“Joy unspeakable”: Thomas Foxcroft and the Contingency of Early Evangelicalism

Abstract

Thomas Foxcroft (d. 1769) ministered to the people of Boston’s venerable First Church for over five decades. While he originally intended to seek ordination in the Church of England, his time studying at Harvard College convinced him to serve in New England’s Congregational establishment. Just three years after graduating and leaving Cambridge, the Boston church voted on March 6, 1717 that “Reverend Mr Foxcroft be called to settle in the office work of the Gospel Ministry among us.” For more than forty years of his fifty-two-year pastorate, he served First Church alongside Charles Chauncy (d. 1787)—one of colonial America’s most outspoken detractors of the Whitefieldian awakenings and their misguided emphasis on “terrors of Conscience, agonies and Convulsions of Soul.” Despite the intense antirevivalism of his clerical companion, however, Foxcroft became one of New England’s most prominent evangelical networkers and publicists