The Wapping Baptists

Church history often focuses on significant events or individuals, while neglecting the everyday lives of ordinary church members. The Wapping Baptists explores the culture and convictions of a congregation. While the church has attracted some attention from historians—primarily, because of the published works of one of its pastors, Hercules Collins—this book explores the interplay between doctrine and devotion. That is, beyond its pastors, who were the people? What did they value? How did they apply these values? And then, how did they document their decisions and actions?


This examination reveals a congregation who recorded itself in its minute book as a people committed to baptistic convictions such as believer’s baptism, church membership, congregationalist polity, the discipline of unrepentant sin, and the autonomy and internal authority of their church. However, they were also embedded within their community as people with jobs, houses, families, and lives beyond the walls of the meetinghouse. The Wapping church, then, becomes an ideal test case for understanding Baptists, Dissent, and social life in the East End of early modern London.