Revd John Angell James

Humble Origins | Pastor of Carrs Lane Church |
Denominational Leader | Author | Anti-Slavery Campaigner | Ecumenical Pioneer | Supporter of Missions and Ministers

• Pastor of Carrs Lane Church 1805-1859
• Founding father of the Congregational Union in 1832, and of the Evangelical Alliance in 1846
  

Humble Origins

John Angell James was born in 1785 in Blandford, Dorset.  When aged 13 he was apprenticed to a draper in Poole.  But he became a Sunday School teacher, and four years later, without further formal education, entered Gosport Congregational Academy to train for the ministry.

Pastor of Carrs Lane Church

The student minister preached at Carrs Lane in summer 1804, and was invited to be its pastor.  He took up his post in September 1805, aged 20.  The previous minister had left with half the congregation, and the church remained weak for some years.  But by 1812 it was necessary to add galleries to the 10-year old second chapel to increase the seats from 480 to 800; and by 1820 to replace it by the third chapel seating 1800.  He was its pastor for 54 years, until he died in 1859.

Denominational Leader - The Creation of the Congregational Union

Before the 1830's, Congregational Churches had been fiercely independent; it being one of their strongest tenets that each church should be run by its own congregation.  They were linked only in County Associations.  James however believed they would be stronger if they were connected together nationally.  In May 1831, at a meeting of church representatives at the Congregational Library in London, he proposed the establishment of a Union of Congregational Churches.
After a year of consultations, he proposed that the provisional committee's proposals be adopted, and the Congregational Union of England and Wales was formed in May 1832.  (The Congregational Union was one of the founder members of the URC in 1972.) 

Author

A prolific writer (17 books), his most influential work was 'The Anxious Inquirer after Salvation Directed and Encouraged' (1834), a 186-page book of which over 400,000 copies were printed, in eight languages.  Its style, like that of his preaching, was florid; but it is so well regarded by some that it is still available from Quinta Press, as is an abridged version of his 'Christian Fellowship or The Church Member's Manual' (1835). 

Anti-Slavery Campaigner

James is one of 136 leading campaigners in an oil painting of The Anti-Slavery Society Convention 1840.  The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society pressed for worldwide abolition; slavery had been abolished in the British colonies in 1833.  The National Portrait Gallery website makes it possible to see a reproduction of this painting, and to zoom in on James in the crowd.  Click on the Next button above the painting (or on this link) to see a small engraving of James, which can be enlarged.

Ecumenical Pioneer - The Creation of the Evangelical Alliance

Starting with a speech to the Annual Assembly of the Congregational Union in May 1842, James was the chief advocate of a 'Union of all Protestants' (apart from the Plymouth Brethen, and the High Church element of the C of E).
He repeated the call in a special Public Meeting in 1843; and in August 1846 a meeting, including representatives of churches in Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, and the USA, set up 'The Evangelical Alliance - a confederation, on the basis of great evangelical principles held in common'.  (The Evangelical Alliance is still an influential organisation today.)

Supporter of Missions and Ministers

James preached at the annual meetings of the London Missionary Society (now part of the Council for World Mission) in London in 1812 and 1819.  The second sermon, preached from memory, lasted two hours!
In 1853 he launched an appeal which financed the sending by the British and Foreign Bible Society of two million New Testaments to China; and in 1858 he made an appeal for a hundred missionaries to go there.
He was Chairman of the Board of Education of Spring Hill College (the Birmingham ministerial training college later to become Mansfield College Oxford) from its foundation in 1838.  Meeting its students regularly, he chose one, RW Dale, to be his assistant and eventual successor.  James used the £500 given him on his 1855 Jubilee to start the Pastors Retiring Fund for Congregational Ministers.