‘How Many Sisters Make a Brotherhood?’ A Case Study in Gender and Ecclesiology in Early Nineteenth-Century English Dissent

Abstract

The Mill Yard Seventh Day Baptist Church, founded in the seventeenth century, had by the 1820s dwindled to a group of just seven women without a minister. One of their seventeenth-century forebears, Joseph Davis, a wealthy linen draper, had established a charitable trust for the purpose of perpetually supporting the cause of Seventh Day Baptists. He had entrusted to it the Mill Yard property in London – which gave the congregation its name – and the task of paying the minister's salary, as well as listing some other suitable beneficiaries. In 1830, however, the trustees at that time resolved to give the property to another congregation on the grounds that the historic Mill Yard church had ceased to exist. The members – all women – protested that they were a true church and all parties agreed to take the case for arbitration to the General Body of Protestant Dissenting Ministers – a ministerial society comprised of the bulk of the Independent, Baptist and Presbyterian ministers in London and its vicinity. Thus, for several days in 1831, many of the most prominent Nonconformist ministers of that era gave themselves to passing judgement on the theological legitimacy or otherwise of the unusual situation arrived at by a remnant of this obscure religious group, providing us with a unique opportunity to discover Dissenting attitudes during that period toward the relationship between gender and the very nature of the Church itself.