Reverend John Church

John Church (1780 – c. 1835) was an Independent minister who was most famous for his involvement in the homosexual scandal of the Vere Street Coterie. He is often claimed as the first openly gay ordained Christian minister in England. Contemporary rumours about this are unproveable one way or the other, though circumstantial evidence may suggest that his "inordinate affections which led me into error" can be equated with homosexual inclinations.

A foundling discovered as a toddler barely able to walk on the steps of St John's Church Clerkenwell (hence his name) or St Andrew's Church Holborn, Church's parents are unknown. He was sent to the Foundling Hospital and spent his first six years in the care of a woman at Hadlow, near Tonbridge in Kent, before returning to the hospital. There he remained, receiving a rudimentary education, including how to read but not how to write, until he was indentured at the age of 10 to a carver and gilder in Great Portland Street. This was broken off after only eight years due to a quarrel with the master but, though he complained of poverty during this time, he managed some self-education and acquired a small personal library.

Church then moved from job to job and, on 22 March 1801, married the daughter of a Mr Elliott of Hampshire at the (Swedenborgian) New Church in the Strand. He may have been introduced to Swedenborgianism by his first employer, despite claiming to have regularly attended Anglican services during his apprenticeship. Becoming more openly an evangelical dissenter, from about 1801 he attended Itinerant Society meetings, a few years later began to preach publicly and organise a Sunday school. In 1807 he was baptised at the Grafton Street congregation under the ministry of its minister, the Revd Richard Burnham. Tried and approved as a preacher there, he admired William Huntington's high Calvinism, though it is unclear that this led, as his detractors claimed, to his practising Huntingdon's "practical antinomianism" or showing wanton disregard for accepted Christian morality.

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