The Preacher Who Crossed Over

In July of 1747 a sixteen-year-old orphan stood in the probate office at New London and did the one legal thing the law left in his hands: being “a minor, over 14,” he chose his own guardian. Laid in a row, the records of his childhood tell the story of a boy who had been starting over since he was two.

Jabez Collver was raised among the Rogerenes, the sect that went to jail and the whipping post rather than pay a “hireling” minister. He grew up to be one. Ordained about 1761 “according to the Cambridge Presbyterian order, which was a congregational platform,” he served nearly thirty years at the Beemer Meeting-House in Sussex County, New Jersey. That phrase is not a muddle but an exact description of the Cambridge Platform of 1648, and it explains why the man who took the orders and the wage never took a presbytery.

A historian of 1907 called him “an uneducated man.” He never saw the thirty-eight pages of divinity Jabez wrote out and stitched together himself.

Text, sources, and notes at history.collver.biz.