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Essex Association Delegates learn lessons of Salem
November, 2002
Do Association delegates need to know about the Salem Witch Trials?
John Hughes thinks they do. That’s why he recently organized a historical tour of Salem – including a stop at the Salem Witch Museum and the Salem Witch Trials Memorial – for delegates and in-care students of the Essex Association.
“We wanted to show that sometimes the church goes awry, and this is why you need associations to make judgements. Today, if someone is accused of misconduct, no church can handle that alone. We needed the greater body, which is why associations were created,” said Hughes, pastor of the First Parish Church, Congregational, in Manchester.
Forty-two people from 22 churches went for the tour, which was designed to show how important their role is in the greater church. The tour included people in costume acting out roles from the past.
The group also visited the First Church in Salem, where the first local church covenant – the Salem Church Covenant of 1629 – was written. There, they heard that the covenant was written by the lay people of the church, before the pastor had arrived.
Hughes said delegates need to understand the important role of laity, because he feels too often lay people defer to clergy at ecclesiastical councils, where it is decided whether ministerial candidates are fit for ordination.
“Lots of times as people go toward ordination, they speak a language that other clergy speak, and we all sort of bob our heads,” Hughes said. “It’s really the person in the pew that this person is going to minister to, so it has to make sense to them, it has to be legitimate to them.”
Finally, the delegates visited the Tabernacle Church Congregational UCC in Salem, where the country’s first foreign missionaries were dedicated in 1812 by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, which had been formed two years earlier.
“At that time, a group of five young men suddenly got a new call that nobody ever had before,” Hughes said. “Everybody had to bind together to make it happen. No one church could sponsor them and keep them alive, so this broader body was created.”
“The Trial of George Jacobs, August 5, 1692.” By T. H. Matteson, 1855.
