Mrs Attaway: (almost certainly not) the first female Baptist Preacher/Minister

I reference Mrs Attaway (her first name is lost to us, as far as I am aware) fairly often, and each time end up going back to the original sources. I wanted to do it again this afternoon, on nothing more erudite than a Facebook thread, and thought I really should write up a few notes and leave them somewhere I could find them, and could point other people to them easily. We have a detailed, if hostile, reference to Mrs Attaway preaching in December 1645, in Thomas Lambe’s church on Bell’s Alley, in London. (I’ve recently argued that there is good reason to suppose this was the continuation of Helwys’s original Baptist congregation–available Open Access here.) The evidence is found in Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena, published in 1646 (pp. 116-119 of the 1646 Ralph Smith edition, Wing E229). She and at least one other woman were preaching regularly, every Tuesday, in the church, and Edwards suggests that they sometimes drew congregations of a thousand or more. (He tells us that the other woman was married to a Major in the army, and gives us some details of her clothing and jewellery, but omits to mention her name; no doubt he thought we had what was important.) Edwards is perhaps best compared to the sort of modern-day media commentator who makes a career out of being regularly outraged. The book is a breathless catena of letters and reports, with details emphasising those aspects which he judges will most shock his intended reader (who is a Presbyterian minister or parliamentarian who sees the replacement of an episcopal national church with a presbyterian national church as the only way forward for England in the 1640s). Criticising the Scottish establishment repeatedly draws his ire–this is the perfection he strives towards. He detests Arminianism, which he sees as the gateway drug to every heresy, and is very concerned to have his readers understand that the leaders of the various communities he criticises are obviously not people who should lead churches–rude mechanicals, who lack breeding, social standing, and university education. (The Major’s wife may escape public ridicule because she is at least of the right social class; Mrs Attaway is in trade (horror!) selling lace in Cheapside.) Edwards seems to have a particular objection to any activity undertaken by a woman. The way he lingers on (very scant) reports of women being baptised nude in rivers at midnight really does invite a Freudian analysis, but the fact that he was roundly trounced in an exchange of pamphlets with the remarkable Independent (i.e., Congregationalist) leader and church planter Katherine Chidley over the first half of the 1640s may not have been irrelevant to this focus (he fails to mention Chidley in Gangraena, which silence is fairly eloquent testimony to how he felt their debate had gone). Already in the ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ we have a passing swipe at ‘Jezebel’ (A4v; you knew it was coming, right?) and a rising crescendo of outrage, culminating with ‘what swarms are there of all sorts of illiterate mechanik Preachers, yea of Women and Boy Preachers!’ (a1v) In his introductory catalogue of the errors of the various sectaries, the 124th entry reads ‘That tis lawfull for women to preach, and why should they not, having gifts as well as men? and some of them do actually preach…’ (30) When he comes to his evidence, the account of Mrs Attaway and her colleague is the bulk of the material. According to Edwards, Mrs Attaway first referenced the classic justificatory text, ‘I will pour out my Spirit on all people … your sons and your daughters shall prophesy’. She then prayed, for ‘almost halfe an hour’ and then preached for about 45 minutes on the text ‘If you love me you will obey my commandments’. Later, in the face of some resistance to the ministry of the Major’s wife, she identified them both in prayer as ‘Ambassadors and Ministers of God’. Lambe’s church is not the only place women are preaching, according to Edwards. He claims in briefer compass to have evidence of female preachers in Southampton, Holland in Lincolnshire, Ely in Cambridgeshire, several in Hertfordshire, and (possibly several) in Brasted in Kent. Of these, he identifies the woman in Southampton as a Baptist (she was ‘dreamt [!] into Anabaptisme‘; p. 84) and claims the woman in Lincolnshire ‘baptizeth’, at least strongly implying she is a Baptist. Ely was at the time home to Henry Denne, associate of Lambe and significant General Baptist leader, and not a large town, so it is very hard not to assume some Baptist influence there, and of course Mrs Attaway and her colleague...

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The Preacher as Antichrist: a sonnet

The Preacher as Antichrist To seize the flesh and make it word instead, Dissecting lived perfection to display Cold concepts, or trite lessons—mere cliche— I block th’ incarnate Word in printer’s lead, Make husk and dry chaff of the living bread, Turn laughter, tears, and blood, to an essay— Mere cleverness—affront to those who pray. To those who come, desiring to be fed And given hope, is all that can be said A worthless, weak, and cheap call to obey? Alliterated numbered points convey A dreary discourse, dull as it is dead. I look up to the Spirit that me owns, And ask, can life be given to these dry bones?   (Certainly not a theorised criticism of preaching; more a confession that, too often, this is what it feels like I am...

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The preacher’s task

I get asked sometimes if I enjoy preaching. I find it a hard question. I know I can’t not preach. And often, when actually preaching, I know that intoxicating experience of utter single-mindedness and control – ‘flow’ as they call it – which is dangerously exhilarating and addictive. Every worthwhile sermon I have ever preached, however, has hurt to write, as I have found that in the text that I wanted so much to avoid, and have been forced to face up to it. And Sangster’s old line, that every preacher sits down every time with disappointment and the hope that ‘next time I shall preach!’ rings true for me. These words probably reflect those two moments of pain more than the ecstatic moment of preaching that comes between. Read Revere Relish Reflect Research Receive Realise React Recoil Resist Repress Reject Rebel Retreat Reassess Repent Reform Return Recall Rephrase Reclothe Redact Rehearse Refresh Rewrite Reveal Recount Release Rejoice Reap Regret Rest Regroup...

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‘Show, don’t tell’: bad preaching and mock reality TV for kids

Our seven year old daughter is presently obsessed by a CBBC show called ‘The Next Step’. I stand up and leave the room when the show comes on. Recently I finally worked out why. It’s because it is far too like bad preaching. And I hate bad preaching (particularly when I am the preacher).

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Why TED talks are far less interesting than revival sermons

I like good oratory. I teach public speaking regularly. I source and buy or download examples of great (imho…) examples of the genre, from business, politics, cinema, and the church. I watch the best of them over and over, making notes on why they work. I go over videos almost frame-by-frame with classes and seminars, pointing out this hand-movement, that inflection, the use of eyes, the deployment of silence, and of course two dozen or more classical rhetorical techniques, which I name easily in Greek and English. I like good oratory. A while ago, at a dinner party, the conversation turned to TED talks. I admitted, truthfully, that I have never yet watched to the end of one. It turned out that another guest was VP of a firm that sponsored one of the regional conferences, and so the conversation became slightly awkward… …I remember, however, not so much the awkwardness as the realisation. It had not occurred to me until I said it over that table, but it is the case that I have never yet watched to the end of a TED talk. I’ve begun to watch several dozen – over a hundred perhaps. I’ve learnt from many of them. In several cases I’ve bought the speaker’s book. But I’ve always clicked the close button before the presenter received her/his applause. On reflection, this is odd. I like good oratory. I study good speakers obsessively, watch them repeatedly, pause the video, go in slow-mo, rewind, replay. But every TED talk I have clicked on, I have clicked off soon afterwards. This week I tripped over an NYT op-ed entitled The Church of TED, proposing that TED talks are the revivalist sermons of yore. This made me think again of my awkward conversation. I have heard and analysed great revivalist sermons; they are a world away from what I see on the TED video streams. When I teach public speaking, I stress one point regarding purpose: the stand-up monologue is, demonstrably, a fairly poor way of communicating information. It excels as a way of communicating vision. To use the form effectively, the speaker should not aim at the mind, but at the heart. A good set-piece speech is not about changing ideas, it is about changing desires. All of this is extensively demonstrated in the literature on public speaking. Of course, this makes sense of preaching. When I speak to experienced preachers I ask them to summarise the message of their last sermon in one sentence (if it was a well-constructed sermon, they will have done this before starting to write it of course). Then I ask them to estimate how many of those who heard the sermon would not have already known that idea. 5% is rare; 10% almost vanishingly so. Preachers repeat endlessly truths their congregations know well, with the hope and prayer that at least some of those congregated might this time be inspired to live what they profess to believe a little better. They aim at hearts, not minds, seeking to change desires, not ideas. The TED talk – classically; no doubt there are exceptions – proposes new ideas to the hearer; it aims at communicating information, not redirecting desire. Generally in my (I freely admit, limited) experience, the informational content of a TED talk is fully conveyed in the first three minutes; however interesting and arresting the talk, there is no need or purpose in watching beyond that. I confess to a very short attention span – no; let me rephrase that; I confess to a very low boredom threshold. I can give weeks to working slowly through an obscure Latin text if it continues to offer me something new, but a videoed speaker who has said his piece gets about twenty seconds more, and then is dismissed. Revivalist sermons told their hearers nothing new, but convicted them of the need to act on the things they professed to know. They aimed at desires, not ideas. This is, simply, the right use of oratory. And in politics and in business this is visibly the successful use of the set-piece speech. I play my students a speech Bill Gates gave, full of technical specs, rich in information, instantly forgettable, extraordinarily boring. Then I play them Steve Jobs’s keynote from a few weeks later, launching the MacBook Air. He said one thing: ‘it’s thin.’ Oh, there is a pile of numbers and pictures and comparisons to make you realise that he means, ‘no, really, it’s thin!’ And there is of course a powerful message about desire: ‘thin is beautiful; thin is desirable; you want this computer…’ But the informational content of the speech? ‘It’s thin.’ The speech is aimed at hearts, not heads; it is about desires,...

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