Life After Bunyan

Abstract

This chapter explores the ‘church life’ of the Congregational meeting at Bedford during the two decades following the death in 1688 of its most famous pastor, John Bunyan, and the passing of the 1689 Toleration Act. It examines the difficult experience of pastoral transition facing the church under the early leadership of Bunyan’s successor, Ebenezer Chandler: the first pastor to be appointed from without the congregation since its establishment in the early 1650s, but about whom almost nothing has been written. This chapter addresses matters at the heart of the relationship between Dissenting pastors and their congregations in one of the most prominent and well-documented Congregational churches of the era, and during a key period in the transformation of English Dissent: from the seventeenth century to the eighteenth century, and from persecution to toleration, via the short-lived ‘Happy Union’ of Presbyterians and Congregationalists in the early 1690s.