Lori Rogers-Stokes
Gathered into a Church: Indigenous-English Congregationalism in Woodland New England
From the publisher
Uncovering how and where Indigenous and settler communities found common ground using newly public church records
Puritans in the American colonies created Congregationalism, a Protestant denomination where power rested in each congregation rather than a larger central body. As has often been told, the official Puritan mission included outreach to Indigenous people. This may appear as nothing more than forced conversion under colonization, but church records from Massachusetts—digitized and made public for the first time—reveal the authenticity of this Indigenous religious experience, as evidenced by commonalities between the Congregational way and some aspects of local Native American cultures. The records also show how the decentralized churches stood in contrast to a growing civil government in the colonies.
Lori Rogers-Stokes focuses on the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the decades around the turn of the eighteenth century, a period bookended by King Philip’s War and the First Great Awakening. She uses as her primary source the many records kept by individual Congregational churches of the time. These records, accumulated over generations, have been missing from the historical record, allowing overly simplistic accounts of this religious community to circulate. With church records now available, Rogers-Stokes reveals a more realistic picture of diverse congregations and contrasts their internal workings—which show inherent flexibility and a focus on a shared creation of community—with a developing civil government focused on consolidating power around white landowners. The result is a story that can expand how scholars write about this period, this region, and these communities, both settler and Indigenous.
Review
“Through a deep reading of congregational records, many of them newly digitized and freshly available, Rogers-Stokes shows, provocatively and convincingly, that many churches functioned in the very communal, familial, assuring, and sympathetic manner that marked social life in Indigenous communities.”—Mark Valeri, author of The Opening of the Protestant Mind: How Anglo-American Protestants Embraced Religious Liberty
Check out some of Lori Rogers-Stokes’s History Camp Boston sessions:
[Broadcast on October 9, 2025; recorded earlier.]
Lori Rogers-Stokes, PhD, (lori.stokes@comcast.net | LinkedIn) is an independent scholar, public historian, and contributing editor for New England’s Hidden Histories, a digital history project making thousands of pages of colonial-era Congregational church records available through digitization and transcription. She is the author of Records of Trial from Thomas Shepard’s Church in Cambridge, 1638–49: Heroic Souls (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Lori studies the history of Woodland New England, particularly the founding decades of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, when Indigenous people and English colonizers took actions that continue to shape our lives today.
Learn more about New England’s Hidden Histories the digital project of the Congregational Library & Archives that digitizes and provides access to early New England Congregational church records here.
