William Carey the Dissenter

William Carey is one of the great heroes of the Christian Faith.

He was born into a family who considered the Church of England to be the authorised church of the English people. But when he heard the gospel and started to read the Bible, he realised he needed to find out more. He began to be drawn to those called ‘Dissenters’.

Holy Dissent
His biographer, Timothy George writes, ‘The Dissenters of Hanoverian England had inherited a legacy of persecution and harassment. When the Act of Uniformity was passed in 1662 over 2000 ministers were expelled from their posts because they refused to declare ‘unfeigned assent’ to everything in the Book of Common Prayer and seek re-ordination from an Anglican bishop…

‘In those days the Clarendon Code imposed severe penalties  on those who could not conform to the established religion; John Bunyan languishing for 12 years in the Bedford jail; George Fox locked up at Scarborough Castle in a cell which was open to the wind and rain of the North Sea, so that “the water came over my bed and ran about the room”…

‘the Welsh Evangelist Vavasor Powell dying in the Fleet Prison in the 11th year of his incarceration there; sergeants disrupting services…;meeting houses burned to the ground; properties confiscated; ruinous fines exacted. Such memories lingered long in the Nonconformist conscience…

‘In 1719 Parliament passed a bill forbidding anyone who attended a Dissenting meeting from teaching, with three months in jail as the penalty’! (Timothy George, Faithful Witness, IVP, p.9)

Nevertheless, the young Carey began preaching amongst them. First, in a house-church in Earls Barton, Northamptonshire and then later as an ordained Dissenting Pastor in Moulton.

They were tough years for Carey and his new bride, but they were years of preparation.

To read the first part of the William Carey story click here

To read the next part of the William Carey Story click here

© 2011 Church History Blog / Lex Loizides

William Carey Believes and is Baptised

A child of the Church of England
Carey was a child of the Church of England, having been christened as a baby and assuming, as almost everyone did in 18th Century England, that any other kind of church was bogus, not a real church at all.

But one of the other apprentices, John Warr, was not a member of the Church of England. And, rather than his being strange or artificial, Warr had a definite and clear faith in Christ.

Biographer, Timothy George writes, ‘As parish clerk, Edmund Carey (William’s father) had required his children to attend church where they listened to the Psalms and lessons from the Book of Common Prayer.

‘Although Carey never disparaged this religious training, it left him, as he put it, ‘wholly unacquainted with the scheme of salvation by Christ.’ Indeed, he confessed, ‘Of real experimental [experiential] religion, I scarcely heard anything until I was fourteen years of age.’ (Quoted in Faithful Wtiness, Timothy George, IVP, p.6)

Convinced by Scripture

Eventually, he did indeed put his trust in Christ for the forgiveness of his sins. He was converted and immediately began to zealously tell everyone of Christ’s love.

Being convinced by Scripture, which the so-called ‘Dissenters’ preached, William broke with family and church tradition and was baptised as a believer in 1783.

The Baptist Pastor, John Ryland, who oversaw his baptism, later wrote,

‘On October 5, 1783, I baptised in the Nene, just beyond Doddridge’s meeting- house, a poor journeyman-shoemaker, little thinking that before nine years elapsed he would prove the first instrument of forming a Society for sending missionaries from England to the heathen world, and much less that later would become professor of languages in an Oriental College, and the translator of the Scriptures into eleven different tongues.’ (ibid. p.12)

To read the first part of the William Carey Story click here

To read the next part of the William Carey Story click here

© 2011 Church History Blog / Lex Loizides