Churches & Denominations of Early Settlers

Churches & Denominations of Early Settlers in Colonial America

(of and by our ancestors)

Established church

The Church of England was legally established in the colony in 1619. In practice, establishment meant that local taxes were funneled through the local parish to handle the needs of local government, such as roads and poor relief, in addition to the salary of the minister.

Anglican parishes

As in England, the parish became a unit of local importance, equal in power and practical aspects to other entities, such as the courts and even the House of Burgesses and the Governor's Council (the two houses of the Virginia General Assembly).

A typical parish contained three or four churches, as the parish churches needed to be close enough for people to travel to worship services, where attendance was expected of everyone. Expansion and subdivision of the church parishes followed population growth. The intention of the Virginia parish system was to place a church not more than six miles (10 km)-easy riding distance-from every home in the colony. Likewise the shires, soon after initial establishment in 1634 known as counties, were planned to be not more than a day's ride from all residents, so that court and other business could be attended to in a practical manner.

A parish was normally led spiritually by a rector and governed by a committee of layman members generally respected in the community, which was known as the vestry. There never was a bishop in colonial Virginia, and in practice, the local vestry controlled the parish. Indeed, there was fierce political opposition to having a bishop in the colony; the Anglican priests themselves were supervised directly by the Bishop of London. By the 1740s, the established Anglican church had about 70 parish priests around the colony.

Parishes typically had a church farm (or "glebe") to help support it financially. Each county court gave tax money to the local vestry. The vestry provided the priest a glebe of 200 or 300 acres (1.2 km2), a house, and perhaps some livestock. The vestry paid him an annual salary of 16,000 pounds-of-tobacco, plus 20 shillings for every wedding and funeral. While not poor, the priests lived modestly and their opportunities for improvement were slim.

After a crop failure caused the price of tobacco to jump, the Two Penny Act was enacted by the General Assembly in 1758, allowing clergy to be paid instead at the rate of two pence per pound of tobacco owed them. The act was nullified by the government in Britain, angering some colonists and leading to a high-profile lawsuit by the clergy for back-pay, which became known as the Parson's Cause.

Alternatives to the established church

Colonists were typically inattentive, uninterested, and bored during Anglican church services, according to the ministers, who complained that the people were sleeping, whispering, ogling the fashionably dressed women, walking about and coming and going, or at best looking out the windows or staring blankly into space. The lack of towns means the church had to serve scattered settlements, while the acute shortage of trained ministers meant that piety was hard to practice outside the home. Some ministers solved this problem by encouraging parishioners to become devout at home, using the Book of Common Prayer for private prayer and devotion. This allowed devout Anglicans to lead an active and sincere religious life apart from the unpopular formal church services. However the stress on private devotion weakened the need for a bishop or a large institutional church of the sort Blair wanted. The stress on personal piety opened the way for the First Great Awakening, which pulled people away from the established church.

In 1689, the Parliamentary Act of Toleration had allowed freedom of worship for certain Nonconformist Protestant groups in England, with conditions and legal constraints. Similar tolerance was put in place in Virginia. Baptists, German Lutherans and Presbyterians, funded their own ministers, and favored disestablishment of the Anglican church. However, by the mid-18th century, Baptists and Presbyterians faced growing persecution; between 1768 and 1774, about half of the Baptist ministers in Virginia were jailed for preaching.

Especially in the back country, most families had no religious affiliation whatsoever and their low moral standards were shocking to proper Englishmen. The Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians and other evangelicals directly challenged these lax moral standards and refused to tolerate them in their ranks. The evangelicals identified as sinful the traditional standards of masculinity which revolved around gambling, drinking, and brawling, and arbitrary control over women, children, and slaves. The religious communities enforced new standards, creating a new male leadership role that followed Christian principles and became dominant in the 19th century.

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St. Luke's Church, built during the 17th century near Smithfield, Virginia - the oldest Anglican church-building to have survived largely intact in North America.

Church of England (Anglican)

Anglicanism arrived in the Americas (and specifically what was then considered "Virginia") with the ill-fated Roanoke Colony (located in present-day North Carolina). Its brief existence saw recorded the first baptisms in North America into the Church of England.

Christ Church Parish, Middlesex County, Virginia, 1653

St. Peter's Parish, New Kent, Virginia, 1679

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Old Trinity Church, Maryland, 1675, Old Trinity Church is located here. An Anglican (now Episcopal) brick church built in 1675, it is the oldest church building in the US in continuous ecclesiastical use.

Episcopalian

Episcopal Church may refer to various churches in the Anglican, Methodist, and Open Episcopal traditions.

An Episcopal church has bishops in its organizational structure (see episcopal polity). Episcopalian is a synonym for Anglican in the United States, Scotland, and several other locations.

The Episcopal Church has its origins in the Church of England in the American colonies, and it stresses continuity with the early universal Western Church and claims to maintain apostolic succession (though the Catholic and Orthodox churches do not recognize this claim).[

The first parish was founded in Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, under the charter of the Virginia Company of London. The tower of Jamestown Church (c. 1639–43) is one of the oldest surviving Anglican church structures in the United States. The Jamestown church building itself is a modern reconstruction.

Although no American Anglican bishops existed in the colonial era, the Church of England had an official status in several colonies, which meant that local governments paid tax money to local parishes, and the parishes handled some civic functions. The Church of England was designated the established church in Virginia in 1609, in New York in 1693, in Maryland in 1702, in South Carolina in 1706, in North Carolina in 1730, and in Georgia in 1758.

From 1635 the vestries and the clergy came loosely under the diocesan authority of the Bishop of London. After 1702, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) began missionary activity throughout the colonies. On the eve of Revolution about 400 independent congregations were reported [by whom?] throughout the colonies.

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The Old Ship Church (also known as the Old Ship Meetinghouse) is a Puritan church built in 1681 in Hingham, Massachusetts.

Puritanism

The Puritans were English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who sought to purify the Church of England of Roman Catholic practices, maintaining that the Church of England had not been fully reformed and should become more Protestant. Puritanism played a significant role in English history, especially during the Protectorate.

Puritans were dissatisfied with the limited extent of the English Reformation and with the Church of England's toleration of certain practices associated with the Roman Catholic Church. They formed and identified with various religious groups advocating greater purity of worship and doctrine, as well as personal and corporate piety. Puritans adopted a Reformed theology and, in that sense, were Calvinists (as were many of their earlier opponents). In church polity, some advocated separation from all other established Christian denominations in favor of autonomous gathered churches. These Separatist and independent strands of Puritanism became prominent in the 1640s, when the supporters of a Presbyterian polity in the Westminster Assembly were unable to forge a new English national church.

The reign of King James I of England (1603-25) saw the continued rise of the Puritan movement in England, that began during reign of Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603), and the continued clash with the authorities of the Church of England. This eventually led to the further alienation of Anglicans and Puritans from one another in the 17th century during the reign of King Charles I (1625-49), that eventually brought about the English Civil War (1642-51), the brief rule of the Puritan Lord Protector of England Oliver Cromwell (1653-58), the English Commonwealth (1649-60), and as a result the political, religious, and civil liberty that is celebrated today in all English speaking countries.

One of the greatest accomplishments of Puritans and Anglicans together during the reign of King James was the translation of the King James Bible (1611); arguably one of the greatest historical, literary, and theological achievements of the western world. It was also during the reign of King James that Puritans and Anglicans worked together at the Synod of Dordt (1618-1619), an international conference of reformed theologians that drew up the Canons of Dordt in defense of the Five Points of Calvinism, refuting the Arminian heresy. It was moreover during the reign of King James that the Pilgrim movement within the reformed churches separated from the Church of England and began their colonizing venture in America known as the Plymouth Colony (1620) under the leadership of William Bradford and William Brewster. These great achievements of the Puritan movement in England under King James shows how widespread the influence of Puritanism was at this time, and how they adapted to the King's authority in different ways. Some of them sought to work within the establishment, like William Perkins, Master of Emmanuel College; while others left the Church of England and ventured elsewhere, like William Ames who spent much of his career in Holland.

In 1620, a group of Puritan separatists, known today as the Pilgrims, made their famous sea voyage on the Mayflower across the Atlantic to settle Plymouth Colony. They were led by governor William Bradford and church elder William Brewster. The Pilgrims were originally a part of the Puritan separatist movement in England. They began to feel the pressures of religious persecution while still in the English village of Scrooby, near East Retford, Nottinghamshire. In 1607, Archbishop Tobias Matthew raided homes and imprisoned several members of the congregation. The congregation therefore left England in 1609 and emigrated to the Netherlands, settling first in Amsterdam and then in Leiden. In Leiden, the congregation gained the freedom to worship as they chose, but Dutch society was unfamiliar to them. And so they made preparations to settle a new colony in America. The first settlement of the Plymouth Colony was at New Plymouth, a location previously surveyed and named by Captain John Smith. The settlement served as the capital of the colony and developed as the modern town of Plymouth, Massachusetts. At its height, Plymouth Colony occupied most of the southeastern portion of the modern state of Massachusetts. It was one of the earliest successful colonies to be founded by the English in North America, along with Jamestown and other settlements in Virginia, and was the first sizable permanent English settlement in the New England region. The colony was able to establish a treaty with Chief Massasoit which helped to ensure its success; in this, they were aided by Squanto, a member of the Patuxet tribe. By 1691 Plymouth Colony and the Pilgrim colonists, eventually merged with the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony under John Winthrop (established in 1628), and other territories to form the Province of Massachusetts Bay.

By the late 1630s, Puritans were in alliance with the growing commercial world, with the parliamentary opposition to the royal prerogative, and with the Scottish Presbyterians with whom they had much in common. Consequently, they became a major political force in England and came to power as a result of the First English Civil War (1642–1646). Almost all Puritan clergy left the Church of England after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the 1662 Uniformity Act. Many continued to practice their faith in nonconformist denominations, especially in Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches. The nature of the movement in England changed radically, although it retained its character for a much longer period in New England.

Puritanism was never a formally defined religious division within Protestantism, and the term Puritan itself was rarely used after the turn of the 18th century. Some Puritan ideals, including the formal rejection of Roman Catholicism, were incorporated into the doctrines of the Church of England; others were absorbed into the many Protestant denominations that emerged in the late 17th and early 18th centuries in North America and Britain. The Congregational churches, widely considered to be a part of the Reformed tradition, are descended from the Puritans.

Moreover, Puritan beliefs are enshrined in the Savoy Declaration, the confession of faith held by the Congregationalist churches.

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The first Congregational church organized in America was First Parish Church in Plymouth, which was established in 1620 by Separatist Puritans known as Pilgrims.

Congregationalism

In the United States, the Congregational tradition traces its origins mainly to Puritan settlers of colonial New England. Congregational churches have had an important impact on the political, religious and cultural history of the United States. Their practices concerning church governance influenced the early development of democratic institutions in New England, and many of the nation's oldest educational institutions, such as Harvard and Yale University, were founded to train Congregational clergy. In the 21st century, the Congregational tradition is represented by the United Church of Christ, the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches, and the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference.

The origins of Congregationalism are found in 16th-century Puritanism, a movement that sought to complete the English Reformation begun with the separation of the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church during the reign of Henry VIII (1509–47). During the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603), the Church of England was considered a Reformed or Calvinist church, but it also preserved certain characteristics of medieval Catholicism, such as cathedrals, church choirs, a formal liturgy contained in the Book of Common Prayer, traditional clerical vestments and episcopal polity (government by bishops).

The Puritans were Calvinists who wanted to further reform the church by abolishing all remaining Catholic practices, such as clerical vestments, wedding rings, organ music in church, kneeling at Holy Communion, using the term priest for a minister, bowing at the name of Jesus, and making the sign of the cross in baptism and communion. Many Puritans believed the Church of England should follow the example of Reformed churches in other parts of Europe and adopt Presbyterian polity, in which an egalitarian network of local ministers cooperated through regional synods. Other Puritans experimented with congregational polity both within the Church of England and outside of it. Puritans who left the established church were known as Separatists.

Congregationalism may have first developed in the London Underground Church under Richard Fitz in the late 1560s and 1570s. The Congregational historian Albert Peel argued that it was but accepted that the evidence for a fully thought out congregational ecclesiology is not overwhelming.

Robert Browne (1550–1633) was the first person to set out explicit congregational principles and is considered the founder of Congregationalism. While studying for ordination, Browne became convinced that the Church of England was a false church. He moved to Norwich and together with Robert Harrison formed an illegal Separatist congregation. In 1581, Browne and his followers moved to Holland in order to worship freely. While in Holland, Browne wrote treatises that laid out the essential features of Congregationalism. Browne argued for a church only of genuine, regenerate believers and criticized the Anglicans for including all English people within their church. The congregation should choose its own leaders, and the ministers should be ordained by the congregation itself not by bishops or fellow ministers. Each congregation should be founded on a written church covenant, and the congregation as a whole should govern the church: "The meetings together… of every whole church, and of the elders therein, is above the apostle, above the prophet, the evangelist, the pastor, the teacher, and every particular elder" and "The voice of the whole people, guided by the elders and the forwardest, is said [in Scripture] to be the voice of God". While each church would be independent, separate churches would still come together to discuss matters of common concern.

The Congregational tradition was brought to America in the 1620s and 1630s by the Puritans—a Calvinistic group within the Church of England that desired to purify it of any remaining teachings and practices of the Roman Catholic Church. As part of their reforms, Puritans desired to replace the Church of England's episcopal polity (rule by bishops) with another form of church government. Some English Puritans favored presbyterian polity (rule by assemblies of presbyters), as was utilized by the Church of Scotland, but those who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony organized their churches according to congregational polity (rule by members of the local church).

The first Congregational church organized in America was First Parish Church in Plymouth, which was established in 1620 by Separatist Puritans known as Pilgrims. The first Congregational church organized in the Massachusetts Bay Colony was First Church in Salem, established in 1629. By 1640, 18 churches had been organized in Massachusetts. In addition, Puritans established the Connecticut Colony in 1636 and New Haven Colony in 1637. Eventually, there were 33 Congregational churches in New England.

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The Third Haven Meeting House, 1684, is generally considered the oldest-surviving Friends meeting house of the Religious Society of Friends, and it is a cornerstone of Quaker history in Talbot County, Maryland.

New Castle Quaker Meeting House, Est. 1684, New Castle, Delaware.

Quaker

Quakers, also called Friends, belong to a historically Christian denomination known formally as the Religious Society of Friends or Friends Church. Members of the various Quaker movements are all generally united by their belief in the ability of each human being to experientially access the light within, or "that of God in every one".

During and after the English Civil War (1642–1651) many dissenting Christian groups emerged, including the Seekers and others. A young man, George Fox, was dissatisfied with the teachings of the Church of England and nonconformists. He had a revelation that "there is one, even, Christ Jesus, who can speak to thy condition", and became convinced that it was possible to have a direct experience of Christ without the aid of ordained clergy. In 1652 he had a vision on Pendle Hill in Lancashire, England, in which he believed that "the Lord let me see in what places he had a great people to be gathered". Following this he travelled around England, the Netherlands, and Barbados preaching and teaching with the aim of converting new adherents to his faith. The central theme of his Gospel message was that Christ has come to teach his people himself. Fox considered himself to be restoring a true, "pure" Christian church.

The persecution of Quakers in North America began in July 1656 when English Quaker missionaries Mary Fisher and Ann Austin began preaching in Boston. They were considered heretics because of their insistence on individual obedience to the Inner light. They were imprisoned for five weeks and banished by the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Their books were burned, and most of their property confiscated. They were imprisoned in terrible conditions, then deported.

In 1660, English Quaker Mary Dyer was hanged near Boston Common for repeatedly defying a Puritan law banning Quakers from the colony. She was one of the four executed Quakers known as the Boston martyrs. In 1661, King Charles II forbade Massachusetts from executing anyone for professing Quakerism. In 1684, England revoked the Massachusetts charter, sent over a royal governor to enforce English laws in 1686 and, in 1689, passed a broad Toleration Act.

Some Friends immigrated to what is now the north-eastern region of the United States in the 1660s in search of economic opportunities and a more tolerant environment in which to build communities of "holy conversation". In 1665 Quakers established a meeting in Shrewsbury, New Jersey (now Monmouth County), and built a meeting house in 1672 that was visited by George Fox in the same year. They were able to establish thriving communities in the Delaware Valley, although they continued to experience persecution in some areas, such as New England. The three colonies that tolerated Quakers at this time were West Jersey, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania, where Quakers established themselves politically. In Rhode Island, 36 governors in the first 100 years were Quakers. West Jersey and Pennsylvania were established by affluent Quaker William Penn in 1676 and 1682 respectively, with Pennsylvania as an American commonwealth run under Quaker principles. William Penn signed a peace treaty with Tammany, leader of the Delaware tribe, and other treaties followed between Quakers and Native Americans. This peace endured almost a century, until the Penn's Creek Massacre of 1755. Early colonial Quakers also established communities and meeting houses in North Carolina and Maryland, after fleeing persecution by the Anglican Church in Virginia.

Plumstead Meeting 1752

The first meetinghouse at Plumstead was a log building erected in 1750 when 15 acres of land was donated to Buckingham Friends Meeting. The original log building was replaced by a stone meetinghouse in 1752. A walled burial ground was established.

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The First Baptist Church in America is the First Baptist Church of Providence, Rhode Island, also known as the First Baptist Meetinghouse. It is the oldest Baptist church congregation in the United States, founded in 1639 by Roger Williams in Providence, Rhode Island.

Baptist

Historians trace the earliest Baptist church back to 1609 in Amsterdam, with John Smyth as its pastor. Three years earlier, while a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, he had broken his ties with the Church of England. Reared in the Church of England, he became "Puritan, English Separatist, and then a Baptist Separatist," and ended his days working with the Mennonites. He began meeting in England with 60–70 English Separatists, in the face of "great danger." The persecution of religious nonconformists in England led Smyth to go into exile in Amsterdam with fellow Separatists from the congregation he had gathered in Lincolnshire, separate from the established church (Anglican). Smyth and his lay supporter, Thomas Helwys, together with those they led, broke with the other English exiles because Smyth and Helwys were convinced they should be baptized as believers.

In 1609 Smyth first baptized himself and then baptized the others.

Both Roger Williams and John Clarke, his compatriot and coworker for religious freedom, are variously credited as founding the earliest Baptist church in North America.

In 1639, Williams established a Baptist church in Providence, Rhode Island, and Clarke began a Baptist church in Newport, Rhode Island. According to a Baptist historian who has researched the matter extensively, "There is much debate over the centuries as to whether the Providence or Newport church deserved the place of 'first' Baptist congregation in America. Exact records for both congregations are lacking."

Helped by the First Great Awakening and numerous itinerant self-proclaimed missionaries, by the 1760s Baptists were drawing Virginians, especially poor white farmers, into a new, much more democratic religion. Slaves were welcome at the services and many became Baptists at this time.

Sabbatarian Church (Seventh Day Baptist) in Newport, Rhode Island, 1671

Friendship Baptist Church in Fruitville, Sarasota County, Florida, 1875

Cemeteries of Sarasota County Florida - A Record of Births, Deaths, and Burials

Friendship Baptist Cemetery

https://sites.rootsweb.com/~flgss/CemeteryFiles/FriendshipBaptistCemetery.pdf

Markers: Sarasota History

http://www.sarasotahistoryalive.com/history/markers/friendship-baptist-church/

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St. George's United Methodist Church, located at the corner of 4th and New Streets, in the Old City neighborhood of Philadelphia, is the oldest Methodist church in continuous use in the United States, beginning in 1769.

Methodist

Methodism, also called the Methodist movement, is a group of historically related denominations of Protestant Christianity which derive their doctrine of practice and belief from the life and teachings of John Wesley. George Whitefield and John's brother Charles Wesley were also significant early leaders in the movement. It originated as a revival movement within the 18th-century Church of England and became a separate denomination after Wesley's death. The movement spread throughout the British Empire, the United States, and beyond because of vigorous missionary work, today claiming approximately 80 million adherents worldwide.

Wesleyan theology, which is upheld by the Methodist Churches, focuses on sanctification and the effect of faith on the character of a Christian. Distinguishing doctrines include the new birth, assurance, imparted righteousness, the possibility of entire sanctification, and the works of piety. Scripture is considered as a primary authority, but Methodists also look to Christian tradition, including the historic creeds. Most Methodists teach that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died for all of humanity and that salvation is available for all. Against the Calvinist position that God has pre-ordained the salvation of a select group of people, many Methodists teach a form of Arminianism. However, Whitefield and several other early leaders of the movement were considered Calvinistic Methodists and held to the Calvinist position.

Origins

The Methodist revival began in England with a group of men, including John Wesley (1703–1791) and his younger brother Charles (1707–1788), as a movement within the Church of England in the 18th century.

Methodism arose in the 18th century as a movement within the Anglican church. Methodist missionaries were active in the late colonial period. From 1776 to 1815, Methodist Bishop Francis Asbury made 42 trips into the western parts of Virginia to visit Methodist congregations.

In 1735, at the invitation of the founder of the Georgia Colony, General James Oglethorpe, both John and Charles Wesley set out for America to be ministers to the colonists and missionaries to the Native Americans. Unsuccessful in their work, the brothers returned to England conscious of their lack of genuine Christian faith. They looked for help to Peter Boehler and other members of the Moravian Church.

At a Moravian service in Aldersgate on 24 May 1738, John experienced what has come to be called his evangelical conversion, when he felt his "heart strangely warmed". He records in his journal: "I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death." Charles had reported a similar experience a few days previously. Considered a pivotal moment, Daniel L. Burnett writes: "The significance of [John] Wesley's Aldersgate Experience is monumental … Without it the names of Wesley and Methodism would likely be nothing more than obscure footnotes in the pages of church history."

The Wesley brothers immediately began to preach salvation by faith to individuals and groups, in houses, in religious societies, and in the few churches which had not closed their doors to evangelical preachers. John Wesley came under the influence of the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609). Arminius had rejected the Calvinist teaching that God had pre-ordained an elect number of people to eternal bliss while others perished eternally. Conversely, George Whitefield (1714–1770), Howell Harris (1714–1773), and Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon (1707–1791) were notable for being Calvinistic Methodists.

George Whitefield

George Whitefield, returning from his own mission in Georgia, joined the Wesley brothers in what was rapidly to become a national crusade. Whitefield, who had been a fellow student of the Wesleys at Oxford, became well known for his unorthodox, itinerant ministry, in which he was dedicated to open-air preaching—reaching crowds of thousands. A key step in the development of John Wesley's ministry was, like Whitefield, to preach in fields, collieries and churchyards to those who did not regularly attend parish church services. Accordingly, many Methodist converts were those disconnected from the Church of England; Wesley remained a cleric of the Established Church and insisted that Methodists attend their local parish church as well as Methodist meetings.

Fairfield Presbyterian Church in Fairton, New Jersey, was founded in 1680 when a log church was built on the banks of the Cohansey Creek, and it is the oldest existing congregation currently in the US.

First Presbyterian Church, the oldest Presbyterian Church in America, Southampton NY, founded in 1640.

Presbyterian

The origins of the Presbyterian Church is the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. The writings of French theologian and lawyer John Calvin (1509–64) solidified much of the Reformed thinking that came before him in the form of the sermons and writings of Huldrych Zwingli. John Knox, a former Roman Catholic priest from Scotland who studied with Calvin in Geneva, Switzerland, took Calvin's teachings back to Scotland and led the Scottish Reformation of 1560. As a result, the Church of Scotland embraced Reformed theology and presbyterian polity. The Ulster Scots brought their Presbyterian faith with them to Ireland, where they laid the foundation of what would become the Presbyterian Church of Ireland.

By the second half of the 17th century, Presbyterians were immigrating to British North America. Scottish and Scotch-Irish immigrants contributed to a strong Presbyterian presence in the Middle Colonies, particularly Philadelphia. Before 1706, however, Presbyterian congregations were not yet organized into presbyteries or synods.

In 1706, seven ministers led by Francis Makemie established the first presbytery in North America, the Presbytery of Philadelphia. The presbytery was primarily created to promote fellowship and discipline among its members and only gradually developed into a governing body. Initially, member congregations were located in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. Further growth led to the creation of the Synod of Philadelphia (known as the "General Synod") in 1717. The synod's membership consisted of all ministers and one lay elder from every congregation.

The Presbyterians were evangelical dissenters, mostly Scot-Irish Americans who expanded in Virginia between 1740 and 1758, immediately before the Baptists. The Church of Scotland had first adopted Presbyterian ideas in the 1560s, which brought it into continuing conflict with the Church of England following the Union of Crowns.

Covenanters 1638-1684

Christ's First Presbyterian Church in Hempstead, NY, 1643

Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Southern Indiana, 1814

- founded by James D. Knowles (my 5x Great-Grandfather), Samuel Montgomery, and the Rev. William Barnett, in 1814

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Augustus Lutheran Church is a historic church and Lutheran congregation at 717 West Main Street in Trappe, Pennsylvania. Consecrated in 1745, it is the oldest Lutheran church building in the United States. It continues to be used by the founding congregation for services during the summer.

Palatines - German Lutherans

Evangelical Church in Germany

Evangelical Church of the Palatinate

The Evangelical Church in Germany (German: Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, abbreviated EKD) is a federation of twenty Lutheran, Reformed (Calvinist) and United (e.g. Prussian Union) Protestant regional churches and denominations in Germany, which collectively encompasses the vast majority of Protestants in that country. In 2019, the EKD had a membership of 20,713,000 members, or 24.9% of the German population. It constitutes one of the largest national Protestant bodies in the world. Church offices managing the federation are located in Hannover-Herrenhausen, Lower Saxony. Many of its members consider themselves Lutherans.

The German Palatines were early 18th-century emigrants from the Middle Rhine region of the Holy Roman Empire, including a minority from the Palatinate, by which the entire group was known. They immigrated to England as refugees and were both Protestant and Catholic farmers. Towards the end of the 17th century and into the 18th, the wealthy region was repeatedly invaded by French troops during the religious wars. They imposed continuous military requisitions, causing widespread devastation and famine. The winter of 1708 was notably cold, resulting in further hardships. The term "Poor Palatines" referred to some 13,000 Germans who emigrated to England between May and November 1709, seeking refuge. Their arrival in England, and the inability of the British Government to integrate them, caused a highly politicized debate over the merits of immigration. The English tried to settle them in England, Ireland and the North American colonies to strengthen their position abroad.

Since 1816, the Palatine Reformed and Lutheran congregations were subordinate to the Protestant church administration of the Kingdom of Bavaria, of which the then Governorate of the Palatinate formed a part. Following the parishioners' plebiscite in 1817, all Palatine Lutheran and Reformed congregations merged into confessionally united Protestant congregations. In 1848, the Palatine Protestant congregations formed a regional church, then called Vereinigte protestantisch-evangelisch-christliche Kirche der Pfalz (Pfälzische Landeskirche) (i.e. United Protestant Evangelical Christian Church of the Palatinate [Palatine State Church]), independent of that regional church in the rest of Bavaria. In 1922, the United Church of the Palatinate counted 506,000 parishioners.

The Palatine settlements did not prove to be viable in the long term, except for those settled in County Limerick and County Wexford in Ireland and in the colony of New York in British North America. In Ireland, fewer than 200 families remained after the original settlement in 1709. But they maintained their distinctive culture until well into the nineteenth century, and Palatine surnames are now diffused across the country. The largest concentration of descendants of Palatine immigrants lives around Rathkeale, Co Limerick.

The English transported nearly 3,000 German Palatines in ten ships to New York in 1710. Many of them were first assigned to work camps along the Hudson River to work off the cost of their passage. Close to 850 families settled in the Hudson River Valley, primarily in what are now Germantown and Saugerties, New York. They produced stores for the Navy in work camps on each side of the Hudson. In 1723, 100 heads of families from the work camps were the first Europeans to acquire land west of Little Falls, New York, in present-day Herkimer County on both the north and south sides along the Mohawk River. This settlement was halfway through the valley, on the frontier far beyond Schenectady and Albany. Later additional Palatine Germans settled along the Mohawk River for several miles, founding towns such as Palatine and Palatine Bridge, and in the Schoharie Valley.

In the early 18th century nearly 3,000 Palatine German refugees came to New York. Most worked first in English camps along the Hudson River to pay off their passage (paid by Queen Anne's government) before they were allowed land in the Schoharie and Mohawk Valleys. There they created numerous German-speaking Lutheran and Reformed churches, such as those at Fort Herkimer and German Flatts. Thousands more immigrated to Pennsylvania in the 18th century. They used German as the language in their churches and schools for nearly 100 years, and recruited some of their ministers from Germany. By the early 20th century, most of their churches had joined the Reformed Church in America (RCA).

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Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow, Sleepy Hollow, New York, 1697, is the oldest church building in New York state.

In 1628 Jonas Michaelius organized the first Dutch Reformed congregation in New Amsterdam, now New York City, called the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church, now the Marble Collegiate Church.

Dutch Reformed Church

Reformed Church in The Netherlands

The first Synod of 23 Dutch Reformed leaders was held in October 1571 in the German city of Emden. The Synod of Emden is generally considered to be the founding of the Dutch Reformed Church, the oldest of the Reformed churches in the Netherlands. The Synod both affirmed the actions of the earlier Synod of Wesel, as well as established presbyterian church government for the Dutch Reformed Church.

Colonial History

The early settlers in the Dutch colony of New Netherland first held informal meetings for worship. In 1628 Jonas Michaelius organized the first Dutch Reformed congregation in New Amsterdam, now New York City, called the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church, now the Marble Collegiate Church. During Dutch rule, the Reformed Church in America (RCA) was the established church of the colony and was under the authority of the classis of Amsterdam.

Even after the English captured the colony in 1664, all Dutch Reformed ministers were still trained in the Netherlands. Services in the RCA remained in Dutch until 1764. (Dutch language use faded thereafter until the new wave of Dutch immigration in the mid-19th century. This revived use of the language among Dutch descendants and in some churches.)

In 1747 the church in the Netherlands had given permission to form an assembly in North America; in 1754, the assembly declared itself independent of the classis of Amsterdam. This American classis secured a charter in 1766 for Queens College (now Rutgers University) in New Jersey. In 1784 John Henry Livingston was appointed as professor of theology, marking the beginning of the New Brunswick Theological Seminary.

The First Reformed Church in Albany started in 1642 to serve the patroonship of Rensselaerswyck. The current church was built in 1798.

The Dutch-speaking community, including farmers and traders, prospered in the former New Netherland, dominating New York City, the Hudson Valley, and parts of New Jersey while maintaining a significant presence in southeastern Pennsylvania, southwestern Connecticut, and Long Island.

During the American Revolution, a bitter internal struggle broke out in the Dutch Reformed church, with lines of division following ecclesiastical battles that had gone on for twenty years between the "coetus" and "conferentie" factions. One source indicates that defections may have occurred as early as 1737.

"Desolation pervaded many of the churches, whereas prior to 1737 good order was maintained in the churches, and peace and a good degree of prosperity were enjoyed. ...But in 1754, the Coetus of the previous year, having recommended the changing of the Coetus into a Classis with full powers, the opposition became violent, and the opponents were known as the Conferentie."

A spirit of amnesty made possible the church's survival after the war. The divisiveness was also healed when the church sent members on an extensive foreign missions program in the early 19th century.

In 1792 the classis adopted a formal constitution; and in 1794 the denomination held its first general synod. Following the American Civil War, in 1867 it formally adopted the name "Reformed Church in America". In the nineteenth century in New York and New Jersey, ethnic Dutch descendants struggled to preserve their European standards and traditions while developing a taste for revivalism and an American identity.

Amwell Church of the Brethren 1733

There is a small church in Delaware Township with a very long history. It is known as the Amwell Church of the Brethren, sometimes called the Dunkard Church for its practice of adult baptism. It seems to be a sort of outlier, quite different from the major religious groups who first appeared in Hunterdon County. Those were Quaker, Baptist, Presbyterian, Anglican (Episcopalian), Lutheran, Methodist, German Calvinist, and Dutch Reformed. They all had congregations throughout the county and hundreds of worshippers. But the Brethren church didn’t even have a church building until 1811, and never grew to any great size, despite two spin-off churches. And yet, it has endured for 283 years.

https://goodspeedhistories.com/the-amwell-church-of-the-brethren/

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Excellent article on Puritanism...

Puritan New England: Plymouth

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/colonial-america/colonial-north-america/a/puritan-new-england-plymouth

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