“A regular Confederation”

The eighteenth century was an era of religious institution-building, and no figure was more important for the birth of Baptist denominationalism in the South than Oliver Hart. In 1751 Hart drew together the Particular Baptist churches of South Carolina to form the Charleston Association, the second Baptist association in America. Successfully transplanting ideas and models he had witnessed in the Philadelphia Association, Hart led the South’s Baptists to form a minister’s education fund, send missionaries to the western frontier, and formalize the doctrines and church practices that would define the Baptist South for the next 150 years.

“The power of religion greatly displayed”

Oliver Hart experienced evangelical conversion at the peak of a dynamic series of revivals known as the Great Awakening. His childhood pastor, Jenkin Jones, publicly supported the evangelist George Whitefield and did all that he could to promote revivalism in Hart’s Particular Baptist congregation. Along with Hart’s personal story, this chapter recounts the Baptist reception of the Great Awakening throughout colonial America, including in New England and in the South. It corrects the common misperception that most Particular Baptists stood aloof from the Great Awakening, and introduces the emergence of the Separate Baptist movement.

Why Andrew Fuller Matters

Andrew Fuller was the most influential Baptist theologian of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is often remembered for his friendship and support of William Carey, but he also needs to be remembered for his theology, known in his own day as ‘Fullerism’. It was formed by his rebuttal of the Hyper-Calvinism that dogged far too many Particular Baptist communities and is encapsulated in his treatise The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation. This controversy, which at its heart was about divine sovereignty and human responsibility, led to Fuller’s instructive involvement in other key conflicts of his day, namely, the debates with Socinianism, Deism, and Sandemanianism. Fuller’s importance as a pastor-theologian, though, is not limited to these controversies, but is also evident in a quintessential evangelical piety that is focused on the cross.

‘Not Keeping One’s Place in the Church’

This chapter examines the issue of absenteeism in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century gathered churches through their manuscript church records. Absenteeism was the offence most frequently cited in disciplinary meetings, yet some members who were censured for absence were active supporters of their churches in other ways. This chapter focuses on those members who were never under a sentence of excommunication but who had ceased to be involved in church life and to take communion. It examines the question of Dissenting identity through lay participation, the reasons why men and women ceased to come to church, and what prompted them to seek reconciliation, sometimes decades after their first admission. Evidence is taken from manuscript church records belonging to Congregational, Particular Baptist, and General Baptist churches, spanning the period c.1640 to c.1714.