The Middle Church and looking to Europe's east

In a recent essay, Alan Ford - a leading historian of the Church of Ireland - considered the Jacobean and Caroline Irish Church in the context of what he termed "the wider perspective of Atlantic Protestantism". Alongside Ford's essay, I was also reading Plantation Churches: Places of worship in early Seventeenth-century Ulster (2025). In its concluding chapter, the book refers to The Middle Church, at the heart of Jeremy Taylor country. While built at Taylor's direction and consecrated in 1668, it is noted that a worshipper "would have seen little difference" between The Middle Church and Jacobean churches in Ireland. Around the same time, I also stumbled across online pictures of the Reformed church in Vámosatya, on the eastern edge of Hungary's Northern Great Plain.

Ford's essay and the pictures of Vámosatya church provoked me to consider looking in the other direction - not across the Atlantic, but across Europe, to the continent's eastern lands. This led me to reflect on what a worshipper in the Reformed Churches of Hungary and Transylvania, visiting the Kingdom of Ireland in the 1680s (perhaps fleeing the violent conflict in their homeland at that time) would have made of The Middle Church.

In terms of the building itself, such a worshipper would surely have almost immediately recognised The Middle Church as Reformed. The pulpit placed centrally on the north wall; the plain interior (indeed, much more plain than some Hungarian Reformed churches); the absence of a chancel: here were distinctive Reformed characteristics, known to Reformed worshippers in Hungary and Transylvania. In obedience to the Canons, The Middle Church would have had Commandment Boards, not unlike the painted inscriptions of the Commandments found in some Hungarian and Transylvanian churches. 

That the Holy Table was placed against the east wall and railed would have been recognised as different but, crucially, the simple, plain wooden Table would have been strikingly familiar. As for the Royal Coat of Arms displayed in The Middle Church, this would have been a reminder that, as in the Reformed Churches of Hungary and Transylvania, the civil magistrate had a significant role in the governing of the ecclesiastical polity.

As Friday's post explored through John Durel's defence of the 1662 Settlement, worshippers in the Hungarian and Transylvanian Reformed Churches were well-used to liturgical forms. Our imaginary worshipper from the Hungarian or Transylvanian Reformed tradition would have found nothing unusual in vernacular liturgical worship. Each Lord's Day, he or she would have seen the minister, in a black gown, ascend the pulpit to preach. Jeremy Taylor's Rules and Advices to his clergy had provided a conventionally Reformed understanding of pulpit ministry: 

Let every Minister be diligent in preaching the Word of God ... Ever remembering, that to minister Gods Word unto the People is the one half of his great Office and Employment. Let every Minister be careful that what he delivers be indeed the Word of God: that his Sermon be answerable to the Text; for this is God's Word.

Over the course of the year, our Hungarian or Transylvanian worshipper would have gathered in The Middle Church for the celebration of Christmas, Easter, and Whitsunday - the great Christian festivals also observed by the Reformed Churches of Hungary and Transylvania, affirmed by the Second Helvetic Confession, but oddly absent from the worship of the local Presbyterian churches.

On those great festivals, and on some other Sundays of the year, the Holy Communion would have been administered. What would our Hungarian or Transylvanian worshipper have thought of the minister in surplice and the communicants kneeling to receive? If this worshipper had distasteful experience of those in Hungary and Transylvania whom Diarmaid MacCulloch describes as "young enthusiasts" - the Puritan-influenced who unsettled the good order of the Hungarian and Transylvanian Reformed Churches and who promoted an "intensely personal and experiential piety [which] devalued the sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist in Christian life" - he or she may have regarded the surplice and kneeling to receive as urged by, for example, Durel: merely as part of the good order of the Churches of the Kingdoms of Ireland and England, expressions of the legitimate diversity in the rites of the Reformed Churches. And, as the Second Helvetic Confession declared, "Unity consists not in outward rites and ceremonies, but rather in the truth and unity of the catholic faith".

Assuming our worshipper is a learned lay person, they would also note the distinct absence of elevation in the administration of the Sacrament, clearly distinguishing the Lord's Supper in The Middle Church from the Lutheran form they may have encountered in parts of Hungary. Likewise, if before the Sacrament was administered in The Middle Church, our worshipper had examined the Book of Common Prayer, he or she would have discovered a reassuringly Reformed emphasis on Christ being received "in the Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner" (Article XXVIII); "we spiritually eat the flesh of Christ, and drink his blood" (third exhortation); "the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son" (post-communion Prayer of Thanksgiving). 

Perhaps when discussing with the minister the teaching of the Churches of Ireland and England on the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, the minister reached to his shelves and opened his copy of Bishop Taylor's The real presence and spirituall of Christ in the blessed sacrament proved against the doctrine of transubstantiation, and quoted some passages:

we affirm that Christ is really taken by faith, by the Spirit, to all real effects of his passion; they say, he is taken by the mouth, and that the spiritual and the virtual taking him in virtue or effect is not sufficient, though done also in the Sacrament ... the benefit reaching to the body by the holy Eucharist, comes to it by the soul, therefore by the action of the soul, not the action of the body; therefore by faith, not by the mouth.

In other words, our worshipper would have been left in no doubt that, contrary to the Lutherans, the Churches of Ireland and England explicitly affirmed we partake of the Lord in the Supper, not by the mouth, but by a spiritual feeding.

When returning home to Hungary or Transylvania, our worshipper would have memories of Reformed worship in The Middle Church, in the far West of Europe. Settling into his or her routines in a Hungarian or Transylvanian church, they would, I think, have had little doubt that the worship, ministry, congregation, and building of The Middle Church belonged to this large European family of Reformed Churches, having significant similarities with the churches, ministry, liturgy, and sacraments known to the worshipper in the far East of Europe. 

Now, of course, there is no record of any Hungarian visitors worshipping in the Middle Church in the later 17th century. This post has been something of an indulgence on my part, an opportunity to reflect upon both The Middle Church and Taylor, and also my interest in the Reformed Churches of Hungary and Transylvania. As an imaginative exercise, however, I do not think that it is entirely fanciful. As evidence, I point to one particular gravestone in the churchyard of The Middle Church. 

It commemorates the Reverend Thomas Higginson, who died in 1819. He was formerly a curate of Ballinderry parish and - the relevant point - last government chaplain "of the French Huguenots at Lisburn". From 1698 until 1812, nearby Lisburn had a French church, established by Huguenots who settled in the town. It - like the majority of Huguenot churches in Ireland - was a conforming congregation, using the French language Book of Common Prayer and its ministers episcopally ordained. Many of the clergy serving the French church throughout the 18th century went on to hold livings in the Church of Ireland. 

In the French Huguenots who settled in Lisburn and elsewhere in Ireland, therefore, we see how the continental Reformed could recognise in the Church of Ireland a Reformed Church, to whose government and worship they could conform. All of which brings us back to our imaginary late 17th century visitor from the Reformed Churches of Hungary or Transylvania, finding in The Middle Church, in the far West of Europe, a Reformed congregation, its building, worship, and doctrine evincing Reformed characteristics, as also found in Europe's eastern lands.

(Pictures 1 and 2 are of The Middle Church, in the heart of Jeremy Taylor country. Pictures 3 and 4 are of the Reformed Church in Vámosatya, Hungary, close to the border with Ukraine. Picture 5 is of a French language edition of the BCP published in Dublin 1704, for use by conforming Huguenot congregations.)