant. Cheever simply reminded the dissenter that the church had decided to maintain traditional admissions requirements at its gathering in 1715, and that the minister “had openly & fully declared my judgment in that matter before we Signed our Church-Covenant.” Tuttle acknowledged the “irregularity & disorder of his former absence,” and the matter “was lovingly ended.” The Halfway Covenant first appears the Reading records, in contrast, decades earlier, in 1665. Pastor John Brock carefully reviewed the innovation and its justifications before the congregation prior to taking a vote. The measure passed unanimously and, again, no evidence remains in the records to suggest that the change even occasioned debate, much less acrimony.

Virtually all churches that adopted the Halfway Covenant still required regenerate membership. But many began to adjust their policies toward relations, owing to the fact that churchgoers especially women found it increasingly difficult to offer their experiences of grace in public, before their entire congregation. Increasingly, churches allowed candidates to provide written relations. Others did away with public relations all together, requiring only that candidates for admission satisfy the minister and lay officers in private. (Reading was not among these; the church still required “a written or oral relation of Christian experience” as late as 1877.) In 1681, Pastor Brock urged his Reading congregation to address the issue of “the weake that say they can’t speake their Experience of grace before many (according to the [Cambridge] platforme).” The church decided to allow shy members to testify in private, before the elders. But the members also refused to permit the elders to exercise unilateral control of the admissions process. They voted to “have some Brethrin Joyned with y^e Elders to heare & Judge & represent the Brotherhood; whither the season Calls for it, or y^e person must Speake before sufficient witnesses for y^e Churches safety & the persons admonition to learne the feare of God.”13

Changes in church discipline accompanied those in church admissions. Innovations in church discipline reflected ongoing cultural developments in New England. During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, New England society experienced a growing population and changing economy and demographics. Religious culture was affected by shifting assumptions about gender, the public versus private spheres, the growing taste for finer goods, competing sites of discourse such as the tavern and the political arena, toleration of different (Protestant) religions, negotiation of clerical and lay prerogatives, and a rising spirit of individualism.14 These factors, among others, gradually undermined a Congregational system that depended heavily upon communitarian values. Both sets of records in this volume contain hints pointing toward the increasing internal friction within eighteenth-century Congregational churches, and sometimes between them, as congregations battled among themselves, ministers argued with other ministers, and individual churchgoers bickered with one another over a seemingly unending range of issues.

As early as 1661, Lydia Dastin’s employment of mutual watch in Reading seemed much more motivated by neighborly aggression than the “spirit of meekness” or “brotherly love” described in the original church covenant. Leaving the meetinghouse one Sunday, she saw several young men laughing and chatting and concluded that they “laughed and jeered at the minister that had then been dispencing the word to them.” Rather than approaching the men in private to clarify matters, she tattled on them. A brief investigation into the matter revealed that, in fact, the men had not been laughing at the minister at all, but only at a “Senseless Jest put forth by S.G.: concerning one who at y^e meeting broke wind.” The young men dealt with Dastin privately for “blemishing their names,” but Dastin “denyed y^t she had particularly named any of them.” At length, Dastin apologized for provoking this squabble. The members accepted her confession even though Pastor Samuel Haugh believed the apology lacked “the freedom and willingnesse as was to be desired.”15

The records presented in this volume reveal that another problem increasingly bedeviling the churches was disorder within the ministerial community itself. Both the Reading and Rumney Marsh churches found themselves drawn into numerous eighteenth-century controversies involving neighboring pastors. A 1729 division in the Leicester church over pastor David Parsons exemplifies the struggles that sometimes erupted between ministers and their congregations. The Leicester members brought up their pastor on no less than nineteen charges, including “Male administration,” “Delinquency,” “Immorality,” “Slander,” “fraudulent dealing” and “lying.” According to the account left in the Rumney Marsh records, events in Leicester several times nearly broke down into complete pandemonium: the pastor “command[ed] the Deacon out of his seat” during one church service, and publicly denounced one church meeting as a “cabal” and another as a “mob.” A deacon made off with “the Churches Vessels from the Use of the Reverend Mr. Parsons” and later the members even physically “opposed Mr Parsons his going into his Pulpit on the Lords day.” In a fit of rage, the Leicester church took the extraordinary step of deposing their minister from office. Ministers and lay delegates from no less than fourteen churches in the area brokered a peace agreement in Leicester, but the church formally dismissed Parsons five years later.16

Parsons’s case was hardly an isolated incident. One Robert Sturgeon from Ireland sought to “irregularly” set up a church in Watertown. In another episode, Peter Thatcher’s Weymouth church saw his departure for the Fifth Church of Boston as a breach of covenant (they accused him of seeking more prestige and a higher salary); many Bostonians agreed, and an ugly brawl punctuated the minister’s ordination.17 The Reading church received numerous complaints about neighboring ministers in the late 1740s and early 1750s; many of the objections concerned doctrine, a topic that was rarely a matter of controversy in the seventeenth century. Even Jonathan Edwards’s noted dismission, which culminated in June 1750, found its way into the Reading church record book. Indeed, Edwards’s effort to enforce stricter membership requirements in Northampton may have had an effect in Reading; after Rev. William Hobby’s death, a division rose in the church, apparently over this very issue, and celebration of the Lord’s Supper was suspended.18 Not until 1768 did the church, having “for a considrable time Past Lived in a neglect of the Lords Supper by means of Some perplexing Circumstances which have attended our affairs,” finally vote to “attend the holy Supper with all Convenient Speed.”19

Throughout the colonial era, Massachusetts churches struggled to police one another in response to this increasing internal and interchurch contention, but provisions of Congregational independence presented major obstacles to these efforts. Minorities within local churches that complained of unfair treatment from majorities, for instance, discovered that under Congregational provisions they enjoyed little in the way of formal recourse. Similarly, if any local church violated traditional practices, there was nothing, technically, or by way of binding authority, that neighbor churches could do to intervene.

With varying success, the Congregationalists attempted to address these difficulties by establishing a non-binding system of mutual supervision. On several occasions during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, lay and clerical representatives gathered together in synods and passed along resolutions or recommendations to all of the churches in the colony. These resolutions the Halfway Covenant was the most famous were non-binding. In matters of more local concern, mutual supervision was exercised most commonly through the implementation of ecclesiastical councils. Divided congregations were urged to call upon several neighbor churches to send their officers and lay representatives to hear cases and render written opinions on the controversy at hand. Ecclesiastical councils expected local congregations to take seriously their decisions (or “results”) and to abide by their recommendations. Nevertheless, these councils enjoyed no binding authority over local churches; their decisions only represented “advice.”

The Congregationalists gradually discovered that this system of local oversight was fraught with weaknesses. Both sets of records in this volume demonstrate the struggles that Congregational churches suffered in trying to maintain mutual supervision, particularly during the first half of the eighteenth century. The Rumney Marsh records, in particular, contain perhaps the most complete and illuminating accounts extant in the entire body of Massachusetts church records concerning the nature, frequency, and difficulty of attempts to employ ecclesiastical councils to address controversies within and between churches.

Oftentimes, councils succeeded according to the ideal: divided parties within local churches mutually consented to seek outside assistance, stood in agreement on the specific neighbor churches to call, received a unanimous decision from the council, and then heeded the council’s advice. In 1745, the Reading church received a letter from the pastor and membership of the First Church of Grafton, indicating that “a number of Brethren there were and for a long time had been Uneasy” over doctrinal issues. Both sides were “now Desirous y^t Matters of Diff[erence] might be Accomodated” through the intervention of a council. Importantly, “Every of y^e Chhes of S^d Councill” was “Acceptab: to & agreed upon by Each party,” that is, both sides in the dispute agreed on the specific churches to call upon for help yet another issue over which divided churches often fought. The Reading church voted to send both its deacons and another prominent member to accompany the pastor to the Grafton council. The Reading records do not contain the fulsome accounts of council results found in the Rumney Marsh records; few church books do. But there is little doubt that the Grafton council met with success. The Reading pastor concluded his entry in the church records by observing, with apparent relief, “NB: Every Person Came in to Receive Councill given. Glory to G^d. peace on Earth.”20

Many councils did not meet with such happy results. Earlier in the colonial period, individuals, as opposed to entire churches or significant church minorities, asserted and won the right to convene councils. The first council to appear in the Rumney Marsh records concerned a dispute between the church of Wenham led by pastor Joseph Gerrish, and one William Rogers whom the church suspended unanimously for offering “words of Opposition” and an “injurious charge” against his minister. Rogers appealed for outside assistance as a lone member.21 A council was convened by Ipswich pastor John Wise, the immensely popular minister of Chebacco Parish, who insisted that most eighteenth-century church disorder stemmed from aristocratically minded ministers who attempted to subvert the Cambridge Platform and trample upon lay rights. Given Wise’s lay sympathies, the council ruled in favor of Rogers and against the Wenham church.

Even when fully justified in their actions, councils that overturned decisions of local churches in this fashion threatened to undermine the entire disciplinary process: members subject to disciplinary measures, for example, soon began to refuse to abide by the decisions of their local churches, instead demanding hearings before a council. Church discipline eventually began to create so much friction that many churches simply threw up their hands and paid noticeably less attention to it. Churchgoers exercised mutual watch less frequently. As one minister ruefully noted, “[w]hen particular members undertake to make enquiry” for the purpose of exercising mutual watch, “they are charged either with prejudice, or doing what is none of their business.”22 Many churches thus began to adjust their understanding of the sorts of cases that legitimately fell under church purview, involving themselves mainly with non-controversial and clear-cut sorts of cases like public drunkenness or premarital pregnancy, offenses that were far less likely to divide a church and create the demand for a council.

Finally, it bears repeating that council results only represented advice. The controversies described in the Rumney Marsh record book demonstrate that it was hardly unusual for churches to ignore the strong expectation that council results would be regarded with reverence. During the Gerrish-Rogers dispute, the Wenham church, which had never requested a council in the first place, paid no heed to John Wise’s admonitions. It similarly ignored a formal council of five churches that repeatedly condemned the Wenham church for its “Obstinacy” in “slighting & rejecting the Process, & method taken with them,” which “thereby put high contempt upon the Constitution of these Churches.”23

The boldness that local churches displayed in ignoring council results became a matter of continual and growing frustration for the Congregationalists, ministers and laity alike. The North Reading church found itself divided into two sides in 1723 and formally requested the aid of a council. Fully aware of churches’ tendencies to ignore the advice of councils, the neighboring clergy attempted a preventive strike: they announced that they would hear a case only if all parties in the North Reading dispute agreed, in advance, to accept the council’s decision, whatever it might be. Both sides agreed to these conditions, “The Rev^d: M^r Putnam, & the whole Church, before the Opening of the Council, laying themselves under Obligation to sit down satisfied by the Judgment of this Council.”24 Once the council justified pastor Putnam, however, the minister’s opponents ignored the council’s advice and continued to wreak havoc in the church for another two years.25

Churches could, in concert, condemn offending local churches and withdraw from communion with them. But the “third way of communion” acted as an effective deterrent only in cases that found large numbers of churches united in their opinions about a particular case—an increasingly rare occurrence indeed. In fact, as the eighteenth century progressed, local churches that found themselves condemned by a council increasingly went so far as to convene “anti-councils” of handpicked allies, whose mission was to contradict the conclusions of the initial council. William Gerrish, for example, convened a council of sympathizers in 1719, which “Justifyed the whole Processe of the Church in Wenham” in its treatment of William Rogers while refuting the actions and conclusions of Wise and his earlier council of five churches.26

At length, churchgoers and pastors alike generally came to recognize that the Congregational system threatened to unravel if local churches were free to ignore any supervisory advice. Such “contempt” for council decisions, John Wise warned Rumney Marsh and other churches, “if not check’t & stopt in time, tends to the utter ruine and subversion of the Noble frame & constitution of these famous, ancient, & flourishing Churches.”27 Equally ominous was the lack of success neighboring churches and elders had in bringing offending pastors to heel. The Rumney Marsh records contain a meticulously detailed account of one of the most notorious eighteenth-century cases of alleged ministerial malfeasance, involving Salem pastor Samuel Fiske, who in 1734 stood accused of “interpolating” or forging into the record book a vote concerning his salary, which, many Salem members insisted, had never been raised (much less passed) in a church meeting. Determined to take a united stand on clerical misbehavior, neighboring ministers assembled dozens of representatives from around the colony to convene in Salem. This huge council itself soon broke down into chaos. Representatives bickered endlessly over countless procedural issues, angry delegates departed or refused to vote, and those resolutions that the largely emasculated council did pass had little effect in remedying the controversy. Eventually an unrepentant Fiske and his supporters split from the Salem church to form the Salem Third (or “Tabernacle”) Church.

The Salem controversy brought into sharp focus the failing efforts to enforce standards of behavior upon local churches and ministers. It also forced congregations to reconsider lay-clerical relations within local churches. Congregations called for more careful lay supervision over ministers, leading some in the early eighteenth century to suggest the reinstitution of the office of lay or “ruling” elder. Most churches did not respond to the crisis in any institutional fashion, but the Fiske affair had an immediate effect upon government in the Rumney Marsh church, which had been following the controversy with rapt attention. In 1736, shortly after the First Church of Salem parted ways with Samuel Fiske and his adherents, the remaining members of the Salem congregation elected two ruling elders. The Rumney Marsh church followed suit, electing Captain Samuel Watts to the ruling eldership and elevating deacon William Hasey to the same position. The move confirmed, as we shall see, that no minister was more committed than Rumney Marsh pastor Thomas Cheever to principles of lay participation and limits on authority even his own.

The Reading church found itself dragged into the Fiske affair as well. Shortly after the church division, the Reading church received a letter from the lay leaders of the “Antient place of worship in Salem; Signifying y^r Desires y^t: we woud by our Elder & Messengers Assist in y^e Ordinatⁿ of M^r John Sparhawk to y^e Pastoral Care over y^m.” Reading pastor Hobby then immediately produced and read a letter from Samuel Fiske and his allies who, at this point, also claimed to be the First Church of Salem, “protesting agⁿ our Assistance in Afores^d: Ordinatⁿ.” The church voted unanimously to support Fiske’s opponents and to assist in the ordination of Sparhawk. The matter, pastor Hobby recorded wryly in the record book, required only “a very short Debate.”28

The records in this volume, in sum, demonstrate that by the eighteenth century, churches like Rumney Marsh and Reading often saw their attention dominated by events in other churches. Rumney Marsh pastor Thomas Cheever served almost constantly on ecclesiastical councils, a testament to the high esteem he held among his ministerial peers but also to the degree of strife in the churches. In many instances, Cheever served as moderator and scribe for these councils as well. The Reading church, on the other hand, manifested far less patience with the contentious state of church affairs in the first half of the eighteenth century. In 1722, the church received a request for council delegates from the First Church of Worcester, which was divided over its choice of pastor. In response, Reading’s “L^t Briant affirmd, y^e Counsel y^t [had convened] last y^r unanimously agreed, y^t M^r Gardener’s call & Settlem^t to & in Woster w^s right, & y^rupon advised y^e dissenting party to fall in.” Why convene another council, the Reading church asked, when the Worcester church had simply ignored the unanimous advice of the first? Two decades later, the Reading church received council requests from Framingham, Hopkinton, the second Church of Bradford, and Dorchester, all within a three-month period. The church flatly refused to provide assistance in the last two councils. As pastor Hobby explained, “y^e Main Reason of Such Refusals” was “Our being so frequently Engag’d in y^e Affairs of Other Chhes.”29

Thomas Cheever and “Traditional” Congregationalism in Eighteenth-Century Rumney Marsh

The Rumney Marsh and Reading church records demonstrate that contention and the convening of ecclesiastical councils and anti-councils at times threatened to engulf the eighteenth-century Congregationalists. But these records also make clear that not all local churches witnessed this gradual disintegration of the Congregational Way. If the churches were not a “peaceable kingdom,” neither were they a scene of unremitting discord. It is important for us to consider the significance of the fact that the Rumney Marsh church no matter how entangled it may have grown with disputes wracking neighboring churches suffered virtually no internal strife itself. Similarly, while most Congregational churches saw their practices and procedures evolve and diversify over the course of the eighteenth century sometimes in dramatic ways some churches remained largely unaffected by change, something that has scarcely been recognized by historians. Rumney Marsh stands out as a remarkable example of an eighteenth-century church whose practices demonstrate strong continuities with those of the previous century. Indeed, in its procedures of admissions, discipline, dismissions, and interchurch relations, the Rumney Marsh church seems almost a “throwback” to the practices of the first generation of churches. In their careful accounts of neighboring church controversies, in short, the Rumney Marsh records illuminate for us the sorts of developments that generally affected local Congregational churches in the eighteenth century. At the same time, these records provide a glimpse at church life in a congregation largely unaffected internally by those changes.

In seeking reasons for this combination of circumstances in Rumney Marsh, one needs look no further than the church’s committed minister, Thomas Cheever. Throughout the colonial era, churches stood a far better chance of maintaining harmony when blessed with a skilled and respected pastor; lay-clerical relations within local churches often directly reflected the deference earned by such individuals. And ministers, such as John Wise, often won respect and deference by strongly adhering to Congregational provisions and by recognizing the importance of respecting lay “liberties.” In the charged political atmosphere of provincial Massachusetts in the early eighteenth century, when elected deputies in the House of Representatives clashed with the governor and his appointed officials over gubernatorial prerogatives and royal supervision, the question of traditional rights and liberties enjoyed by New Englanders was hotly defended.30 No one agreed more fully with Wise than Thomas Cheever. The publication of the Rumney Marsh records establishes Cheever as an important figure in northeastern Massachusetts religious affairs and shows that Wise was not alone in his principles. Cheever’s success in Rumney Marsh presents us with an interesting eighteenth-century representation of a seventeenth-century model: a ministerially established ecclesiastical culture based heavily upon lay participation.

Born in 1658, Cheever’s remarkable career spanned no less than sixty-eight years. He graduated from Harvard College in 1677 at the age of nineteen, and began preaching in Malden in 1680. His strong commitment to Congregationalism may have been owing in part to his coming of age during and after the convening of the Reforming Synod of 1679, at which the ministers and lay leaders of the colony performed a powerful and public recommitment to Cambridge Platform, and urged every local church to do the same. Cheever’s roots, at least by extension, can be traced all the way back to the founding generation; the First Church of Malden ordained him in 1681 as a colleague to longtime pastor Michael Wigglesworth, who had been with the church since 1656.

Cheever’s five-year stay in Malden was turbulent. In 1686, he found himself barred from church communion and then haled before a council of ministerial and lay delegates for “scandalous breaches” of the third and seventh commandments. The specific charges remain cloudy, beyond that he offered “light and obscene expressions (not fit to be named) in an Ordinary at Salem” and “as he was travailing on the Rode.” Cheever acknowledged guilt before the council, condemning himself for “expos[ing] Religion and y^e ministry to Reproach.” Impressed with Cheever’s “humble and penitent” demeanor, the council recommended that the Malden church “grant him a Loving Dismission to some church according as himself shall desire.”31

Even in the absence of complete documentation, the case against Cheever seems to have been less than clear-cut. Although he added his assent to the council’s decision, Cotton Mather nevertheless expressed reservations about the outcome, noting that this “poor young minister” had been “terribly stigmatized for his Misdemeanors.” Mather seems to have believed that the affair should have been resolved quietly and privately; in response to the controversy he tellingly vowed personally to avoid “uttering any Reproachful Thing” unless it “bee not only True in itself but also proper and useful to be mentioned.” Mather also undoubtedly recognized that the Maldenites were a fractious lot: members of the Cheever council condemned the Malden church for “that want of Love, and for that bitterness of Spirit which appears in sundry of them.”32

Finally, Cheever’s relationship with Wigglesworth had likely been stormy, as was Wigglesworth’s relationship with his own congregation. Events in the aftermath of the council suggest that Wigglesworth may have opposed his colleague’s ordination in the first place, and that many Malden members clearly opposed Cheever’s dismissal. In response to Cheever’s dismission, Wigglesworth gloated that his church “had cause to condemn themselves, as for other sins, so their sudden laying Hands on Mr. Cheever.” A second council was eventually convened in Malden to address not only an angry salary dispute involving Wigglesworth but the fact that overtures had been made to rehire Cheever. The second council ordered “that no further disturbance or offer be made . . . to restore the said Cheevers [sic] to the service of the Ministry in that place.”33

The next thirty years of Cheever’s life remain something of a mystery. He probably served as a schoolteacher and he is on record as having taught “reading, writing, and ciphering” at Rumney Marsh from 1709 to 1719. Apparently, his early indiscretions were not brought up when he was hired to serve as pastor of the newly gathered church in 1715, nearly three decades after his dismission for scandal.

From the outset, Cheever and his congregation together made clear their intention to follow traditional Congregational practices, pledging in their covenant not only “to endevour to keep ourselves pure from the sins of the times” but to adhere strictly to principles and practices of the Cambridge Platform, mutual watch, careful observation of discipline, oversight of the elders, and communion with neighboring churches:

Five years later the church again confirmed their commitment to the Congregational way and its “mixed” form of government.

Cheever thus ably managed church affairs by institutionalizing for his followers the principle of government by consent and by carefully adhering to the Congregational procedures and provisions to which he and the members mutually agreed. The Rumney Marsh membership debated and voted on virtually every issue facing the church from the important (such as the establishment of ruling elders) to the mundane (such as the specific seating location in the church for the ruling elders and psalm setters).36

Throughout Cheever’s thirty-four year pastorate, Rumney Marsh continued to adhere to “traditional” Congregationalism in its handling of both internal and interchurch affairs. As mentioned, the church refused to implement the Halfway Covenant. Though over three-quarters of Massachusetts churches had relaxed admissions by 1690, and nearly all churches followed suit in the early decades of the eighteenth century, Rumney Marsh did not adopt the Halfway Covenant until 1749, shortly after Cheever’s death. The small number of full members usually less than a hundred shows that the church’s resistance to the Halfway Covenant was a matter of principle and not a concern about the size of its membership rolls.

Church disciplinary hearings do not dominate the Rumney Marsh church records. But this observation does not suggest that the church shied away from controversy or church watch, as neighboring churches increasingly began to do in the eighteenth century. Possibly the community generally suffered less in the way of contention than other towns. Perhaps more likely, Cheever simply enjoyed more success in convincing members to resolve their disputes privately.

In any event, the records make clear that, in contrast to developments in many contemporary Congregational churches, discipline and church purity remained matters that the church took seriously in the eighteenth century. Prior to the admission of Abraham Skinner in 1719, for example, the church discovered that years earlier Skinner had been charged with “stealing or carrying off a post from the parsonage land in Maldon.”37 The church launched a full investigation, appointing several prominent members to contact authorities in Malden to authenticate the charge. After gathering testimony from numerous witnesses, the church concluded that the charges had been fabricated; Skinner’s membership owed considerably to the close attention to procedural detail exercised by the Rumney Marsh church and its pastor.

Decades into the eighteenth century, when most churches were drifting away from mutual watch, the Rumney Marsh church still regarded private behavior as resting entirely within its purview. In 1730, Elisha Tuttle and his wife were charged with “abusive carriage” to their mother and sister, and the church required them to “give satisfaction” to the church for their behavior.38 The church then disciplined Tuttle again the following year for withdrawing from communion. The church admonished one William Tuttle for drunkenness, but even in this case the church’s action cannot be characterized as perfunctory. The records make clear that Tuttle had been guilty of multiple offenses, and that the church had long been exercising mutual watch over the errant “brother.” Several members labored with Tuttle in private, where the offender offered many “promises” of reformation. Eventually, Tuttle was restored to the church.39

The Tuttle case also indicates that while much changed throughout the eighteenth century, another continuity in the Rumney Marsh church, and in other churches as well, was the emphasis even a growing emphasis on lay participation. Toward the end of his career, Cheever began to refer to himself as the “moderator” of church meetings (a title usually given to the lay leader of a committee), whose charge was simply to present the agenda and maintain order until decisions could be reached by majority vote.

Decades of participation in church government left the church well-prepared when age and infirmity forced their minister from the pulpit. As Thomas Cheever neared the end of his life, the Rumney Marsh church prepared to ordain William McClanachan first to the office of colleague and later to the office of pastor but not before first settling some critical issues of authority and church government. Prior to the ordination, the church voted that “The Ruling Elders, the rev^d. W^m. McClenachan, Mes^s. Thomas Pratt and Hugh Floyd take the Ch^h Covenant into Consideration, and make what additions or amendments agreeable to the substantials of the Platform that they think just and report thereon” to the church.40

The “worthy laymen” on the committee affirmed that McClanachan’s church authority would be strictly limited and that they would impose those limits personally. The committee thus reported: “They are of the Opinion that Ruling Elders are, agreeable to the Platform, Essential Oficers in a Congregational Church; and that no teaching Elder be admitted as Pastor of this Church unless he submit to such oficers in y^e Ch^h.” They further disabused McClanachan of any notion that he would enjoy a veto power over any church decision, a right that some ministers attempted to assert in the eighteenth century. Any “negative power” over church decisions, the committee noted, “does not pertain to the teaching, or ruling Elders distinct but to a majority of the eldership.”41 The committee also recommended, at last, that the church adopt the Halfway Covenant. The members agreed to all of the committee’s proposals.

Despite the limits on his power, McClanachan succeeded in convincing the Rumney Marsh church to embark upon a rapid course of liberalization. He introduced the Halfway Covenant, though the number of people who took advantage of it was so abysmally small that the measure did little to boost overall membership if that indeed was McClanachan’s goal. Also, McClanachan proposed, and the church accepted, the use of Isaac Watts’s hymns in worship to supplement or replace traditional psalm-singing. These innovations alienated several prominent members of the church, including Nathan Cheever, son of the former pastor, and two of the deacons, who removed to another church. Even so, the remaining members registered surprisingly little consternation when McClanachan, continuing his history as a religious chameleon, announced he had converted to the Church of England and requested to be dismissed. In December 1754, the church voted not to allow him to depart. After the long pastorate of Cheever, the prospect of his successor lasting only a few years may have seemed incomprehensible. Alternatively, the congregation may have anticipated that they would have a difficult time finding another minister. If so, their fear turned out to be true. After McClanachan’s unauthorized departure for England, two potential candidates turned them down, and it took three years before they found a replacement in Philips Payson.

Church Records and Religious Practice

Early Massachusetts church records contain great potential for scholars and practitioners interested in a newer area of historical inquiry: the history of religious practice.42 Dorothy Bass, one of the most prominent American scholars in this field, writes that “Practices are those shared activities that address fundamental human needs and that, woven together, form a way of life.” David D. Hall, who has been the most active in applying the study of practice to early America, points to a conception of practice as “culture in action.” “As most of us use the term,” Hall writes, “it encompasses the tensions, the ongoing struggle of definition, which are constituted within every religious tradition and that are always present in how people choose to act. Practice thus suggests that any synthesis is provisional. Moreover, practice always bears the marks of both regulation and what, for want of a better word, we may term resistance.”43

A great number of practices that characterized the Congregational churches of colonial New England are reflected in the records of Reading and Rumney Marsh. Some have already been described in the “Primer” section above, but many others merit attention. For example, accounts of lay and clerical ordinations were carefully and proudly preserved, usually by the incoming minister. Clerical ordinations were especially important rituals in colonial life; churches or the new ordinands themselves sometimes expended the equivalent of a year’s salary for an ordination “ball,” which typically featured plenty of food, spirits, and even dancing. The records note meticulously the names of neighboring ministers who participated in the service, extended the right hand of fellowship (or gave the “charge”), and preached the ordination sermon. Congregationalists also honored the elevation of lay officers as an important tradition in their churches; those entrusted with such positions assumed high responsibilities in the church’s worship and meetings, served as delegates in ecclesiastical councils, and generally helped to establish the tone of local religious life. Consequently, while the ordinations of lay elders and deacons were less celebrated affairs, churches carefully recorded the process of electing and ordaining these officers as well.

What historians term “regulatory” practices are also amply evident in the hundreds of pages of entries in these records. A complex of practices, generally covenantal in nature, reflected the Congregationalists’ communal identity. In order to embody themselves as a church, as we have seen, a group of believers drafted and agreed upon a covenant that bound them together in common fellowship. When a person entered the church, he or she owned the church covenant, or consented to be bound by it. These covenants regulated individual behavior according to a literalistic reading of Scripture, including all but the ceremonial laws in the Old Testament, obligating members to participate in mutual watch and subjecting them to church discipline. It was not uncommon for family members siblings and cousins, or extended kin to present themselves for membership together, to symbolize a mutually supporting familial network of shared piety within the larger church community. Husbands and wives often presented themselves together as well, even though only one parent in full communion was required in order to have children baptized. This suggests that couples often went through significant religious episodes together. Occasionally, churches publicly and collectively re-affirmed their covenants, as both the Reading and Rumney Marsh congregations did.44 Days of fast or humiliation, observed by civil proclamation, provided opportunities for the community as a whole to acknowledge its sins and covenant breaches and to seek God’s favor.45

The churches incorporated these regulatory acts in accordance with general guidelines such as Scripture rules (especially Matthew 18, where steps for reclaiming offending fellow believers are laid out), the Cambridge Platform, more specific institutional expressions such as local committees and clerical councils, and sentences of admonition, suspension, and excommunication. But there were other, more subtle, interpersonal regulatory practices besides these codified or formal processes. Rendering confessions for offenses, whether in writing or orally, represented an established method for members to be received back into the good graces of the church. Both the Reading and Rumney Marsh records contain excerpts of such lay confessions.46 But confessors did not always immediately meet with acceptance. Here they entered a realm in which they were subject to their fellow members’ subjective interpretations of religious meaning and practice. We have already seen that members carefully scrutinized candidates for full membership and sometimes rejected them. Those in full membership who strayed could expect even more demanding treatment. The Reading church deemed Elizabeth Hart’s 1655 confession unsatisfactory, “& some desired to deferre till another time.” When given another chance, she again failed to convince her fellow members of her repentance. Only on the third try did she provide sufficient “Satisfaction” to remove her censure.47

The fact that members sometimes remained dissatisfied with offenders’ confessions demonstrates the degree to which lay people took seriously their covenant obligations and the ways in which they interpreted their duties, and reaffirms the central role they played in implementing church practices. By involving themselves in cases of neighborly acrimony or family misunderstandings churchgoers actively regulated discourse and behavior. The regulation of speech, especially women’s speech, has been examined as an important facet of early American religious and civic culture.48 Church records reveal that regulation of discourse cut across gender lines. In 1683, “Brother Briant” of Reading was reported to have “spoken passionately in a Towne meeting”; some brethren, taking exception, “cast it into the church [as] disorderly & unseasonably.” Fellow members even “helped” Briant in writing his “acknowledgment.” George Davis was earlier heard to sing a portion of a “filthy song”; those at a church disciplinary meeting saw through his attempts to dodge the charge and suspended him. Nearly a century later, in 1747, Jonathan Eaton entered a complaint against William Bryant Jr. for “Some Slanderous & Vilifying Expressions.” In this instance, however, the church ended up focusing its attention on the accuser rather than the accused, first for not sufficiently following “y^e private Steps prescribed by Our Sav^r,” and then for following only the letter of the law but not the “Charitable Design & End of y^e Gospell w^ch: is to Reclaim an Offender.” Thus, Eaton’s “Conduct” was voted to be “Defective.”49

As Hall notes, if certain practices constituted “regulation” of collective behavior, others reflected individual “resistance” to those regulations. In response, communities were forced to negotiate and define the larger covenantal identity in the face of resistive, delinquent, or unlawful acts, and then to enforce conformity to that evolving identity.

Let us look at drunkenness, a common problem for the Congregationalists in colonial New England, which had the highest alchohol consumption in American history.50 In 1700, the Reading church without much debate cast Mary Salmon out of the church for habitual intemperance following a public admonition. Only a year had passed before the church resorted to excommunication. The same church’s prolonged dealings with Ebenezer Parker Jr.’s alcoholism four decades later illustrate both the growing disinclination to employ excommunication and the patience with which a congregation could treat a fellow member. By the same token, the records reveal the absence of means for dealing with such a problem beyond the traditional punitive ones of censure, suspension of privileges, and, ultimately, excommunication. The community viewed the solemn penalties, publicly accepted and declared, as having enough rehabilatory power of their own for any person not thoroughly lost in iniquity. Parker no doubt agreed, notwithstanding his condition.

Such assumptions, however, did not apply to fornication, especially as the eighteenth century progressed. For the most part, a person or couple stood accused of fornication if their child was born less than seven months after marriage. In 1680, for example, the Reading church accused Mary Davis (though not her husband) of “having broken the seaventh Command of God before her marriage.”51 She admitted her sin “before the Church” (that is, the full members), which accepted her repentance. Her confession was then further “published” (possibly in written form, or else by word of mouth) to the wider congregation of members and non-members. Only after performing this public act of contrition was she allowed to own the covenant. In 1724, Daniel and Elizabeth Nichols were accused, and after witnessing their confession before the congregation and pleas for forgiveness of God, the church restored them to charity and communion. But the Nicholses were one of several couples simultaneously brought before the church on similar charges. By this time, premarital, and indeed promiscuous, sex were widespread in most New England communities and churches increasingly treated these cases in a pro forma manner.52

Another practice of “resistance” that increasingly vexed New England churches as the eighteenth century wore on was separatism. Ironically, the sophisticated knowledge of congregational practice among lay people paved the way for schisms and separations. The Rumney Marsh church was one of several represented in a 1722 council that criticized dissenting members of the Watertown church for taking the initiative to ordain Irish émigré Robert Sturgeon as their pastor. The council also sternly rebuked Rev. MacGregore of Nutfield for collaborating with the Watertown laity by single-handedly installing Sturgeon in a clandestine night meeting. In 1747, the Reading church assisted in remonstrating with the “Separating Brethⁿ” of Dorchester. And that same year, Reading dealt with a separatist in its midst in the person of John Dammon, who “had fallen into y^e Depths of Enthusiasm,” “enthusiasm” being a term used to deride the seemingly irrational behavior and speech of revival participants. Taking matters in stride, the church appointed a committee to deal with Dammon. For two full years the church endured Dammon’s diatribes, including fulminations claiming that Reading church and all the churches in the land “were but Baals [Bel’s] Chhes & y^e Ministers, but y^e Dragons Angels.”53 Incidentally, the Reading church found itself debating the separatist Dammon’s fate at the same time as it was considering Parker’s alcoholism. In the end, the church adjudged Dammon’s transgressions less offensive than Parker’s. Dammon seems never to have been excommunicated; after characterizing the separatist as temporarily insane, the church suspended the offender and his wife from communion. After this, they drop out of the records.

As the case of John Dammon illustrates, individuals sometimes resisted criticism and censures of their church despite all efforts to reclaim them. Refusal to bow before the will and advice of churches and councils was a recourse individuals increasingly took some with conscientious motives, some with merely obstructionist ones. The controversies involving pastors Gerrish, Fiske, and Parsons demonstrate that clergymen, no less than ordinary churchgoers, were not above ignoring petitions from church members and advice from neighboring churches.54 Therefore, in a church such as Rumney Marsh, whose first pastor had been so sensitive to his people’s will, it must have been heartrending for some when, in 1749, several prominent members including Cheever’s son Nathan objected to the new minister. The head deacon, Jacob Halsey, even declared he “wou’d not deliver the utensills of the Church” to an appointed committee.55

Church members who felt slighted or unjustly treated could make their feelings known in various ways. One avenue of expression, of course, was speaking out in a church meeting. Another was communion. The political dimension of communion, so evident in these records, has never been fully noted by scholars before. As we have seen, clergy and councils used communion as a device to impose conformity. But the laity could register grievances by absenting themselves from communion exercising, on a personal level, a form of reverse admonishment that churches usually employed towards individuals. So in 1742, Elisha Tuttle of the Rumney Marsh church, charged with his wife for ill-treatment of family members, withdrew for “a considerable time.” When asked to appear before a church meeting to explain his reasons, he stated that he felt “Slighted by the Church” and that several people were “prejudiced” against him. In this case, the church had to produce answers to a member’s objections and criticisms. Once they had done so and the misunderstanding was cleared up, Tuttle “Owned that he had done wrong” and promised to return to communion.56 Given the prescribed range of practices, we see that the responses to “resistance” and the general dynamics of applying religious precepts could be surprisingly complex.

Another realm of church practice was financial. Like all churches, the Rumney Marsh church kept careful accounts of the funds that it committed into the hands of the deacons, who provided periodic reports on their use.57 These reports reveal that churches expended money for communion, for repairs, which might include fixing broken windows or installing new pews, and especially, for the needy.58 Such practices represented extensions of worship, or supported some part of worship life such as the liturgy. Churchgoers regarded them as important opportunities to express their faith in the context of community and to draw members into concerted and collective action. At Rumney Marsh’s founding, the congregation voted to purchase a set of “utensils,” or communion vessels. The church also decided that the sacrament would be held three months apart and that “each Communicant should give six pence a time.” Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, congregants continued to give a regular “contribution” for the Lord’s Supper, customarily observed once every month or two. The Reading church voted in 1734 to increase the contribution from two to three shillings “in Order to y^e making a proper provision of Elements for y^e L^ds Table,” that is, wine and bread.59

Charity in colonial Massachusetts began at home. Massachusetts law required that every town take care of its indigent and impoverished. When a family’s house burned down or when a widow was unable to support herself and her family because of illness, the local church stepped in. In 1727, for example, the Rumney Marsh congregation earmarked a contribution for one Mrs. Marble, whose daughter had been “for a considerable time under the Doctours hand having a dangerous humour in her Mouth & throat.”60 Another sort of charity evident in the records, perhaps unique to the often combative nature of the larger colonial setting, provided funds for “redeeming” individuals who had been taken captive by Indians.61 Finally, members often left bequests or legacies to their church as an expression of faith and as a means of perpetuating their memory in the life of the church.62

Church Admissions and Membership Patterns

The records of the Reading and Rumney Marsh churches are remarkably useful in providing us with the number and names of people who “owned” the covenant and who were admitted to full membership. Ministers and deacons of both churches were especially conscientious about keeping track of new members of various levels. Reading did not accept the Halfway Covenant until 1670, twenty-two years after the church was gathered, and Rumney Marsh until 1748, thirty-three years after its foundation (and, more importantly, only after Thomas Cheever was no longer active). Consequently, until those dates, only full members are listed, usually by year and sometimes by month and day (Table 2).

The records demonstrate that, after formation, whether in 1648 or 1715, both churches witnessed an initial wave of members, followed by a period of few or no new admissions. This was the norm in most colonial New England churches.63 In Reading, no new communicants came forward for a full decade from 1651 to 1661. Rumney Marsh saw a steady trickle, but seldom more than that, reflecting the small size of the community through the eighteenth century. The church seems never to have topped more than about 100 full members, whereas a tally of Reading members in 1721 by Pastor Richard Brown resulted in more than twice that number (Table 3). In light of its small size, it is difficult to offer statistically significant conclusions about Rumney Marsh, but if we examine membership trends there and compare them with Reading and other churches for which studies have been done, some general patterns in our two subject churches emerge.

Table 2: Church Admissions in Reading and Rumney Marish, Massachusetts, 1648-1769

1 The list on MS p. 20, cued after the list on MS p. 6 ending 1669, is undifferentiated and may identify all full admissions for 1670-1681.

2 The lists from the bottom of MS p. 30 through MS p. 31 are undated; the breakdown of full admissions for 1686–86 is conjectural.

3 Includes one admission of unknown gender.

4 Includes one admission of unknown gender.

Table 3: List of Full Members in Reading Church, 1721

The Towns and Their Ministers

Note on the Texts