Thomas Gillespie (minister)

Thomas Gillespie (1708 – 19 January 1774) was a Scottish church leader.

Gillespie was born at Clearburn, in the parish of Duddingston, Edinburgh (then part of Midlothian). His father died when he was young, and his mother ran the family farm and brewery. She encouraged him to hear Thomas Boston the elder preach.

After a period in the family businesses, Gillespie studied at the University of Edinburgh from 1732. In 1738 he left for the seminary run at Perth by William Wilson (1690–1741) of the Secession Church; but was not impressed and moved on after a short while. He then went to Philip Doddridge at Northampton in 1740, with a recommendation signed by 12 Scottish ministers, five of whom were "Marrow Men". There he was ordained in January 1741. He ministered at Hartbarrow in Lancashire, and September 1741 was admitted minister of the parish of Carnock, Fife. The presbytery of Dunfermline agreed to sustain as valid the ordination he had received in England, and to allow a qualification of his subscription to the church's doctrinal symbol, so far as it had reference to the sphere of the civil magistrate in matters of religion.

Gillespie was closely involved in the religious revivalism of the 1740s in Lanarkshire, at Kilsyth and Cambuslang. It was associated with the preaching of George Whitefield in Glasgow in 1741–2, and was taken up as a phenomenon by John Erskine, The Signs of the Times Consider'd (1742). The local ministers involved were William McCulloch at Cambuslang, and James Robe at Kilsyth. The evangelical John Maclaurin was drawn in from outside, as was Gillespie, who edited the conversion testimonies collected by McCulloch.

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