Levellers

Strictly speaking the 17th century Levellers were a political rather than a religious movement per se, but they deserve mention for their influence and their nonconformist connections.

Their nickname – applied by their enemies, possibly even by Charles I himself – came about from their belief in ‘levelling’ all strata of society, and that all men are equal in God’s sight, or possibly through origins in rebel rural hedge levelling.

As well as numerous social reforms, they campaigned for the separation of Church and state.

They began as natural allies of Oliver Cromwell, many of them members of his New Model Army, but a dispute over back pay for soldiers (and a general disaffection with Cromwell’s authoritarianism) led to rebellion – this was quashed when Cromwell executed three Levellers at Burford, Oxfordshire in 1649.

The citizens of Burford remember the event to this day – see www.levellers.org.uk. Pamphleteer John Lilburne was a prominent founder of the movement – he later became a Quaker.

Liberal Catholic Church

The Liberal Catholic Church www.liberalcatholicchurch.org was effectively founded in the 1910s by James Wedgwood of the renowned china-producing family.

He was ordained into the Old Catholic Church, a German group which split off from Roman Catholicism in the 1970s through a rejection of papal infallibility, and later spread to England.

The life of Christ is the guiding principle of Liberal Catholicism, which also holds that Christ practised certain rites of ‘mysteries’ of the East – thus the movement was closely allied to the mystical theosophy movement of Madam Blavatsky and Charles Leadbeater.

Liberal Catholics, who are found worldwide, maintain there is a common unity and purpose to all religions – though this didn’t stop their own schism in 2003 over the ordination of women, and two movements now use the Liberal Catholic Church name.

Lollards

The Lollards also blurred boundaries between politics and religion, but with a more specific theological underpinning thanks to their founder John Wycliffe (1320s-1384).

Wycliffe was a theologian who criticised the Church for its corruption, disputed the divine authority of Church leaders, and famously laboured to produce the first English vernacular edition of the Bible.

He even questioned transubstantiation. He was a respected Oxford don, after his death his books were burnt, and although Lollardy persisted in pockets into the 16th century, his followers were persecuted.

The etymology of the Lollard name is disputed, possibly meaning ‘mumbler’ or ‘idler’, but the term more generally came to mean ‘heretic’. The Lollards had no central doctrine, but their anticlerical stance was an early herald of the Reformation.

London Missionary Society

The LMS was founded as the Missionary Society in 1795, then renamed in 1818, with a focus on evangelical missions to Africa and the Pacific islands.

It was non-denominational, Congregationalist (see earlier in this series) in tone and supported by evangelical clergy from both Anglican and Nonconformist churches.

Its first voyage was on The Duff, to Tahiti, where its 17 missionaries received a hostile reception; and on a return voyage the society was financially devastated by The Duff’s capture by French privateers.

In the 1830s and 1840s the LMS was more successful, apart from when missionary John Williams was eaten by cannibals in the New Hebrides.

The society disbanded in the 1970s but was absorbed into what is now the Council for World Mission.

Grindletonians

(also see Familists)
The Grindletonians were yet another small dissenting group of the mid-17th century, this time named after a place rather than a person, namely Grindleton in what was Yorkshire and is now Lancashire.

They were founded around 1610 and were active in the area until the 1660s. Grindleton is below Pendle Hill, associated with Quaker founder George Fox, who may have been influenced by the Grindletonians’ leading light, Roger Brearley.

His preaching embraced antinomianism (a rather hasty summary of which would be “you’re saved, so you can do what you like”) and the earthly paradise, and he was against the organised Church and its sacraments. Other Grindletonians included John Webster and Robert Towne.

Inghamites

The Inghamites also hailed from Yorkshire and Lancashire. Their founder was Benjamin Ingham (1712-72), an Ossett-born and Oxford-educated preacher who had accompanied the Wesley brothers to the USA in the 1730s.

On his return, he was banned from preaching in churches, and established his own Inghamite Methodists, split off from the Moravian Methodists – within 20 years there were more than 80 congregations, a few fragments of which persist to this day in Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cumbria. Ingham often preached in homes and fields, and emphasised devotion and responsibility to the laity.

When Ingham disagreed with the curate of Ossett, a Rev Godly, he wrote to John Wesley: “I have just been talking to Mr. Godly. You know, I believe he has been misnamed.”

The majority of Inghamite groups broke up from the 1760s, when Ingham himself was influenced by the Sandemanians (see later in this series), and some were absorbed into the Scottish Daleites in the early 19th century.

Various early Inghamite registers are held by The National Archives. A small Inghamite congregation was even founded in Canada and continues today – see www.farringdonchurch.ca.

Irvingites

Edward Irving (1792-1834) was a Scottish minister from Annandale who is regarded by many as the main figure behind the Catholic Apostolic Church – but not by its members themselves, who see him as more of a John the Baptist figure.

Various miracles such as prophecies, healings and speaking in tongues were believed to have taken place during Irving’s ministry in London, and the group focus on such acts of the Holy Spirit through formalised rituals of their own, under the guidance of 12 Apostles who are ‘called’ rather than ordained.

Irving was influenced by some of the poet Coleridge’s more mystical philosophies, and in 1833 was deposed from the Church of Scotland on the grounds of heresy.

The two main Irvingite or Catholic Apostolic congregations surviving in Britain are in Surrey (where Henry Drummond, a more important figure to the group than Irving himself, lived) and London, and there are others in America and across Europe – but no new Apostles have appeared since the last died in 1901.

Familists

The Familists, or Family of Love, were a mystical sect not actually born in the British Isles, but in the Netherlands.

They were founded by heretical merchant Hendrik Niclaes, who took St Paul’s assertion that a part of God is in everyone to mean we are all part of the Godhead.

Familism comes across as a something like a modern hippy cult, with a quiet community spirit, artistic following, belief in communal property – and accusations of wife-swapping from their enemies.

The movement spread to England in the late 16th century, mainly via Christopher Vitel, a joiner and preacher from Delft who settled in Colchester and Southwark. Familist enclaves were notable in Cambridgeshire and Surrey.

Rumour had it that some of Elizabeth I’s Yeomen of the Guard were Familists, as well as James I’s lion-keeper at the Tower of London, and men at the court of Charles I.

A Rev James Pordage established a Familist community near Reading in the 1640s. There is some evidence many members later influenced and/or became absorbed into the Quakers.

Fifth Monarchists

The Fifth Monarchy Men (referencing Daniel 2:44) were a millenarian group who flourished during Cromwell’s rule from 1649-1660 and planned to reform Parliament to prepare the nation for Christ’s coming, creating a new kingdom (the previous four were those of the Assyrians, Persians, Greeks and Romans).

They saw 1666 as the year of the Antichrist and some believed that Christ himself would return in 1700.

The movement appears to have started among New Model Army members in Norfolk. Leading members, who preached government reform, the end of taxation, care for the poor and… better salaries for the New Model Army, included Christopher Feake, John Rogers, John Simpson, Vavasor Powell and John Canne.

They had much in common with the Levellers, and were among the few groups to criticise Cromwell after that movement was crushed. Later key figures were Major-General Thomas Harrison – who was executed in 1660 for having signed Charles I’s death warrant – and Thomas Venner, who continued opposition against Charles II.

The Great Fire of London in 1666 briefly fuelled their cause, but eventually the flame dwindled in the early 18th century.

Free Christians

Free Christians are self-avowedly open-minded followers of the teachings and example of Christ, but without adhering to any specific creed or doctrine.

They have much in common with Unitarians and there is some cross-over of membership – if the term has any precise meaning – with the Quakers.

Free Christians often find themselves sitting alongside agnostics and even atheists in congregations at places such as Bridport Chapel, Mill Hill Chapel, Stratford Unitarian and Free Christian Church and various Unitarian chapels across Britain. Free Christianity is regarded largely as a philosophy rather than a specific denomination.

Free Church of England

The Free Church of England, otherwise known as the Reformed Episocopal Church, was founded in 1844 when it split off from the Church of England as an evangelical reaction against Anglo-Catholicism.

It holds to the Book of Common Prayer and the 39 Articles of the Church of England, as well as salvation by grace and the Bible as being the inspired word of God.

It maintains an episcopal structure, albeit a small one with two dioceses in England and a church in St Petersburg. It has around a dozen parishes overall.

The FCofE maintains a Low Church approach to worship, and has recently been riven by schisms of its own over how close its links should be with other churches, especially if they are not evangelical in spirit, and whether members should be allowed to be Freemasons or not.

Free-will Men

The Free-Will Men were a small separatist movement focused on individual free will, questioning political and religious conventions and opposed to pre-destination, who flourished between the 1540s and 1560s.

Small congregations existed mainly in Essex and Kent and had beliefs in common with the earlier Lollards. A number of their leaders were imprisoned or executed during the reign of Catholic Queen Mary I, which is when they largely died out – but they continued to influence English liberal religious traditions thereafter.