Circa 1768. Light shone from a crowded meeting house into the evening gloom of a Charlestown, South Carolina street, where 13 year old boy, John, and his companion stood arguing about whether they should go in. John was booked to play the French horn at a function that night, but was distracted by the large numbers packing into the meeting house.
His friend was dismissive: “A crazy man is hallooing
there.”
John was curious to find out more, so began to wade through
the crowds toward the doors to see what the ‘crazy’ man was on about. His
friend was pulling at him, distracting him, telling him not to go, it was
nothing really, not worth the time or effort, they had somewhere to be… John
couldn’t be persuaded.
“If you will do one thing, I will go in with you.”
“What is that?”
"Blow the French horn among them."
This seemed a fun idea, and thirteen year old John rather
liked it. But it had its risks. It was a large crowd, and they might not take
kindly to the disruption, not least by a young black youth. Wouldn’t they beat
him? But his companion promised to stand by and defend him, so what did he have
to lose?
***
John Marrant was an African-American born free on 15 June,
1755, in New York City. His father died when he was four, and his mother moved
the family to St. Augustine, Florida where he was sent to school and taught to
read and spell. After eighteen months, they moved to Georgia, away from the
upheaval caused by the Seven Years War. The family – John, his mother, and four
siblings – stayed in Georgia until John was eleven at which point they moved
again to Charles Town (now Charleston), South Carolina. It was here that he
developed a love for music and very quickly learned to play the violin and the
French horn. Opportunities began to arise for the young and very successful
student of music. He later wrote of that time,
This opened to me a large door of vanity and vice, for I
was invited to all the balls and assemblies that were held in the town, and met
with the general applause of the inhabitants.
I was a stranger to want, being supplied with as much money as I had any
occasion for; which my sister observing, said "You have now no need of a
trade." I was now in my thirteenth
year, devoted to pleasure and drinking in iniquity like water; a slave to every
vice suited to my nature and to my years.
As a child around the age of ten, he had rejected the idea
of pursuing a trade for this lifestyle, but seems to have grown bored of it. He
left the music school at the earliest chance he could get, and after visiting
his mother in the countryside, returned to the city seeking a trade. He was, as
he later confessed, “unstable as water.”
Despite securing an apprenticeship, John continued to
perform after-hours, sometimes all night, before going back to work in the day.
It was en-route to such a musical performance that John saw the lights and
crowds of the meeting house.
***
They pushed through the crowd and after much difficulty
made it inside. John was pushing the people around him to make enough room for
him to get his horn off his shoulder so he could follow through with the prank.
The speaker was a Christian preacher - indeed, quite a well-known one – named
George Whitefield. While John wrestled with his French horn, Whitefield
announced his text, and looked around the room. It seemed to John that the
preacher’s eyes landed directly on him. Whitefield pointed with his finger and
his voice boomed: "Prepare to meet thy God, O Israel." Everything went dark.
John opened his eyes. Two men were tending to him while a
woman threw water in his face and held smelling salts to his nose. He had been
out for half-an-hour, “speechless and senseless”, he believed because “the Lord
accompanied the word with such power.” The sermon continued, but John’s
reactions to it did not improve. “Every word I heard from the minister was like
a parcel of swords thrust into me, and what added to my distress, I thought I
saw the devil on every side of me.” While he had planned to disrupt the
gathering by blowing his horn during the sermon, he found himself disrupting it
by bitterly crying out to the point he was carried out of the room to the
vestry. When the people were dismissed,
Mr. Whitefield came into the vestry, and being told of my condition he came
immediately, and the first word he said to me was, "Jesus Christ has got
thee at last.”
After days sick under deep conviction and a follow up visit
from a local pastor who prayed with him three times, John says
the Lord was pleased to set my soul at perfect liberty, and
being filled with joy I began to praise the Lord immediately; my sorrows were
turned into peace, and joy, and love.
What did it look like to the watching world for Christ to
have John Marrant?
As a thirteen year old new Christian, he devoted himself to
studying the Bible so much that his family thought he was crazy. They became so
hostile to him that he contemplated suicide, and eventually picked up his Bible
and a Dr. Watts hymn book, left the house, and didn’t look back.
As a fourteen year-old runaway he preached the gospel of
Christ to the Native American nations of his region. When facing death for
trespassing on their lands, he was miraculously spared when he began to pray in
the Cherokee language and his executioner came to faith in Christ. He
maintained an itinerant ministry to the tribes, living among them and adopting
their dress and way of life so far as compatible with the Christian life.
While still in his teens, Marrant hired himself out as a
carpenter to a plantation and there the free black man began to teach black
slaves about Jesus. This was very much against the wishes of their mistress. As
the slaves began to know more about Jesus and the Bible, they organised prayer
meetings in their quarters. This was violently raided by the master and a gang
of assistants, and the slaves flogged till the floor was covered in blood. The
meetings continued though, under cover of darkness, in the woods.
Though living in the countryside and finding it difficult
to access a place where the gospel was preached, Marrant found gatherings of
Christians in nearby towns with whom he could pray and listen to the preaching
of the gospel.
When Revolution broke out, Marrant was pressed (a form of
coercive enlistment) into the Royal Navy as a musician, and while he felt cold
and dead spiritually over the almost seven years that he served the King, he
later would write “My gracious God, my dear Father in his dear Son, roused me
every now and then by dangers and deliverances.” While manning a gun at the
Battle of Dogger Bank, he fell seriously wounded, “covered with the blood and
brains of the slain”, but survived after over three months in hospital. His
wounds later made him severely ill, so he was discharged in Plymouth, England.
When denied a pension, and despite the prejudices of the
society around him, Marrant applied himself diligently to work alongside a
merchant in London and found fellowship with churches belonging to the Countess
of Huntingdon’s Connexion, a network of churches founded by Selina, Countess of
Huntingdon in 1783. Here, he grew as a Christian, embraced a Calvinistic
Methodist theology, developed his gifts of teaching and preaching, and saw more
clearly that God was calling him to gospel ministry.
On 15 May, 1785 the 29 year old Marrant was ordained for
gospel ministry in the Connexion, and preached many sermons over the next
months in Bath, Bristol, and London. These were very well received, with
visible fruit evidenced in people’s conviction and conversion.
Marrant continued to carry a burden for his people – not
only his family, but people of African descent in North America. His brother
was numbered among the thousands of African American refugees who were
transported from the newly formed United States to Nova Scotia, not least as
many of them had fought for the Crown instead of the colonials in exchange for
freedom from slavery. His brother, who had joined his family in their hostility
to John when he first became a Christian, wrote that he was praying for ministers
to come and preach to them.
Marrant showed the letter to the Countess, Lady Huntingdon,
who believed it was God’s providential guidance. Marrant was set apart and sent
out from England by the churches for gospel ministry in Nova Scotia, leaving on
18 August 1785. Harlem Renaissance intellectual Arturo Schomburg would later
identify Marrant as “the first Negro preacher of the Methodist persuasion” and
applies the words of Methodist missionary Dr. E. Stanley Jones to him: “A Negro
preacher to the American Indians laid the foundation of the missionary work of
the Methodist Church”.
Marrant planted and organised a church in Birchtown, the
largest of Nova Scotia’s African American refugee communities, which at its
peak constituted the largest community of free black men and women outside of
Africa. Though free, they were however severely marginalised, did not receive
the reparative aid promised them by the British government, and survived in
poverty. They could not adequately support Marrant, so he joined them in barely
surviving for the glory of God in the proclamation of the gospel. The money
sent by the Connexion had been quickly exhausted by travel expenses, and there
was no regular support from England. The ailing Countess was unresponsive to
Marrant’s appeals for help. A narrative telling of Marrant’s life, A Narrative of the Lord's Wonderful Dealings
with John Marrant, a Black, had been written and published from notes based
on his ordination sermon, but not by him and he did not get money from its
publication. Marrant used his own finances to build a meeting place for the
church. Sometimes, he had no option but to pawn the jacket he wore to get to
the more remote communities he was seeking to reach.
Marrant married Elizabeth Herries, a Black Loyalist, and it
seems from correspondence that they had children. He continued to work hard
preaching and teaching in Birchtown - where he pastored a diverse congregation
of black, white, and First Nations people - and travelling as an evangelist to
native and fishing communities further afield. He also represented the needs of
his impoverished community, carrying petitions to the British governor in
Halifax, appealing for the land grants promised but not delivered, and
procuring supplies to help the people of his town at least have a fighting
chance in their harsh environment.
Marrant’s mission was to proclaim Christ toward the
creation of a covenant community submitted to the sovereignty of God, which
would be characterised not only by word but also deed – the pursuit of justice,
and the peace of his city. When it looked increasingly difficult to achieve the
spiritual focus and social flourishing of his people facing prejudice, poverty,
and a harsh climate, Marrant became involved in discussions with abolitionists,
influential black freemen, and promoted the idea as something of a missional
vision to his church.
After establishing the church in Birchtown and appointing
leader, Marrant went to New England in 1789. There, his preaching sparked a
white riot in Boston, designed to disrupt the evening meeting he was preaching
at and ultimately to end in his death. The men behind the riot were resentful
because after work they would visit their girlfriends and find them missing:
gone to hear Marrant preach. As with so
many other dangers throughout his life, he escaped unharmed and continued to
teach at a school and to preach, until he departed for England.
Marrant went to England, concerned by the lack of support
and communication from his sending churches. When he arrived, he found himself
the target of false accusations that he had squandered the money they had sent
with him. This led him to publish his Journal, in which he kept detailed
records of sermons he preached, the response he was met with, controversies he
weathered, and dangers he escaped. He was confident that no preacher in the
Connexion could have suffered more than he had, and while compelled to
demonstrate this (not entirely unlike the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians),
believed it was all worth it for the glory of God.
Marrant continued preaching at the Upper Street Independent
Chapel in Islington, London. He died within a year of his return in 1791, at
the age of 35. He was buried in the graveyard adjoining the chapel, called New
Bunhill Fields, which has long since disappeared. A year later, almost all of
his church in Birchtown, Nova Scotia immigrated together to Sierra Leone. As
they set foot on the ground of their new home, they began to sing from the
Countess of Huntingdon Connexion hymn book, “The day of Jubilee is come;
return, ye ransomed sinners home.” Within twelve days they had planted the
first Connexion church in Sierra Leone, and Connexion churches continue there
to this day.
That is what it looked like for Christ to
have John Marrant.
For further reading:
John Marrant, A
Narrative of the Lord's Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black (London:
1795) http://blackloyalist.com/cdc/documents/diaries/marrant_narrative.htm
(last accessed 24/10/2020)
John Marrant, A
journal of the Rev. John Marrant…(London: 1790) http://blackloyalist.com/cdc/documents/diaries/marrant_journal.htm
(last accessed 24/10/2020)
Joanna Brooks, “John Marrant's Journal: Providence And
Prophecy in the Eighteenth-Century Black Atlantic” in The North Star vol. 3, Number 1 (Fall, 1999) https://www.princeton.edu/~jweisenf/northstar/volume3/brooks.html
(last accessed 24/10/2020)
Cedrick May, “John Marrant and the Narrative Construction
of an Early Black Methodist Evangelical.” African American Review, vol. 38, no.
4, (2004), pp. 553–570. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4134417
(last accessed 24/10/2020)
John Saillant, “'Wipe away All Tears from Their Eyes': John
Marrant's Theology in the Black Atlantic, 1785-1808” in Journal of Millennial Studies, vol. 1, no. 2 http://www.mille.org/publications/winter98/saillant.PDF
(last accessed 24/10/2020)
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