The First Church in Salem
Image credit: www.firstchurchinsalem.org
Over the last few years members of the Roger Conant Club have been researching the life and times of the founder of the American city of Salem. The Club’s interest in East Budleigh’s ‘other hero’ has been enthusiastically welcomed by his descendants and by Salem residents on the other side of ‘the pond’.
Among the latter are members of the First Church in Salem, founded by Roger and his West Country friends nearly 400 years ago, on 6 August 1629. As you can read from the Order of Service below, it is one of the oldest Protestant churches founded in North America. It embraced Unitarianism in the early 1800s, and today the Church remains a self-governing congregation that follows its own by-laws and democratically elects its own officers.
Diane Smith, Chair of the Archives Committee of the First Church in Salem, invited the Roger Conant Club to contribute to the Founders’ Day service held last month.
‘I designed the Order of Service for the day to feature Roger Conant and the East Budleigh group with an eye toward doing more together in the future,’ she told us.
Here is a record of the service:
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