A BRIEF HISTORY OF NORWICH CENTRAL BAPTIST CHURCH.

In the November of 2013 NCBC hosted the UK-2013 conference of the Alliance for Vulnerable Mission. The following historical resume accompanied the publicity for the conference. This article below was written for missionaries attending the conference, a conference I helped to organise. 

Norwich Central Baptist Church is among the oldest Baptist churches in England. It dates itself from 1669 when its congregation appears on a record commissioned by the Archbishop of Canterbury. This record was compiled to help keep an eye on Christian congregations that were not part of the state church, the Church of England. Under the reign of the Stuart Kings the state was suspicious of non-conforming congregations and outlawed them. However, freedom of worship for non-conformists was granted shortly after 1688 when the Catholic slanting Stuart monarchy was deposed, and the constitutional monarchy of William of Orange instituted.  After the 1688 revolution NCBC’s congregation met freely in various locations one of them being the East Granary (pictured above). This building was once part of the Cloister of St. Andrews Hall and today is used by the Norwich University of the Arts. Eventually the congregation settled at the current venue in 1744 where they have been ever since. The church came to be called "St Mary's Baptist Church" (SMBC) because of its location on St Mary's plane.

The plaque on NCBC commemorating the presence
of those early Baptists at the East Granary. 

The plaque on the East Granary commemorating
 the presence of those early Baptists. 

After the repeal of the Test Act in 1823 (an act barring non-conformists from civic office) the way was clear for non-conformists to take up public appointment. The progressive ethos at SMBC favoured their involvement in liberal politics and business. Subsequently its congregation has included members of parliament, mayors, sheriffs and notable business grandees. Their contribution to public, civic and industrial life has been memorialized in city street and school names.

The industrial revolution started not long after 1744 and runs in parallel with the rise in the status and influence of SMBC. Throughout the nineteenth century the effects of the industrial revolution increasingly took hold of the country, radically changing the conditions of life and bringing about a world unprecedented since history began. Baptists, such as we find at SMBC, were in the thick of these changes and its members became increasingly respected and well placed in society. They were progressive and whiggish in their outlook. In 1781 their pastor Rees Davies denounced the war against the American revolutionaries. In 1831 the anti-slavery campaigner William Knibb preached at the church. Simon Wilkin, a member of one of SMBC’s high-status families, edited the first complete edition of the works of Norwich polymath Sir Thomas Browne. Liberal MP and industrialist Sir Jeremiah James Colman and his family attended the church.  The Baptist Sir Samuel Morton Peto, a businessman who pioneered the world’s first railway networks, was a friend of Rev. William Brock pastor of SMBC from 1833 to 1849 and attended the church when he was in Norwich. Philanthropic businessman and Liberal MP Sir George White was also a member of the Church and one of its Sunday school superintendents. 

A maker of the modern world: Samuel Morto-peto
centre stage at Norwich Railway station. 

SMBC’s move into a more mainstream Christian affiliation and away from their alienated sectarian and separatist past is symbolised by their 1860 defeat of a legal case that attempted to force closed communion on the church. Subsequently SMBC assumed more and more the culture of an establishment church. The signs of this shift in culture among mainstream Baptists are evidenced by an architectural legacy that apes the architecture of the established church. The high-status members of the church almost became a kind of neo-aristocracy. They were changing, and their mission field was changing with them.

The history of SMBC covers a period that saw the formation of modern times, from the nascent English democracy of pre-Newtonian days, through the enlightenment and the growth of the New World, to the huge social, political and Weltanschauung changes driven by industrialisation. As we have seen, members of SMBC were at the forefront in the exploitation of the new mechanico-industrial paradigm that now suffused society. Latterly, however, SMBC witnessed the late twentieth century marginalisation of Christian influence and a recrudescent Christian sectarianism and separatism. 

In 2003 SMBC merged with its daughter church, Dereham Road Baptist Church to become Norwich Central Baptist Church (NCBC). Like many another church merger it was an event pressured by the decaying Western Church population. With a loss of rich Christian benefactors and influential public leaders there is a corresponding loss of confidence among contemporary churches as they face big challenges about how to respond to tensions between fundamentalist and liberal interpretations of the faith and between schismogenic tendencies and compromise.

SMBC & NCBC’s history of adaptation to prevailing conditions cuts across the idea that there is a timeless detailed blueprint for Christian community; changing conditions changes how Christians think of themselves, their culture, their practices and how they communicate the eternal truths of the Gospel to the vicissitudes of their mission field. Today, European Christians effectively find themselves as Vulnerable Missionaries in their own society, but not because they have chosen this role: Changed circumstances mean they no longer hold the reins of power or act as benefactors with overriding influence. Therefore using only their local resources and native languages Western Christians are thrown back almost entirely on the intrinsic persuasiveness of their lives and the message they bring.

Beyond the walls of the European church the general populace has become increasingly cynical, disaffected and confused about its worldview. That confusion is a legacy of both the anti-authoritarian freedoms introduced by the Reformation and the enlightenment discovery that mechanism is more predictable and comprehensible than either magic or the numinous. The post-enlightenment Westerner, now liable to question self-proclaimed authority, asks “Does it work?” rather than “Is it the will of the Spirits?”. This change of emphasis in the way the Creation was interrogated and used, eventually reaped the wealth of industrialization. 

But these changes also brought with them a loss of both social anchorage & philosophic direction. In the human context freedom brings fearsome responsibilities, difficult choices and contention; as a result some kind of escape is often devised. In one of those tempting artifices used to simplify reality, it is all too easy to draw a circle round the science of mechanism and declare that to be the sum total of reality. The ill-fitting remnant of phenomena that are not easily placed into the categories of mechanical science may be referred to as “magic”, often with pejorative & dismissive connotation. But by itself the science of mechanism is hard pressed to give satisfactory answers to questions about life's meaning or provide a religious rationale which, as is so often true in the past, has been the source of community cohesion.

Significantly, the very same question about the incommensurability of magic and mechanism is uppermost on the agenda of the Alliance for Vulnerable Mission as this Alliance grapples with very fundamental questions about intercultural mission. NCBC is privileged to host the November 2013 UK conference. The Alliance’s cutting-edge ministry is very much in line with NCBC’s forward looking traditions. There are lessons here that go well beyond foreign mission fields, because it seems that in today’s secular Western societies Christians are by force of circumstances Vulnerable Missionaries.

Addendum December 2022: A Disclaimer

Although I have long accepted Jim Harries' VM thesis that cross-cultural missionaries working exclusively with local languages and local resources will have a greater chance of probing deeper into a culture than Intercultural Integrated Mission, I would nevertheless want to express my opinion that VM will never be (or never should be) an exclusive approach to Christian mission. I also find myself disagreeing with many of the embellishments that Jim adds to his account of VM, embellishments which look to be more an expression of a reactionary worldview than necessary accoutrements of VM. My divergence from Jim's worldview has become increasingly clear to me as I have read his recent book on "anti-racism".