Brattle St Church - Puritan vs Baptist; Samuel Cooper

1 City Hall Sq

Before this church was officially built it was a meeting house for Baptists. The First Baptist Church met secretly in members’ homes, and the doors of the first church which was located here were nailed shut by a decree from Puritans in March 1680 as Puritans considered any other faction or division of Christianity a threat and persecuted them. That group was forced to move to Noddle’s Island disguised as a tavern and members traveled by water to worship. The Brattle Square Church (Puritan) was built after they moved.

Henry Cabot Lodge, a parishioner in his youth, noted: "It was a fine old eighteenth-century church with a square tower, in which was embedded a cannon-ball said to have been fired and lodged there by the American batteries at the siege of Boston.” To distinguish itself in contrast to Boston's three other Congregational churches, the new fourth church issued a manifesto that detailed a somewhat relaxed attitude toward rigid Calvinist (Puritan) practices. Parishioners included John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Joseph Warren, John Adams, Abigail Adams, Richard Clarke, Jane Mecom, John Lowell, Henry Cabot Lodge (1676–1747), and many others. In 1872, the Brattle Street church building was demolished. Work on a new church building began in 1873 and became known as the Brattle Square Church. That group “became extinct” in 1876 and the building was sold in 1882 to the First Baptist congregation.

There were two other Baptist meeting locations I found documentation for – see Anabaptist Meeting House and Stillman Meeting House.

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Puritan Samuel Cooper served as minister here his entire life. He was an active and influential patriot and a trusted friend of Benjamin Franklin. When Franklin stole letters from Governor Thomas Hutchinson he sent them to Cooper who sent them to Sam Adams to be published in a Boston newspaper. Massachusetts radical politicians propagandistically claimed they called for the abridgement of colonial rights and a duel was fought in England over the matter. The response of the British government to the publication of the letters served to turn Benjamin Franklin, one of the principal figures in the affair, into a committed Patriot.

What fruitage did these spiritual leaders produce? Mt 7:15-20. Consider John 17:16 vs Acts 20:29, 30. What would Jesus have said seeing this?

-Source Links-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Baptist_Church_(Boston,_Massachusetts)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Cooper_(clergyman)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brattle_Street_Church

https://www.masshist.org/database/571?ft=Revolutionary-Era%20Art%20and%20Artifacts&from=/features/revolutionary-era/people&noalt=1&pid=38

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutchinson_Letters_affair

https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/siege-of-boston-map.htm