A People So Favored of God

Pastoral ministry has often been neglected by historians of colonial New England. For example, Cotton Mather has been remembered mainly as an ecclesiastical and political powerbroker, as the author of countless hackneyed hagiographies, and even, erroneously, as a harrier of alleged witches. Yet for more than forty years he was Boston's most successful pastor. His in-the-trenches approach broke with the disengaged clericalism typical of his day and blazed a trail for New Light activists of the next generation. The pastoral perspective's importance has also been missed by scholars scrutinizing the Great Awakening. Yet the Awakening represented a profound pastoral crisis, as Old Light opponents brought fresh zeal to their embrace of traditional clericalism while many New Light proponents broke with this in favor of Mather's activism. Divergent methodologies led to divergent outcomes. In Boston, for example, the records of Third ("Old South") Church, shepherded by New Light activists Thomas Prince and Joseph Sewall, attest to its robust good health. In contrast, the records of Ninth ("West") Church, pastored by Old Light clericalist Jonathan Mayhew, show lassitude and enervation. Most tellingly, the records of Seventh ("New Brick") Church, led by the zealous New Light clericalist Ebenezer Pemberton, Jr., testify to terminal decline. Theologically, as others have argued, Mather and his disciples built a bridge between seventeenth-century Puritanism and nineteenth-century evangelicalism. Ecclesiologically, as this study shows, the health of the churches they pastored made it possible for evangelical Congregationalism to survive and ultimately to thrive even in Boston, Unitarianism's birthplace and bastion.