So where were the Baptists in New Hampshire?

Dover’s third minister, Hanserd Knollys, no doubt laid a foundation for the Quaker message two decades after his brief tenure in the town pulpit. He was beset by controversy and even a physical skirmish or two, but he organized the church as a Congregational society even as his own theology was evolving into Particular Baptist.

Some of New Hampshire’s early Baptists did relocate to New Jersey, where they named a town Piscataway, in honor of Dover’s Piscataqua River. And Knollys himself became the pastor of London’s first Baptist church, once he had fled New Hampshire and the New World.

By the way, the number of colonists who returned to England from America still amazes me. How could they even afford it, much less the time involved?

Some of his challenges to conventional Christianity, like rejecting the baptism of infants, opened the way for Quakers to build on, once they arrived.

Still, I couldn’t get a clear picture of the existence of the Baptists as New England’s other dissident denomination in the colonial era. Was it all down in Rhode Island, where they contended with the Quakers over the governance of the colony?

My own book, Quaking Dover, concentrates on Dover Friends Meeting and its families, once they’re established, but the Baptists seem to be largely invisible until the Revolutionary War or so.

Carla Gardina Pestana’s Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts now provides an understanding of the faith north of Rhode Island. Essentially, it was long comprised of one church in Boston, and its members were scattered across the region, rather like a network of solitary souls. The church underwent an evolution over the years, from lay ministry to ordained pastors, and ultimately presented less of a threat to the Puritans/Congregationalists than did the Friends.

Still, their insistence on a separation of church and state and their view of a church being comprised of fellow adult believers rather than a place one had to attend regardless of one’s heart and thinking were liberal and revolutionary.

Pestana’s description of the impact of the Great Awakening on the Baptist movement gives me a clearer understanding of why so many of its churches appeared in and around Dover – and the rest of New England – in the early 1800s.