John Rippon

John Rippon (1751-1836) was born into a Baptist family in Tiverton. He arrived at the Bristol Baptist Academy in 1769 and in 1773 replaced the legendary John Gill as pastor of the Baptist church at Carter Lane, Southwark, where he remained the rest of his life. Unlike Gill, however, Rippon was an evangelical Calvinist after the model of Andrew Fuller and John Ryland, Jr. He became one of the leading Baptist figures in London during his long tenure at Carter Lane, which eventually relocated to New Park Street in 1833, where C. H. Spurgeon would later preach. One of Rippon’s early achievements was his work as editor of the Baptist Annual Register from 1790 to 1802, the first periodical to chronicle the activities of the Particular Baptists and their involvement in the evangelical revival in England and America, as well as in India and Sierra Leone through the work of the BMS. Rippon was also a well known hymn writer, with his Selection of Hymns (1787) going through twenty-seven editions in his lifetime. He was the Baptist Union’s first chairman in 1813, and was a consistent advocate of Baptist unity. He also published a work on the life of John Gill (1838), as well as a short history of Bristol Academy. Rippon’s influential Baptist Annual Register (1790-1802) was the first periodical produced solely to promote the work of the Particular Baptists, both in England and America.  He was an important hymnodist as well, publishing A selection of hymns (1787) that went through twenty-seven editions in his lifetime.  A leading advocate of Baptist unity throughout his life, he became the first chairman of the Baptist Union in 1812.  Rippon’s A Discourse delivered at the Drum Head, on the Fort, Margate, Oct. 19, 1803, the Day of the General Fast, before the Volunteers, commanded by the Right Hon. William Pitt (1803) brought Rippon the contempt of many political reformers and opponents of the War with France, including the newspaper editor Benjamin Flower and the London dentist Joseph Fox. Rippon hoped that the leaders of the war and of the Volunteer Corps would be “as celebrated for their urbanity, their valour, and every martial and christian virtue, as they are for their illustrious [Colonel Pitt], a man renowned by his friends for talents and influence which have made half a globe tremble, and of whom there is but one expectation-that having been great in the cabin­et, great in the senate, always great; he will, if necessity shall require, be also great in the field; and, under the blessing of God, without which talents are trifles, be rendered, with all the staff, not an honour to his own country, and to half the nations only, but a distinguished ornament and long continued blessing to the whole globe! (34-35). He closed by praising George III for having “several times” “indulged” the Protestant Dissenters with “an enlargement of their religious liberties.”  He thanked God that England had  “the best of earthly monarchs” (35). In his Discourse, Rippon referenced Samuel Stennett’s hymn, “The Christian Warfare,” and Philip Doddridge’s hymn, “The Christian Warrior Animated and Crowned.” See Ken R. Manley, Redeeming Love Proclaim: John Rippon and the Baptists, Studies in Baptist History and Thought, vol. 12 (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2004); Sharon James, “John Rippon (1751-1836),” in The British Particular Baptists, ed. Michael A. G. Haykin, 5 vols (Springfield, MO: Particular Baptist Press, 1998-2019), 2:57-75.