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Travelling eastwards along the road from West to East Mersea you see a turning to the left named "Meeting Lane"; if you go down the lane you will not now find any clues as to where meetings were held or what they were about. But a little before WW2 you would have seen a weather-boarded building, with a cottage next to it; it was a chapel used for worship by the Strict Baptists, whose records date back to 1803. (The title' Strict', by the way, refers not to their attitude to morality, firm as it was, but to a theological doctrine which insisted that before anyone could take communion, they had to have been baptised as Christian believers, by immersion.)
The chapel seated about sixty, and had a floor of white brick, with three heavy oak beams across its width, supporting a tiled roof. A worm-eaten pulpit stood at one end, with an old pendulum clock on a shelf just behind the preacher (not calculated to keep sermon-length under control!)
It is not known when the chapel was built, but evidence exists that there was a building for Dissenters' worship in East Mersea in 1640 - and by 1772 a preacher from a Particular Baptist Church in Colchester was visiting the place as a 'free preacher'.
In the later years of the 19th Century, George Frederick Smith was the minister, but he became ill in 1899.
A Pastor Appleby became the minister around 1900 and served there for over twenty years; numbers dwindled slowly, and in the last years of his ministry the congregation numbered only ten or twelve people - and they were not committed church members. When he resigned through illness, a Mr Cackett, who had moved from the East End to Mersea, tried to carry on, but after he left the village, no successor came forward. The neglected building decayed and collapsed, and now no trace of it can be seen.
Recently there came to light a notebook which was kept by the Minister who preceded Mr Appleby - Mr F.G. Smith. In this notebook he kept a record of the texts on which he preached week by week, together with a prayer which he wrote for each Sunday. There is a poignant note about the entry
for December 31,1899, his last Sunday as pastor before he handed on the responsibility to his good friend Mr Appleby. His prayer for the day was: "Gracious Lord, though under a dark cloud that I am passing through, bless, oh bless, thy grace of goodness to us."' But in spite of the
"dark cloud", his choice of text was positive and uplifting: Psalm 107, vs. 1,2: "O give thanks unto the Lord, for he is good; for his mercy endureth for ever."
Strict Baptists (now commonly called "Grace Baptists") continue to flourish in Suffolk, but the East Mersea chapel and its sister church which used to be at St. John's Green, Colchester, have disappeared almost without trace; and when the older generation has gone, dusty records
will be all that is left.
The history above is based on an article by A. Morgan Derham in Mersea Island Society Mistral magazine, 1992.
See also Memories of an Essex Minister by S.R. Appleby, RUD_MTG_012 .
Two water colours of the chapel, with a few letters and minutes of the Church, are with the Strict Baptist Historical Society Museum at Fulham.
A book in the Baptist Historical Society Museum at Dunstable has been transcribed by Alan Smith - and says "Mr Merchant having fitted up a convenient place for Meeting it was opened on 24 February 1804 by Revd. George Pritchard of Colchester.". Perhaps this gives a date for the building being completed. [ CGU_BK1_008_002 ]
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