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Kingdon, Robert M.
1981.
The Church: Ideology or Institution.
Church History,
Vol. 50,
Issue. 1,
p.
81.
Article contents
Protestant Parishes in the Old World and the New: The Cases of Geneva and Boston
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
Extract
There can be little doubt that for centuries the most important single unit of the Christian church has been the parish. It is surely the most fundamental of the structures upon which the institutional church has been built. Only by studying closely the parish and what goes on within it can we gain a real appreciation of what religion has meant and continues to mean to the average Christian at the grass roots level. It is somewhat surprising, given the general spread of interest in social history among contemporary historians, that there has not been more study of the parish. One can understand the superior appeal of historical theology to the historian who concentrates on ideas, given the range and sophistication of the systems of thought created over the centuries by theologians, but we should not forget that these systems could not even be comprehended by the great majority of Christians. One can similarly understand the superior appeal of ecclesiastical politics to the historian who concentrates on events, given the high drama in which ecclesiastical leaders have often been engaged, but we should not assume that these events necessarily even came to the attention of average Christians. But for the historian of society who is interested in the religious experience of the average man, the parish must be a starting point.
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References
This paper was prepared to be read at the meeting of the International Commission for the Comparative Study of Ecclesiastical History in San Francisco on August 25, 1975, as part of the International Congress of the Historical Sciences. I am indebted to Richard J. Ferraro for assistance in its original preparation, particularly in gathering material for the section on developments in Boston, and would also like to acknowledge the bibliographical suggestions of my colleague David S. Lovejoy.
1. We should all be grateful to the Parish Studies Group of the International Commission for the Comparative Study of Ecclesiastical History for its reminder of this basic truth and its stimulating initiative in developing this field of study. I am grateful to Professor Jerzy Kloczowski of the Catholic University of Lublin for introducing me to the work of this group. Brief reports on its activities can be found in the annual chronicle of the work of relevant international organizations in the Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique 66 (1971), 1: 1040–1045;Google Scholar 68 (1973), 1: 925–927; 69 (1974), 1: 543–545; 70 (1975), 1: 671–672, 829.
2. Oxford English Dictionary, corrected re-issue of 1933, s.v. “parish.” Reproduced from Naef, Henri, Les orzgines de la Réforme à Genève, Vol. 1 (Geneva and Paris: Jullien and Droz, 1936), p. 8.Google Scholar
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6. Ibid., p. 5. “Pour envoyer les enfans au cathechisme et pour recepvoir les sacrements, que en tant qu'il se pourra faire on observe les limites des parroisses.”
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16. Any transplant, of course, poses some problems. One of the more difficult in this case was the fact that there were variations in the English model and sometimes citizens of a Massachusetts town came from several different types of English parishes. For an extended case study of this problem, see Powell, Sumner Chilton, Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town (Middletown, Conn., 1963).Google Scholar For a stimulating but schematic overview of the parish in England during the early seventeenth century, see Hill, Christopher, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (London, 1969), a reprint, chap. 12, pp. 407–428,Google Scholar “The Secularization of the Parish.”
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23. Hill, , Old South Church, p. 312.Google Scholar See also Motte, Ellis Loring et al. , eds., Records of the Church in Brattle Square, Boston … 1699–1872 (Boston, 1902),Google Scholar especially pp. vii-viii. At least half of its founding members came from Old South. Compare the membership lists in Reproduction of a map of Boston drawn by Captain John Bonner, first published in 1722. Motte, p. 95, with those in [Hamilton Andrews Hill and George Frederick Bigelow?], An Historical Catalogue of the Old South Church (Third Church), Boston, 1669–1882 (Boston, 1883), pp. 5–18 and 114.Google Scholar
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25. Foote, Henry Wilder, Annals of King's Chapel (Boston, 1882), chaps. 2 and 3.Google Scholar
26. Ibid., pp. 321–325, and chap. 12. See also Burroughs, Henry, A Historical Account of Christ Church, Boston (Boston, 1874)Google Scholar and Trinity Church in the City of Boston, Massachusetts, 1733–1933 (Boston, 1933).Google Scholar
27. Gannett, Ezra S., A Memorial of the Federal-Street Meeting-House (Boston, 1860).Google Scholar
28. Greenleaf, Jonathan, A History of the Churches of all Denominations in the City of New York from the First Settlement to the year 1846 (New York, 1846);Google ScholarDisosway, Gabriel P., The Earliest Churches of New York and its Vicinity (New York, 1865).Google Scholar
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