Pershore Baptist Church

Submitted by Alan Marsden on Thu, 02/10/2025 - 00:00

It was a hot, July afternoon. I had been traipsing around Pershore in Worcestershire which already involved a long walk from the station, and another to get back. I was hot and tired, and was delighted to see a friendly sign outside the town’s grand-looking Baptist Church declaring it to be open. In I went, and was offered a cup of Earl Grey by friendly volunteers all the while inspecting what appeared to be a rather fine, Victorian chapel. Sipping tea, getting breath and collecting my thoughts were just what the doctor ordered.

The church, rather than the building, appears to go back to the time of Oliver Cromwell, whose New Model Army’s officers and men were espousing Congregational and Baptist views of the local church (unlike their paymasters, the MPs, who were predominantly more conservative and Presbyterian). They were in the vicinity for the 1651 battle of Worcester, though the church’s official history seems rather more cautious, and dates it to sometime around 1658 (when the great Oliver was already dying). Although the Commonwealth and Protectorate were not the bastions of religious freedom we sometimes imagine, they covered a brief few years when serious students of scripture could examine the New Testament and create church structures uninhibited by tradition and the dead hand of episcopacy. When the monarchy was restored and Laudian Anglicanism re-confirmed as the only legitimate expression of English Christianity, Baptists like those at Pershore were forced to meet in secret until William of Orange’s Act of Toleration.

Those early days would have been heady, difficult and dangerous, and the years of persecution might have been enough to break that bruised reed. Yet God saw them through and supplied as much strength as their days demanded. Pershore Baptist will face new, different challenges in the 2020s, which will require similar quantities of strength, wisdom, resilience, and of course, prayer.