It was in the autumn of 1790.
Before wintry weather made the 20 miles or so between Olney, Buckinghamshire, and Everton, Bedfordshire, quite difficult for travel, two Baptist pastors wended their way to an Anglican parish for a few hours’ visit with its vicar. For much of the 18th century, many Baptists and Anglicans had been like the Jews and Samaritans of old: they had ‘no dealings’ with one another (John 4.9). But times were rightly changing, and Baptists were coming to realise that it was the better part of wisdom to build friendships with gospel-centred Anglicans.
Flying to Jesus
So it was that Andrew Fuller, the tall, broad-shouldered pastor of the Baptist cause in Kettering, Northamptonshire, and the author of The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation (1785), which would do much to open up the Calvinistic Baptist community to revival, along with his close friend John Sutcliff of Olney, came to spend a few hours in the company of John Berridge, the vicar of St Mary’s Church, Everton. Beginning in the late 1750s, this 13th-century parish church had witnessed remarkable scenes of revival when Berridge, after his own conversion in 1757, preached the gospel to literally thousands and hundreds, like him, ‘fled to Jesus alone for refuge’ (part of the epitaph on Berridge’s tombstone in the cemetery of St Mary’s).
