John Cennick

John Cennick (1718-55) was a prolific Moravian minister, whose Sacred Hymns for the Children of God (1741) and Sacred Hymns for the Use of Religious Societies, 2 vols (Bristol: Felix Farley, 1743) were popular among many nonconformist groups, not just the Moravians. Converted in 1737, he left the Church of England after contact with the Wesleys and George Whitfield. He sided with Whitefield in the controversy with Wesley over predestination and free will, and was excluded from the Methodists. Cennick put up a chapel in Kingswood, near Bristol, in 1741, and preached along the Welsh border as a Calvinist Methodist. He met Zinzendorf, leader of the Moravians, in 1743, and in 1745 joined their sect, thereafter being ostracized by many of the Calvinistic Methodists and Particular Baptists. He preached in Ireland in 1747 and continued to do so for many years, forming over 200 societies there, as well as in Wales. His temperament was Moravian, but his theology was always closer to Whitefield and the Calvinists and Independents. He published more than 50 works, nearly all of them printed and sold by John and Mary Lewis and their daughter and son-in-law, Martha and Henry Trapp, in London, printers as well to Whitefield, Toplady, and many other Calvinist dissenters and evangelicals.