John Stevens

John Stevens (1776-1847) was originally from Northamptonshire. He came to St. Neots in 1799 after preaching at Oundle for two years. On 1 October 1800 a church was formed with 13 members. He resigned in 1805 and removed to the Baptist church in Boston, Lincolnshire (see letter 80). In 1811 he moved to London to pastor a Strict Baptist congregation meeting in Grafton Street. Stevens moved his congregation to York Street, Westminster, in 1813, and in 1824 to a new building in Meard’s Court off Wardour Street, following a split in his congregation at York Street. He subscribed to the BMS in 1804-1805. As John Briggs notes (from private correspondence with this writer), Stevens’s career, in which he moved from his origins among the Particular Baptists to a position adhering to the principles of the Strict Baptists, is a good illustration of how the Strict Baptist position came to be defined within the denomination during the first half of the nineteenth century. See Biblical Magazine 3 (1811), 460;  BMS Periodical Accounts, vol. 3, p. 137; Manual of the Baptist Denomination for the Year 1848 (London: Houlston and Stoneman, 1848), 45; W. T. Whitley, The Baptists of London 1612–1928 (London: Kingsgate Press, 1928), 134.