West Church Research Articles

West African Church History: Christian Missions and Church Foundations 1482-1919

West African Church History: Christian Missions and Church Foundations 1482-1919

Anti-Slavery, Blacks, and the Boston Elite: Notes on the Reverend Charles Lowell and the West Church

Anti-Slavery, Blacks, and the Boston Elite: Notes on the Reverend Charles Lowell and the West Church

The Immigrant on the Land: Polish Farmers and New England Novelists

general condemnation of Boston's pulpits.30 When the published version of Parker's remarks failed to make exception of Lowell, however, the West Church pastor was deeply disturbed. Your sermon will go abroad, it will be handed down, Lowell pleaded, and a stigma, a monstrous stigma upon my name, will go along with it.31 The sermon was republished later that year, in a footnote Parker acknowledged: Dr. Charles Lowell, with the humane piety which has beautified his long faithful ministry, at that time opposed the Fugitive Slave Bill with manly earnestness.'32 Parker's belated tribute to Lowell reminds us to be wary of the abolitionists' generalizations about their elite opponents. Lowell's high social standing his cushioned West Church pulpit never translated into softened principles or accommodation to the status quo. During a ministry of nearly half a century among Boston's privileged class, Lowell steadfastly contended for the rightful claim of black Americans to freedom, dignity, equality.

West African Church History: Church Missions and Church Foundations, 1482-1919

West African Church History: Church Missions and Church Foundations, 1482-1919

Religion and the American Revolution: Samuel Cooper and the Brattle Street Church

IN late summer I765, as Boston began to resist the Stamp Act, the prominent merchant Richard Clarke sat uneasily under the whiggish preaching of Jonathan Mayhew at the West Church. On August 25 Mayhew delivered a sermon which even he admitted had been composed in a high strain of liberty. Clarke, among others, believed that this sermon helped to incite the riot that destroyed Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson's mansion on the following day. Refusing to hear his pastor's profuse expressions of regret, Clarke angrily withdrew his family from the congregation.' One might expect Clarke to have found a new spiritual home in of the town's three Anglican churches, for instance at King's Chapel, the rector of which characterized Mayhew's composition as one of the most seditious Sermons ever delivered. Instead, he took a pew at the Brattle Street Congregational Church. Here, without fear of contaminating his family with disturbing political or religious doctrines, he could listen to the soothing preaching of Dr. Samuel Cooper, in the company of such whig leaders as John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Dr. Joseph Warren, and, from time to time, John Adams. Apparently pleased with his choice, Clarke remained in this congregation until he became a loyalist exile in I775. As late as I773, only a short time before he stubbornly supported Britain in the tea crisis, he purchased an expensive pew in the handsome new meetinghouse just erected by this affluent congregation.2

RELIGION AND CULTURE

vivacious Pastor Anthony Joseph of the West African Church of Hope and Glory. The Pastor's style of public address was unusu ally impressive, and built up to an appeal for greater support from the main Christian Churches for the type of small Church he rep resents. The only opportunity for group discussion in the whole meeting followed these presentations. After morning worship the next day there were five more pre sentations. The first was on the part of the Romanian Orthodox Parish, completing the Russian presentation of the evening before (and also the Greek Orthodox presentation at the Greenhills Ecumenical Meeting of the previous January). Next, Rev. Alan Martin presented the fruits of his research into the integration of immigrants into Irish Church congregations: meeting the cultural expectations of incomers to Ireland is a major challenge, so that fully integrated worship is difficult. What works best at present in Irish towns is the use of churches and other buildings at different times by different ethnic groups. A contrary instance was pre sented by Rev Noel Fallows of the Clontarf Methodist Church, whose church and congregation has, as he described it, been revi talised by being virtually taken over by a group of Christians from Rwanda. Church involvement in social justice returned to the agenda with a powerful and indeed rather harrowing account of the work being done by the Spiritans (Holy Ghost Missionaries) for the vic tims of persecution and, in many cases, torture, who are quite numerous in Ireland. The final presentation of the day was by Fr Michael Daly of Stamullen, who described his ministry to those housed at the former Mosney Holiday Camp in his parish, and their integration into the local parish for worship. The concluding event of the meeting was a presentation to Dr David Stevens, since 1992 Executive Secretary of the IICM, the organiser of 'Ballymascanlon', who is taking up a new appoint ment with the Corrymeela Community. The Emmaus meeting showed clearly the intensity and realism of inter-church activity in Ireland during his period in office.

To Heaven in A Swing: The Transcendentalism of Cyrus Bartol

Among the many popular descriptions of New England Transcendentalism which ran current in its own day, the most usual and least malicious were those which stressed its ethereality. Transcendentalism means “a little beyond,” said Emerson's friend with a wave of her hand. A meeting of the Club was like going to heaven in a swing, according to one earth-bound observer. And for many Bostonians “the model Transcendentalist,” as O. B. Frothingham pointed out, was not Emerson or Parker but Cyrus Bartol, minister of the West Church. For Bartol appeared to fit the public preconception. “He seems a man who lives above the clouds,” Frothingham remarked, “— not always above them, either.”

The West Church at Apollonia in Cyrenaica

Apollonia in Cyrenaica was founded by the Greeks as the port for the city of Cyrene, from which it is some 20 km. distant. In the Roman period its prosperity was such that it received autonomy and became one of the five cities of the Pentapolis; by the sixth century A.D. it had surpassed both Gyrene and Ptolemais in importance. Christian sources more commonly refer to Apollonia as ‘Sozusa,’ and it is from this Christian designation that the present Arab name of ‘Susa’ is derived.Witness to Apollonia's nourishing Christian life are its extensive Byzantine remains. Among these figure at least four churches, three of which have now been excavated, and what is probably the palace of the governor of the Pentapolis himself, the most recent structure to have been uncovered. What follows is a report on the ‘West’ Church excavated by the Department of Antiquities of the Provincial Government of Cyrenaica during the spring, summer, and fall of 1958 and again in the spring and summer of 1959. The consolidation and reconstruction of the church were begun simultaneously with the excavation and are still in progress.The West Church at Apollonia was first plotted by the Beecheys in 1821–1822. In their plan of Apollonia the church appears with a quite extensive forecomplex. Intervening time plus in some places an overlay of small Italian buildings completely obscured the outlines of the church and caused the forecomplex to disappear from view altogether. Yet excavation of the site has proved the Beecheys essentially correct.

The Litany of an Independent West African Church

A promising new small periodical called the Sierra Leone Bulletin of Religion appeared in 1959. Of special interest to students of religion in general and of Africa in particular, it is edited by members of the faculty of Fourah Bay College, Freetown, Sierra Leone. In order to introduce the new publication to readers of Practical Anthropology, as well as to share a valuable article with a wider audience, we reprint the present discussion of a litany developed by a separatist sect in West Africa.

Excavations at San Lorenzo f.l.m. in Rome, 1957

For many years archaeologists agreed that the extant structure of San Lorenzo consisted of two distinct parts: the nave and aisles to the west, including the narthex facing the Via Tiburtina, and the present chancel, separated from the nave by the triumphal arch and better identified as the church to the east. South of the joining of these two parts and some meters distant rises the Campanile. Further east, near the end of the east church, the monastery of the Capuchin Fathers, a 12th century structure, projects in an L-shape to the south and west. The nave of the west church is bounded on

Monumental Brass in the Old or West Church, Aberdeen

Monumental Brass in the Old or West Church, Aberdeen