I want to take the opportunity of welcoming Charles Gardner as my successor as Editor-in-Chief of this weekly magazine. This month we are sharing responsibilities, and next month he becomes the sole Editor. We have been friends and colleagues for a number of years, and I have every confidence in his leadership. It is appropriate that today we are both focusing upon the Pilgrim Fathers, as we have a similar heritage.
Heritage Issues
In the future Monica and I will be concentrating on our personal heritage issues as together we develop this foundational part of Issachar Ministries. We spent many years in the East End of London pioneering new concepts in ‘community-based evangelism’ which is a useful experience to be shared today.1 We both need more time for writing, which is why I am stepping back from the leadership of Prophecy Today, the bi-monthly publication that I founded in 1985.
The Pilgrim Fathers provide a suitable link to introduce one aspect of our heritage. Both Monica and I were born into families of ‘Independents’ worshipping at local Congregational churches, and we met at a world mission conference. It was quite natural, after I had felt called to be a preacher, that I should become a Congregational minister.
Independents
As indicated above, members of Congregational churches were originally called ‘Independents’. They were the Post-Reformation Separatists who were not satisfied with the reforms of the Church of England, which they said followed the same practices as the Roman Catholic Church. They viewed the king as the head of the Church, rather than the Pope. When new laws forcing everyone to ‘conform’ were introduced, these Separatists left their livings and formed independent congregations. This was the birth of Nonconformity in Britain. The Independents rejected the authority of Anglican bishops, recognising only the authority of Jesus in the local gatherings of believers – similar to the first Christians as recorded in the book of Acts.
Some English Independents sought refuge from persecution in Holland, but they never really settled there, and many returned home. So, in 1620 a little band of Independents left Plymouth and the old world to found a new world in America where they could be free to practise their faith. The place where they landed, they called Plymouth.
Landing of the Pilgrims, painting by Charles Lucy (c.1898)
Plymouth, Massachusetts
I had the privilege of preaching in the Congregational Church in Plymouth, Massachusetts (the oldest church in America) at the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the founding of the USA in 1976. I was at that time the President of the Congregational Churches in Britain, and, also as part of the bicentenary celebrations, I delivered the ‘Congregational Lecture’ at Harvard University.
In my address I said:
The early Separatists – our Congregational forefathers – were both Christ-centred and were concerned for the value of each individual, and his or her place in society. They attempted to build a new world, but they knew that a new society had to be the creation of the Lord of Creation, or it was doomed to failure. They knew that only if they were directed by the Holy Spirit could they be used by the Lord to create a worthy new society.
Thus they had both social creativity and spiritual dynamic in their faith. Theirs was a faith that was alive and vital. It was faith that carried them across the perils of the Atlantic to America. It was faith that gave them courage and energy and vision. It was faith that motivated the pioneers who trekked across to the west and helped to make this land great. It was faith that lit the altar of the past whose flames we need today to light the fire of a new tomorrow.2
Spirit of America
The ideal of the essential worth of every human being and the sovereignty of God over both individuals and nations is written deeply into the American psyche.
It was the Pilgrim Fathers, with their combination of faith in God and their commitment to the unique value of each individual human being, who established the essential characteristics of the ‘spirit of America’. Even on their dollar bills today they declare ‘In God we trust’. Of course, there are plenty of things wrong in America, as most fair-minded Americans would admit, but the ideal of the essential worth of every human being and the sovereignty of God over both individuals and nations is written deeply into the American psyche.
Slavery
These values, which were at the heart of the Protestant Reformation, were drawn from the New Testament. And it was these same Scriptures which also formed our British Judeo-Christian heritage and became the founding principles of the American nation. Sadly, it was the British who, with their limited knowledge of ethnology at that time, also gave slavery to America, when a Portuguese slave ship en route to Mexico was overtaken by English privateers, who proceeded to take the first consignment of Africans to Virginia in 1619, four hundred years ago last year. So, the British have not only given their language and part of their historic social and cultural values to the Americans, but also part of their deep-rooted contemporary social problems.
Faith Foundations
We can be proud at this 400th anniversary of the spiritual heritage that our forefathers carried across the Atlantic.
The Pilgrim Fathers would certainly have had nothing to do with slavery, as they regarded each individual human being as being equally loved by God, and they established good relationships with the native-American population. They evangelised among the natives and were responsible for producing and printing the first Bible in a North American Indian language.3 They believed everyone should enjoy the freedom to develop their gifts and abilities as a sacred trust given to them by God. We can, at least, be proud at this 400th anniversary of the spiritual heritage that our forefathers carried across the Atlantic and implanted in the New World. Like the men of faith listed in Hebrews 11, they were “longing for a better country – a heavenly one” (Heb 11:16). They were “looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (Heb 11:10).
1 ‘Renewal in the Inner City’, published by the Methodist Home Mission Department in 1978 and updated in 2020 (Available from Issachar Ministries resources website).
2 The full address, entitled ‘The City on the Hill’, is currently in the process of being digitalised for the heritage section of Issachar Ministries website.
3 This was the Wampanoag language or ‘Massachuset language’ (Algonquian family)
