April 2, 2006 An Open Door: the Old South Church in Boston by Dr. Margaret Bendroth,  Director/Librarian American Congregational Association (Right-click to save to your computer or right-click "Open in new window" to start streaming.)  Agenda Program (PDF)   Lecture Text Below   History of the Old South Church Slide Presentation (use Internet Explorer Browser  to View)

photos by George Delianides

A Quick Tour of Old South’s History, 1669-2006
by Dr. Margaret Bendroth

When I was assigned the task of telling this congregation its history, two things occurred to me at once. First, I could be reasonably sure that a good part of my audience would include people who knew thirty times as much as I could ever know about Old South’s past.  And second, I knew that we’d run out of time.

 So, rather than attempt to do a time line or a list of great events and people, I want you to imagine that you and I are on a duck tour together, clunking around the streets of old Boston. I’m the tour guide, driving the boat and alerting you to some points of interest as we go. The idea, of course, is to give you a basic “lay of the land,” assuming that you’ll go back on your own time and visit some of the buildings and monuments we rush past. I’ll do my best to keep things moving and interesting, and to let a few of you drive the boat when we get to the end.

Founding: Negotiating the Halfway Covenant

Old South was originally known as “Third Church,” and it formed as the result of controversy. Boston’s First Church dated back to 1630, when a group of people decided to unite under covenant and call a pastor. We discussed last time what a risky, radical thing this was back in the seventeenth century, to have ordinary people band together to make their own decisions and hold their leaders accountable.

It was risky and it was difficult. In 1667, First Church was getting ready to call a new pastor. Some wanted to call the famous John Davenport of New Haven, an elder statesman of the Puritan churches. Others wanted James Allen, a younger and more liberal candidate. The dividing line between the two was a complex and painful issue controversy among Congregational churches of that generation, the so-called Halfway Covenant.

The Halfway Covenant was a ruling that addressed a growing problem in New England: the children of those original emigrants were not having full conversion experiences and they weren’t joining the churches. You’ll remember that two weeks ago I described the lengthy, public process by which Congregational churches took in new members—not surprisingly, perhaps, the numbers began to dwindle within a generation or two. The sons and daughters of the original Puritans stayed in the churches, regularly attending of course, but not becoming members. And the question arose: what will happen to their children? The Halfway covenant decision allowed these church attenders to become “halfway members”; they could have their children baptized, but could not take communion. The implications were huge, and two bitterly opposed factions soon formed.

John Davenport was a conservative: he opposed the Halfway decision as a dangerous watering down of the old time zeal. The other candidate, James Allen, favored it. Boston’s First Church was soon in an uproar.
Matters soon grew worse when James Penn, the ruling elder, tried to force Davenport’s candidacy through. Old church records suggest he played a bit fast and loose, failing to communicate reluctance from Davenport’s church in New Haven, and calling meetings without announcing them to the entire congregation. Poor James Davenport did finally end up as pastor, but only lasted another fifteen months.

By that time, the Boston church had divided. The dissenters, whom Davenport had described in at least one sermon as a tool of Satan, had to appeal to the magistrate for freedom to leave. First Church announced that because they had all signed its covenant, they had no right to up and go.

This was an important moment in the history of American Congregationalism. For all the many examples of human frailty and stubbornness, we can see ordinary laypeople making their own way according to their own understanding of church teaching. The First Church dissenters were really staring down an authority structure of wealthy, learned people, even the power of the magistrate, and starting something new.

Those twenty-eight dissenters formed Boston’s Third Church on May 12, 1669. They called Thomas Thacher, previously of Weymouth and a practicing physician, as their first pastor. Old South began as a “male only” congregation: it took First Church another five years to release the wives of the original dissenters from their bonds of fellowship.

They also drew up their own covenant, promising “constantly to walk together as a Church of Christ, according to all those holy rules of gods word given to a church body rightly established, so far as we already know them, or they shall be hereafter farther made known unto us.” They also promised to “establish among ourselves and convey down to our posterity, all the holy truths and ordinances of the gospel (reflecting the issues raised by the Halfway covenant), and “to cleave one to another” in “holy watchfulness until mutual edification in Christ Jesus.” And, perhaps most noteworthy, these fugitives from First Church promised “to promote and maintain sisterly fellowship and communion with all the churches of Saints in all those holy ways of order appointed between them by our Lord Jesus, . . . that the Lord may be one and his name one, in all these Churches throughout all generations, to his eternal glory in Christ Jesus.”

 The original meetinghouse was built on land granted them by Mary Norton, the widow of John Norton, who was an associate of John Wilson at First Church. The land, at the corner of Milk and Washington Streets, was in fact part of the original estate of John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts. The Cedar meetinghouse went up in late 1669, impeded at one point by the local constable Freegrace Bendall, who came with a warrant that declared their work illegal and threw a couple of the workmen into prison. Surrounding towns were so incensed by the intolerance of Boston that they sent gifts of timber.

The new church, often known as South Church because of its location, grew quickly. In fact, by 1717 it had become “Old South” to distinguish from a new congregation over on Summer Street. By 1730, they’d erected a new building, the present Old South meetinghouse on Washington Street (an earthquake in 1727 convinced some that it was time to rebuild—others warned that the earthquake was a sign that God was against rebuilding.) The list of members from the first hundred years includes many sturdy citizens: Ann Pollard (who died at age 105 with 130 descendents) Samuel Sewall, the parents of Benjamin Franklin, and Phyllis Wheatley, the famous African-American poet. The list of pastors was even more stellar: Samuel Willard, who went on to become president of Harvard, Joseph Sewall (son of Sam), and Thomas Prince, whose famous library is now in safekeeping at the Boston Public Library.

In 1682, Old South and First Church formally reconciled, passing letters promising to “forgive and forget,” and joining in a solemn day of fasting, prayer, back to back preaching services by both pastors.

Revolution: Free Speech

By the time the Revolutionary War came around, Old South was used to opposition. Back in the 1680s, the English crown sent over a hostile governor, Edmund Andros, to keep the Puritans in order. He commandeered the Cedar meetinghouse for an Anglican service on Easter Sunday morning, forcing them to wait out in the cold until 2:30 in the afternoon.

So, when news of the Boston Massacre broke in March of 1770, it was not surprising that the opposition meeting was held at Old South and led by Samuel Adams. His “committee of fifteen” eventually forced the British authorities to remove both of their regiments out of the city (they had been drilling over on Boston Common), over to Castle Island. The announcement was read from the Old South Pulpit.

And it made sense, in November and December, 1773, that as news spread of the tea ships sitting in the harbor, unable to unload their cargo or get customs clearance to go back to England, that people would meet at Old South to decide the next course of action. The poor ship captain was caught in the proverbial hard place, losing money by the minute, and his last appeal turned down by the governor. That night, December 16, a large group of patriots, Sons of Liberty, and rabble rousers, met at Old South to hear a string of stirring addresses. But the big moment was when Sam Adams rose to speak, and simply said, “We can now do nothing more for our country.” It was a prearranged signal: at once scores of men and boys ran from the building, turned themselves into Mohawk Indians, and systematically dumped all of the tea in three ships into the harbor.

British authorities did not forget. They locked down the city and turned Old South into a riding school for British cavalry, tearing out the pews and burning them (as well as a good portion of Thomas Prince’s famous library and John Winthrop’s original house) for fuel. The congregation met over in King’s Chapel until the war ended in 1783 and building repairs were complete.

Nineteenth Century Passages

The nineteenth century was a tumultuous and sometimes difficult time for Congregationalists in Boston. Not only did they suffer the loss of their tax-supported status in 1833, but they endured a theological schism which resulted in the departure of some of their wealthiest and oldest churches. The Unitarian controversy officially began when Henry Ware was given the theology chair at Harvard—a known liberal, sympathetic to the Enlightenment and not very strong on orthodox Calvinism. The orthodox responded angrily, founding their own seminary up in Andover in 1808 and a new flagship church, the Park Street Church in 1809 (actually in the living room of an Old South member).

 Old South was one of the only Boston churches that stayed in the Congregational fold, steering a path between rigid Calvinism and Unitarian rationalism. Joshua Huntington, the pastor from 1808-1819, was described in one account as “a very decided Calvinist,” along with Edward Norris Kirk at Park Street.
 But the two churches were moving in a decidedly different direction. Park Street would quickly become the center of foreign missions, temperance reform, and a somewhat genteel form of abolitionism. Old South stood a bit apart. At the height of the antislavery controversy, in the years before the Civil War, the church had two pastors, Jacob Manning and George Blagden, one an abolitionist and the other not.

 For the Old South Congregation, one of the most difficult passages of the nineteenth century was the move from the “old downtown” to the Back Bay in 1875. A massive public works project had reclaimed prime acres of swampland on either side of the old Shawmut peninsula, creating the Back Bay and the South End. Both were stylish, upscale neighborhoods, though in time the South End would become Boston’s racial and ethnic melting pot and the Back Bay a more exclusive preserve. A major fire in 1872 destroyed much of the old waterfront, with the flames literally licking against the walls of the Old South meetinghouse. Real estate was at an absolute premium in the following years, and with considerable legal and emotional difficulty, the congregation eventually moved to the current location on Boylston Street, in the heart of one of Boston’s most beautiful and culturally prestigious corners.

In the late nineteenth century, Copley Square housed some of Boston’s leading institutions: the Harvard Medical School, the Mass Institute of Technology, the Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Public Library. Some of Boston’s finest hotels—the Vendome, the Brunswick, and the Victoria—also added glitter to the neighborhood.
 George Gordon was the perfect pastor, an archetype of the Victorian master of the pulpit. Gordon was nationally known as a leading voice in Protestant liberalism, what historians actually call “evangelical liberalism,” because he was basically orthodox, but pushing at the boundaries of rationalistic orthodoxy. His sermons waxed eloquent on human possibility, the importance of imagination and emotion, the need to keep a few options open in the way human beings talk about God.

Not surprisingly perhaps, his installation was somewhat of a watershed. According to Congregational polity, he was called by the Old South church, but was examined by an ecclesiastical council of representatives from other churches in the area. Normally, this was a bit of a professional courtesy, a fairly pro forma exercise—but not on the second of April, 1884.  At the end of his statement of beliefs was a toss-off line, in which he described himself as an “inquirer, a student of the things of God and the life of man.”  Alas, this was all the orthodox Calvinists needed to begin a lengthy ordeal of questioning about everything from his drinking habits to his view on Satan. While the congregation sat upstairs waiting for the installation service to begin and the dinner grew cold, the ecclesiastical council went into closed session. They finally returned with a verdict in his favor, 44 to 18—but the opposition included the man who was to have given Gordon the “right hand of fellowship” and another who was to have given the opening prayer.  Substitutes had to be found before the installation service could begin.  Not surprisingly perhaps, Gordon later wrote that “When I returned for the night in the parsonage, I felt as if the Council had done its best to place the tower of the church upon my chest.”

Urban Church

But Gordon stayed at Old South for forty-five years, until 1929. By that time, the church was in the midst of yet another transition, into an urban “institutional” church. Russell Henry Stafford, who followed Gordon, engineered the conversion of the old parsonage at 645 Boylston into a parish house, a social center for use every day of the week.  By the 1930s, fewer and fewer of Old South’s members still lived in the Back Bay, and in fact during this time, the area was in decline. The rigors of city life made survival difficult for congregationally-based churches—the Mount Vernon Church, founded in 1842 as another bastion of orthodoxy and successful for many years after that, federated with Old South in 1970. Its records remain at the Congregational Library, and the church no longer possesses a building; the minister of Old South is, in effect, also the minister at Mount Vernon.
 There are several different formulas for successful urban churches, and Old South followed a pattern that was already familiar at Park Street and Tremont Temple. These were the other two big preaching centers of the day.  Like Old South, they regularly called pastors with special pulpit gifts and the ability to chart a wide course in the city of Boston. Frederick Meek and Jim Crawford were more than able to do this, in two very long and creative pastorates that are probably within the memory of many people here.

 I usually try not to say too much as I move closer to the present, especially as many of you here could do a better job than I could describing what has been going on under these walls for the past fifty years.  What I’d like to do in the remaining minutes is to help you think through what we’ve heard, and what all this historical information might be saying about your own identity as a congregation.

 You are, first of all, a treasured Boston institution. You are impressively old and well-integrated into a lot of familiar American history, a steward of some of our most important moments of the past. Your history is very much a part of our national story of colonial independence, and of Boston’s own growth and development. You are a church, but you are also a public institution (for good or ill). There is no escaping that fact.
 You have been dissenters but not dividers. You have historically valued free speech, the right of the minority to be heard and protected. But, your original group of dissenters also, in the long run, observed the bonds of covenant; the differences with First Church were real and heartfelt, but not beyond the scope of eventual reconciliation.

 You have been both orthodox and progressive (and I don’t mean necessarily in succession, but really at the same time—the two aren’t mutually exclusive). Remember that in the early nineteenth century, you were one of two Boston churches to stay within the Congregational fold, but remember as well that by the end of the century, you were a flagship of theological liberalism. “Liberal” is a funny, complicated term, especially when applied to nineteenth century religion—but suffice to say, it was at its best when proclaimed from the pulpit, a ringing affirmation of God’s love for humanity and for the created world. That was pretty good news during a time of rationalist Calvinist orthodoxy, and it’s still pretty good news today. We are not overburdened with progressive, confidently Christian voices in the world today—all the more reason for you to hold your own history with the respect and appreciation it certainly deserves.

Copyright (c) 2006 by Author and Old South Church

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Old South Church
645 Boylston St.
Boston, MA 02116