laudable Practice

Sunday coming is Yale Apostasy Day. On 13th September 1722, the day after commencement at Yale, seven New England Congregationalist ministers publicly declared their intention to seek episcopal orders in the Church of England. It was a day which shook the 'New England Way' and brought the Church of England to the land of the Pilgrim Fathers. Over the years of writing on Yale Apostasy Day on this blog, my interpretation of the event has changed. I initially regarded it as the arrival of 'Laudianism' in New England. Leaving aside the fact that I now believe the term 'Laudian' to be meaningless, it was opponents - not New England Church of England ministers and their congregations - who viewed the Yale Apostasy and its consequences in such a way. In more recent times, I have moved to emphasising what Church of England ministers and laity in colonial New England shared with their Congregationalist neighbours.  This year's Yale Apostasy Day post returns to anothe...

Tomorrow is Yale Apostasy Day. On 13th September 1722, the day after commencement at Yale, seven New England Congregationalist ministers publicly declared their intention to seek episcopal orders in the Church of England. Four of the seven were ordained deacon and presbyter in the Church of England the following year, with three returning to minister in America. For New England's Congregationalist establishment, it was indeed 'apostasy', a rejection of the 'New England Way' and the introduction of the Church of England to the land of the Pilgrim Fathers. Central to the 'Yale Apostasy' was Samuel Johnson. Having previously taught at Yale, he became minister of a nearby Congregationalist church in 1720. Influencing his thinking was a significant figure in the late 17th/early 18th century Church of Ireland, William King, Bishop of Derry 1691-1703 and Archbishop of Dunlin 1703-29. In his Life of Samuel Johnson , Thomas Bradbury Chandler - a protege of Johnson an...

It is Yale Apostasy Day . On 13th September 1722, the day after commencement at Yale, seven New England Congregationalist ministers publicly declared their intention to seek episcopal orders in the Church of England. Four of the seven were ordained deacon and priest in the Church of England the following year, with three returning to minister in America. For New England's Congregationalists it was a shocking event, "the dark day", "the Great Apostasy", not least because, as a result of the the Yale Apostasy, Anglicanism became a feature of New England's religious landscape, offering a serious alternative to the New England Way. On past commemorations of Yale Apostasy Day, laudable Practice has considered how the the ministry and writings of the Yale Apostates did indeed offer such an alternative. This year, however, I consider a somewhat different theme: did Church of England congregations take root in New England after the Yale Apostasy because of  similar...

To celebrate Yale Apostasy Day, the day in 1722 when seven sons of Puritan New England - all Congregationalist ministers - declared that they were convinced on the need for episcopal ordination, we hear from one of the Yale Converts , James Wetmore . Wetmore received episcopal orders, alongside his fellow converts Timothy Cutler and Samuel Johnson, in England in 1723, before returning to the colonies, appointed by the SPG to be rector of Rye Church, New York.  In 1747, he responded to an attack on episcopal orders by Connecticut Congregationalist minister Noah Hobart. Hobart declared that because the Church of England was an episcopal church, claiming only for its bishops succession to the apostles, its presbyters lacked apostolic commission: "They to whom it does not belong, are no Ministers of Christ, nor do they derive any Authority from him". Apostolic ministry in New England, therefore, was to be found in the presbyters of the Congregationalist establishment, claiming an...

13th September was  Yale Apostasy Day .  On that day in 1722 - the day after commencement at Yale - that seven Congregationalist ministers shocked Puritan New England by publicly declaring they doubted the validity of their presbyterian ordination and would seek episcopal orders in the Church of England. Three of the seven - Timothy Cutler, who had been rector of Yale,  Samuel Johnson, and James Wetmore - received episcopal orders in England and returned to minister in the American colonies, Cutler and Johnson in New England, Wetmore in New York.   While Puritan New England may have been considered unlikely ground in which the Church of Laud might take root, the decades following the Yale Apostasy did see this happen.  (And it was a distinctly Laudian, High Church vision which animated the 'Yale Apostates' and their successors.) As Jeremy Gregory has said, "Up until the early 1760s [when the political context became fraught], the progress of the Churc...

To celebrate the anniversary of the Yale Apostasy , words from one of those sons of Puritan New England who embraced Anglicanism, Samuel Johnson (pictured, from a 1761 portrait).  We see in Johnson confirmation of the thoroughly Laudian nature of this event, an articulation of the identity of the Church of England in deep continuity with Laudian thought.  On episcopacy, the superiority of the Formularies, and the liturgy, Johnson points to those involved in the Yale Apostasy - and who then received orders in the Church of England, before returning to minister in New England - as embracing the Laudian vision in the land of the Pilgrim Fathers. Episcopacy as the right and apostolic ordering of the Church lay at the heart of the Yale Apostasy.  Some weeks after the event, Johnson "set down the motives" for his participation in the original declaration: Sundry texts of Scripture there are which seem to me plainly to intimate that Episcopacy is of apostolical appointment, whi...