By Rev. Dr. Jim Lawrence
It is good to routinely make a pilgrimage to sacred beginnings, and a case can be made that our shrine city is Boston. That is where the Swedenborgian movement originally congealed in a fulsome way in America, and it still boasts more Swedenborgian churches in the greater Boston area than any other city.
James Glen gave the first public lectures on Swedenborg in 1784 in this country on a short swing that included Boston. Two converts were netted, which quickly grew into a reading circle that included some prominent citizens. They gave a set of Swedenborg’s works to young Samuel Worcester, son of a prominent, if controversial, Congregational minister and also a student at Harvard. Hearing that the reading circle also gave a set of the Arcana Coelestia to Harvard College, Worcester, and his younger brother, Thomas, went looking for them. Not finding them on the library shelves, they searched until they located the volumes in a dusty room that the university called a “Museum” but which the Worcester brothers said was more a broom closet—though it did also contain a stuffed alligator.
Thomas Worcester was also a Harvard student and a good friend of fellow student Ralph Waldo Emerson. Thomas gathered a reading circle of Latin-reading Harvard students—a group that included three future Swedenborgian ministers, a Swedenborgian layman who became a banker and state senator, one who became a druggist and a leading Swedenborgian thinker and writer, and another who became a lawyer and dean of Harvard Law School. That’s a productive haul for a trial reading group! With this nucleus, the Boston Society of the New Church was founded in 1818, and the congregation named Thomas Worcester as its leader.
Over time, there would be as many as ten Swedenborgian churches in the greater Boston metropolis. Worcester himself was a force far beyond Boston. He became the most prominent denominational leader as the Swedenborgian movement began to grow, having become legally founded in 1817 as the General Convention of the New Jerusalem. Worcester was an intense and creative force, as he became the on-point advocate for Convention’s congregational polity. He was resisting the centralized episcopal movement advocated by the Academy Movement anchored in Philadelphia, which ultimately broke away in 1890. Worcester’s style became synonymous with the “Boston Position,” and he holds the distinction of having served the most years total as president of Convention: a whopping thirty-six years across three incumbencies (1832, 1839–49, and 1851–74).
Importantly for Boston, Worcester drove the beginnings of our seminary in 1866, the New Church Theological School, which had numerous locations in the Boston area for decades, including in the Boston Church itself, until finally establishing its beautiful campus adjacent to Harvard Yard in Cambridge, where the original seminary chapel is today a noted architectural gem of Cambridge with its “pocket Gothic” style.
At this year’s convention on outing day, we will be visiting the Boston Church as well as experiencing the surrounding Boston neighborhood, rich with culture and history. Consider a pilgrimage to Boston this summer!
—Rev. Dr. Jim Lawrence
Read the full issue of the April Messenger.
Meet Jim Lawrence
Rev. Dr. Jim Lawrence is the president of the Swedenborgian Church of North America. He was the dean of the Center for Swedenborgian Studies for 21 years prior to being elected President in 2022.
