Today, tens of thousands of Baptist churches dot the American landscape. In 1639, there was only one. Roger Williams founded that congregation in Providence, Rhode Island. Who was Williams? What was the context for forming that church? What Baptist principles evolved from that fellowship of believers for future generations of Baptists?

        Williams (c.1603-1684) was born in London and reared in the Church of England. A 1627 graduate of Cambridge University, he became a Separatist in 1629, meaning that he withdrew from the Church of England, viewing it to be a false church. To escape likely imprisonment because of his religious views, he and his wife Mary took a ship to New England, arriving in early 1631.

       Following several years of conflict with the religious officials of New England, Williams fled into the wilderness in early 1636. Sustained by Indians, he and several friends established Providence Plantations in June 1636. This new colony promoted democracy, religious freedom, and the separation of church and state.

       In that context, Williams and others formed the first Baptist church in the new world by March 1639 on the basis of believer’s baptism. These early Baptists insisted on voluntarism in faith, liberty of conscience, complete religious liberty for all people, church/state separation, and congregational church government.

       This Baptist church in Providence was a true laypersons’ church. It typically met in members’ homes and out in the open until it constructed its own building about 1700.  

       Rhode Island would continue to serve as a pivotal colony for Baptist “firsts” in America. In 1764, Rhode Island College would be organized as the first Baptist college in America. In 1767, the Warren Baptist Association would be formed as the first Baptist association in New England.

       Baptists in the South and West, take note: Our debt to New England Baptists is real.

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John Clarke, Ill Newes From New England, 1652

by Walter B. Shurden

             The myth stubbornly persists in American history that the founders of this country came here to establish religious liberty for all people. Not so! It is true that many of the earliest settlers came here to escape religious persecution. They came to America, however, to establish religious liberty for themselves, not for all citizens. Few people anywhere in the seventeenth century believed in religious liberty as a principle for all people. Universal religious liberty evolved as a hard-earned freedom in America. The last state church in this country was not dismantled until 1833, more than two centuries after the founding of the earliest colonies.

            Baptists led the parade for universal liberty of conscience in early America. And John Clarke, a medical doctor, served as the Baptist drum-major in that parade!  Yet many Baptists have never heard of him. Clarke wrote a fiery Baptist classic exposing religious persecution in seventeenth century New England. It was called Ill Newes From New England.

            In 1651, John Clarke and two of his church members, John Crandall and Obadiah Holmes, from the First Baptist Church of Newport, Rhode Island, traveled to Lynn, Massachusetts. In Lynn they conducted a worship service in the home of William Witter, a blind and aging Baptist. That trip became one of the most famous events in American Baptist history. It also became the occasion for John Clarke’s Ill Newes from New England.

            Civil authorities brusquely interrupted the Baptist worship service in old man Witter’s house that day. Then they arrested Clarke, Crandall, and Holmes, eventually taking them to Boston to be tried for breaking the unjust laws of Massachusetts. Friends paid fines for Clarke and Crandall, and they were released. But stubborn old Obadiah Holmes refused to let his fine be paid. As a result he was lashed thirty times with a “three-coarded whip” on Market Street in downtown Boston. At the end of the humiliating whipping, Holmes looked to the civil magistrates and said, “You have struck me as with Roses.”

            Clarke asked for an opportunity to debate the New England Puritan clergy on the questions surrounding freedom of worship. The Puritans refused. But the next year, while visiting in England, Clarke continued the debate when he wrote Ill Newes from New England.  Very intentionally he sent a copy to the Parliament of England. He fervently hoped that it would become political leverage for the rulers of Old England to rid New England of its religious intolerance.

            In this Baptist classic Clarke narrates the imprisonment in 1651 of the three Rhode Islanders. Important for the narrative alone, Ill Newes also contains important  primary documents–court proceedings, autobiographical statements, and a confessional statement–that make Ill Newes all the more significant in Baptist history. Clarke obviously intended Ill Newes, consisting of these multiple documents, to serve several different functions.

            First, Ill Newes  was a historical document. It  exposed the dirty details of the harsh and unjust treatment of the three Rhode Islanders. In maybe the most serious  understatement in Baptist history, Clarke described the Lynn incident as  “discourteous treatment.” But he also graphically described the incivility of the Massachusetts magistrates toward the three Baptists from Rhode Island, and he exposed the cruel laws of religious discrimination of the Commonwealth.

            Second, Ill Newes served as a theological document in several ways. It constituted a bombastic attack on  the religious prejudices of Puritan New England. Also, it repudiated  the theological manner in which the Puritans ordered their church life. Incidentally, if one ever suspected that the Baptist appeal for religious freedom came from soft and uncertain religious convictions, one should read Ill Newes for sterness of conviction alone. Our Baptist ancestors were nothing if not sure of themselves. In fact, they were at times downright self-righteous!

            Third, in the process of exposing the theological deficiencies of Puritanism, Clarke gladly confessed his Baptist understanding of Christianity. The longest part of the document contains Clarke’s valuable confession of faith. Indeed, the confession of faith in Ill Newes is the earliest confessional statement we have from the pen of Baptists in America.

            Fourth, Clarke cleverly directed  Ill Newes  toward the civil rulers of Old England.  With calculating deference, he refers to the English rulers as the “rod and staff” of “the most high.” Clarke hoped, of course, that the powers of Old England would exert pressure on New England, granting elbow room for freedom of conscience in the colonies.

            What did Clarke say in Ill Newes? He said

            . . . conscience was that “sparkling beam from the Father of lights and spirits that...cannot be lorded over, commanded, or forced, either by men, devils, or angels. . . .” (6);

            . . . conscience or the inward person can only be dealt with by way of “convincing, converting, transforming, and as it were a-new creating of them” (7);

            . . . that he wanted the Puritans delivered from their false zeal for God which led to “soul murdering” (10);

            . . . that the Puritans who wronged him, Crandall, and Holmes had “much more wronged [their] own souls in transgressing the very law, and light of nations. . . .” (16);

            . . . that each Christian should “search the Scriptures, and therein to wait for the power and glory of the spirit of God” (21);

            What may we learn from this Baptist doctor from Rhode Island? Clarke lived when Baptists constituted a distinct minority. You and I live in a time when Baptists have become the largest Protestant group in America. Maybe we should pause, take stock of the minorities among us–people such as Clarke and Holmes and Crandall–and recommit ourselves to religious freedom for all on the basis of principle.