Samuel Pearce

Samuel Pearce (1766-1799) was converted as a teenager in the Baptist church at Plymouth. He soon committed himself to the ministry. He began his studies at Bristol Academy in 1786, and in 1790 became pastor of the Baptist congregation at Cannon Street in Birmingham. He immediately became involved with the political reform movement, publishing a radical pamphlet titled The Oppressive, Unjust, and Prophane Nature, and Tendency of the Corporation and Test Acts, exposed, in a sermon preached before the Congregation of Protestant Dissenters, meeting in Cannon-Street, Birmingham, February 21, 1790. He was an ardent evangelical Calvinist, devoting himself to itinerant preaching and the establishing of Sunday schools around Birmingham. He was one of the founders of the BMS, assisting Andrew Fuller in editing the Periodical Accounts and in fundraising. He studied Bengali in the hope of joining Carey in India, but the BMS committee decided that he should remain in England. Though his health declined after 1796, he still remained active in promoting Baptist causes throughout England, Ireland, and Asia, as letters 52 and 57 attest. See Arthur Mursell, Cannon Street Baptist Church, Birmingham. Its History from 1737 to 1880 (London: n.p., 1880); Tom Wells, “Samuel Pearce (1766-1799),” ed. Haykin, in The British Particular Baptists, 2:183-199.