Bunyan Meeting, Bedford, Church Book

Bunyan Meeting, Bedford. The following notes are taken from The Church Book of Bunyan Meeting 1650-1821 [facsimile].  Introduction by G. B. Harrison (London: J. M. Dent, 1928) (first paragraph) and H. G. Tibbutt, Bunyan Meeting Bedford 1650-1950 (Bedford, n.d.) (second paragraph).

This church was also called the “Old Meeting” for Bedford.  Joshua Symonds was the pastor from 1766-1788. He introduced believer’s baptism to the church in 1772, which caused some controversy, but he remained nevertheless.  After his death Samuel Hillyard came in 1791.  He was ordained there on 12 June 1792 (ff. 226-230).   In the mid-1790s, a William Smith is one of the deacons.  Could his wife be the Mrs. Smith, the printer/bookseller, in Bedford mentioned in the letters? (f. 236).  There is also a James Smith attending as well (f. 239).  However, the “New Meeting” at Bedford was pastored in the 1790s by a Rev. T. Smith (f. 237).  A Mrs. Rachel Hensman shows up in 1767-68, giving the church some difficulties with the pastor and withdraws herself to avoid “the worst kind of popery” being exercised upon her by the church (f. 190).   She had written earlier in 1797 that she thought Symonds to be “a hot-headed, bigotted, weak man, & as such I can by no means think him a proper teacher of others, & therefore cannot attend his ministry with any satisfaction” (ff. 189-90).  William Coles is listed here as pastoring the church at Malden in a note about a letter of dismissal for someone in December 1768 (f. 192).  There were still Hensman’s in the church as late as the 1790s, one--a Mr. R. Hensman--was received into the church by letter of dismissal from the 3rd Church in November 1797 (f. 238).  In January 1799 Mr. Smith left the church and joined the 3rd Meeting over what he felt was bad conduct toward him by some members of the church (f. 239).  In August, October, and December 1799, several individuals from Kempston are proposed for communion and membership, which may have been the result of Sunday School there that Eliza Gould started prior to her marriage to Benjamin Flower (f. 239). 

 At one time Thomas Burkitt was pastor of the Cotton End Independent Church, Bedford, and preached for Hillyard in 1819.  The Third Church was at Mill Lane, called the “New Meeting” and later became Howard Congregational Church, a split off of the Bunyan, or Old Meeting, in 1773 under Joshua Symonds (43).  Another split occurred after Symonds’ death, during the beginning of Hillyard’s pastorate, and that group formed a Particular Baptist congregation at Mill Lane in 1791-92.  The book also mentions that “it was during Hillyard’s ministry that the Sunday School was started, probably in 1800, but possibly earlier.  In its earliest days, the girls of the Sunday School were taught by Mary Woodward whose tombstone against the wall of Howard House states: ‘To the memory of Mary Woodward.  Died August 9th, 1820.  Aged 75 years.  This worthy woman founded Bunyan Sunday School.  Robert Raikes was her guest.’ . . . In 1830 the Sunday School Jubilee was celebrated by a service in the Old Meeting conducted by Hillyard.  The scholars of the Sunday Schools of the Old Meeting and of the Kempston and Elstow branch churches attended ‘and afterwards partook of a substantial repast in the shape of a cold meat dinner and hot plum pudding in the Old Malting in Horne Lane’” (44).  Doctor Joseph Thackeray of Bedford General Infirmary died in 1832, with Hillyard preaching his memorial service.  Hillyard helped found the Bedfordshire Union of Christians with William Bull of Newport Pagnell and Samuel Greatheed of the Woburn Congregational Church in September 1797, with the address by Greatheed on 31 October at the Old Meeting noting: “Surely it is time that the keen edge of bigotry, which has so long mangled and separated the members of Christ’s body, should be taken off for ever.  What are the points of difference between real Christians, compared with the greatness of those objects in which we all agree” (48-49).  Hillyard was also a good friend of Robert Hall, Thomas Toller, and Andrew Fuller and was present in 1815 at the ordination of Fuller’s successor (50).  Fuller had married William Coles’s daughter, Ann.