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By Peter Benes

Outfitted essentially for public non secular routines, New England's wood-frame meetinghouses however have been heavily wedded to the social and cultural textile of the local and fulfilled a number of secular reasons for far of the 17th and eighteenth centuries. because the purely municipal construction in the neighborhood, those buildings supplied destinations for city and parish conferences. in addition they hosted legal trials, public punishments and executions, and political and spiritual protests, and infrequently they served as protecting forts, barracks, hospitals, and areas to shop gunpowder.

Today few of those as soon as ubiquitous constructions live on. in response to website visits and meticulous documentary examine, Meetinghouses of Early New England identifies greater than 2,200 homes of worship within the quarter through the interval from 1622 to 1830, bringing lots of them to gentle for the 1st time.

Within this framework Peter Benes addresses the beautiful yet eventually impermanent blossoming of a brand new England "vernacular" culture of ecclesiastical/ municipal structure. He pinpoints the categorical eu antecedents of the seventeenth-century New England meetinghouse and lines their evolution throughout the eighteenth and early 19th centuries into Congregational, Presbyterian, and Baptist church buildings seriously inspired via an Anglican precedent that made a spot of worship a "house of God." venture a parish-by-parish exam, Benes attracts on fundamental sources―original documents, diaries, and modern commentators―to make sure which spiritual societies within the sector encouraged (or resisted) this evolution, tying key shifts in meetinghouse structure to the region's moving liturgical and devotional practices.

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Elders and teachers no longer crowded the pulpit and their offices were reduced or dropped. Bible reading and the Lord’s Prayer—long avoided as a staple of Anglican liturgy—were reintroduced into the ser vice. Psalmody was now taught in schools. One of the most significant transformations was in church authority. Although each Church of Christ was autonomous in the Congregational system, by mutual agreement they all followed a set of rules formulated by bimonthly The Meeting house and the Church 35 regional meetings and synods, of which the principal ones were the Cambridge platform of 1648 and the Saybrook platform of 1708.

Pitch pipes, tuning forks, and homemade “whistles” (whose length could be regulated) were first introduced in the second half of the eighteenth century by choristers who wanted to keep the notes within the range of singers’ voices (fig. 5). Special care was observed to minimize complaints. Kensington, Connecticut, allowed a pitch pipe as long as choristers used it “modestly,” and some pitch pipes were even disguised as books to avoid inflaming the congregation. Swinging of the hand—a way of keeping time—was begun by congregations in the 1760s; but because it was seen as “ostentatious,” Sterling, Massachusetts, outlawed the practice (as well as the pitch pipe) in 1770.

Faced with a declining number of communicants, late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century New England churches initiated compromises to stabilize or increase membership and to keep the community involved with the church. The most radical—and contentious—approach was introduced at a synod held in Boston in 1662. In a very close vote, churches were encouraged to extend the privilege of baptism to parishioners who were not church members. Nonmembers could publicly “own the covenant,” putting themselves under the jurisdiction of the church, and offer themselves and their children for baptism.

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