Gathered Into a Church: Indigenous-English Congregationalism in Woodland New England

Join us for a virtual book talk with Dr. Lori Rogers-Stokes on her important new book on Indigenous-English Congregationalism in 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.

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.

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.

Email any questions to programs@14beacon.org.

SPEAKER BIO

Dr. Lori Rogers-Stokes is an independent scholar, public historian, and contributing editor for New England’s Hidden Histories, a digital history project of the Congregational Library & Archives. She is the author of Gathered into a Church: Indigenous-English Congregationalism in Woodland New England, out in September 2025 from the University of Massachusetts Press, and 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, where Indigenous people and English colonizers took actions that continue to shape our lives today.