In New England, 1801

The first “Christian Church” in New England was about seven years later than the first in the South, and its origin was entirely unrelated to the earlier one. The New England movement got its impulse from the independent reactions of two young men against the type of religion they found in the Baptist churches of which they were members and in which they began to preach. These churches were Calvinistic in their emphasis on original sin, the limitation of the benefits of Christ’s atonement to the “elect,” the wrath of God toward sinners, the threat of hell, and the inability of man to do anything for his own salvation.

Elias Smith, born in 1769 at Lyme, Connecticut, spent his boyhood under very crude frontier conditions in a new settlement in Vermont, and had a violent 45 experience of conversion when a log fell on him in the woods. He joined the Baptist church, and began to preach when he was about twenty-one. In spite of his almost complete lack of education, the Baptist ministers of Boston ordained him two years later. For almost a decade he was a somewhat irregular Baptist preacher, improving his education by diligent private study, becoming more and more dissatisfied with orthodox Calvinism, seeking a way out of his confusion by independent study of the New Testament, and moving toward the conviction that the churches should abandon their theological and ecclesiastical systems and restore the simple faith and practice of the primitive church.

Abner Jones, born in 1772 at Royalton, Massachusetts, had a Vermont boyhood not unlike Smith’s in its combination of frontier hardship, lack of schools, and torturing religious experience. Having achieved conversion, he joined the Baptist church, taught school for a time, then studied and practiced medicine by the short-cut “Thompsonian” system; but he also preached as opportunity offered. Still in his early twenties, he “quit the fellowship of the Calvinist Baptists,” as his biographer testifies, after hearing Elias Smith preach, though Smith was then still a Baptist. As the result of his own thinking, stirred by Smith’s influence, Jones organized an independent church at Lyndon, Vermont, in the Autumn of 1801, to which he would give no name but “Christian.” This, says the historian of the movement, was “the first Christian church in New England.” During the next year Jones secured ordination by three Free Will Baptist preachers—not as a Baptist but “only as a Christian”—and organized “Christian” churches at Hanover and Piermont, New Hampshire. Up to this time, Smith 46 had been the leader in thought but had hesitated to break his Baptist ties. Jones now persuaded him to abandon the Baptist name and joined him in organizing a “Christian” church at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In 1804 Jones moved to Boston and formed a church there.

These two men, Smith and Jones, lived and worked for nearly forty years after that. Jones established churches at Salem, Massachusetts, where he lived for several years, and at many other towns in New England, never striking root very deeply in any place but winning many followers to the movement and a number of preachers to its advocacy. Smith’s most important contribution was the founding of a religious paper, the Herald of Gospel Liberty, the first issue of which was published on September 1, 1808, at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. With some slight intermissions and under a variety of names, finally returning to the original one, this journal was published for 122 years and then merged with the Congregationalist.

Within twenty years after the founding of that first “Christian” church at Lyndon, Vermont, there were dozens of such churches in New England and others in adjacent parts of Canada and in New York and Pennsylvania, all deriving from this original impulse. These were, on principle, independent churches. No organization directed or controlled them and they had no cooperative activities. However, there was a sense of fellowship among them and they soon began to hold informal conferences. There is record of a meeting of “the elders of the Christian Churches in the New England states, assembled at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, June 23, 1809,” which authorized a fraternal reply to a letter from representatives of the Christian Churches in Virginia and North Carolina. The “general 47 conference” held at Windham, Connecticut, in 1816, and the series of “United States conferences” beginning in 1820 were really, in spite of their comprehensive names, only conferences of the churches in the northeastern states. One of these, in 1827, voted that it was not proper for ministers to use the title “Reverend” and passed a resolution condemning the use of instrumental music in public worship. About thirty regional conferences, by states or parts of states, had been organized within this area before 1832.