The year 2007 marks the 198th year of the organized work of the First Baptist Church of Plymouth, but the seeds of Baptist principle and policy were sown in this place many years before.
In tracing the earliest Baptist influences that touched Plymouth, we must begin with the Pilgrims who settled here. In their ten years stay in Holland, they had associated with the Dutch Baptists and the English Baptist refugees, and their association and sentiments seem to show the effects of such association.
The most famous Baptist in colonial Massachusetts was Roger Williams, who was banned from Massachusetts Bay Colony for his heretical ecclesiastical views. The neighboring Plymouth Colony gave him refuge briefly, and he preached at one time from the pulpit of the Pilgrim Church. He is most famous for his establishment of the First Baptist Church in America in Providence, the capital of his new colony of Rhode Island.
In 1794, the Rev. Dr. Chandler Robbins of the Pilgrim Church baptized one woman by immersion, which was a new thing in this town. In the neighboring town of Kingston, once a part of Plymouth, a Baptist Church had been organized and, in the surrounding towns of Marshfield, Carver, and Pocasett, Baptist congregations were serving the communities before the turn of the eighteenth century. Thus it was inevitable that a Baptist Church should be established in the ancient Shiretown of Plymouth.
On February 24, 1808, one year before the establishment of the Baptist Church, certain citizens of Plymouth met and constituted "The First Baptist Society in Plymouth", and the first page of their record book reads as follows:
" We, the subscribers, seriously impressed with a sense of religion, and professing ourselves to be of that religious persuasion called Baptists, and having for some time past maintained preaching under that denomination and having full belief that the sect called Baptists are in the right way to secure the favor of approbation of the righteous Judge and Savior of man, do hereby associate ourselves by and under the denomination of the First Baptist Society of Plymouth, and by subscribing our names hereunto do pledge ourselves to that order of Christian Worship".
The purpose of the First Baptist Society in Plymouth was to arrange for services in the Baptist tradition, provide a meetinghouse for the Church, and arrange for the handling of all secular business concerned with the Church. The finances of the Church were to be maintained by the Society, with the exception of the Communion offerings, which were to be under the direction of the Deacons. All affairs pertaining to religion, polity (the form or constitution of a civil body), doctrinal relationship, were to be managed by the Church, being those persons baptized or otherwise received into spiritual membership. This church/society arrangement was not uncommon in New England, and it functioned in Plymouth's Baptist Church into the 1880’s.
The Society encroached more and more upon the decisions of the church, and friction developed between the two bodies. One cause of this friction was the fact that many of the members of the Society charged with the supervision of the church affairs were not members of the church itself. This friction culminated in the 1880's, and the Society, convinced of the inefficiency and difficulty of duplex church government, voted to disband itself after a faithful stewardship of almost eighty years. Thus the government of the Church was returned to those persons directly and rightfully concerned with the affairs of the Church.
On the first page of this Church's record book, dated June 9, 1809, it is recorded that a group of twenty-nine (seven men and twenty-two women), met and adopted articles of faith similar to those of the Third Baptist Church of Christ in Boston. An Ecclesiastical Council was called and recognized the Church as the "First Baptist Church of Christ at Plymouth" and ordained one of their members, Lewis Leonard, to be their minister. Leonard, later to be awarded a Doctorate of Divinity, served the struggling parish for one year. When he left, the Church went without a minister for six long years.
For lack of a meetinghouse, the faithful met in their homes or worshipped in a basement kitchen at the corner of Summer Street at Ring Lane. Finally, accommodations were secured in Burbank's Hall on Middle Street at a rental of twenty-five cents per week, and neighboring preachers ministered to the flock.
In January, 1821, it was voted to purchase a lot on Spring Street, between Summer and High Streets, and a Church was built and dedicated on November 6, 1822. Not much is known of this church building, however, during the 1840's the church was listed in the Old Colony Memorial newspaper as one of many meeting places on the South Shore of Massachusetts for the Old Colony Anti-Slavery Society. In particular, there was a convention held in the church on July 4, 1847, showing our church's early involvement with social justice.
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