‘Mothers in Israel’

In 1653, the Choice Experiences of Jane Turner appeared in print as the first singly published, Baptist conversion narrative. ¹ She acknowledged that she walked ‘in an untrodden path, I having never seen any thing written before in this manner and method’, but was ‘well satisfied’ that her footsteps would ‘be found as for matter, so for method and manner, among the foot-steps of the flock of Christ, where I desire to feed besides the Shepheards Tents’. ² Here, Turner recalls Christ’s answer to his spouse, the Church and ‘fairest among women’ in Song of Songs 1:8, that she should adhere to the true pastors of his flock, feeding on his word. The spouse’s initial complaint, according to the Geneva marginal notes, was that when she realised her sin and ‘negligence’, she had come across some pastors that ‘set forthe their owne dreames instead of thy [Christ’s] doctrine’. Indeed, this is the message of Turner’s conversion narrative: she is the recipient of God’s free grace, evidenced by her saving faith as well as her preservation from temptation and error, despite being endangered by many pastors and sects that she believed ‘set forthe their owne dreames’. She concludes, in a section expounding on ‘true Ministery’ (p. 97) reflecting on her own baptism, that ‘publick hearing out of the Church of God’ (p. 96), outside the communion of strict Particular Baptists, was unprofitable and dangerous: her own experiences attest to the confusion caused by open-communion churches (those composed of both paedo- and anti-paedobaptists) and the evangelising efforts of the Quakers. Despite these several hindrances, Turner came to acknowledge her sins and corruptions, before arriving at a belief in the saving graces of God, undergoing the ‘labors and travels of my soul’ before her conversion which she described ‘as life from the dead’ (p. 129). Having received this grace, Turner believed that it was her duty to share this with other Baptists in her own Newcastle Church, but also to others further afield: the title page of her work indicates that it was sent to the small Baptist churches in Berwick-upon-Tweed and in Scotland. In her observations following the fourth section of her work, which included the circumstances of her baptism, she wrote that she believed it was ‘the duty of all that have received the Grace of God to be active for his Glory, so it is the nature of Grace to teach and engage Saints to do the same’ (p. 90). Despite the hostility faced by some women in the previous chapter, Turner’s exemplary experiences of grace, and her learned arguments against anti-Baptist beliefs, earned her the title of ‘Mother in the true Israel’ from John Gardiner, a London Baptist. He was, of course, aligning Turner with Deborah who ‘arose a mother in Israel’ (Judges 5:7), and who, according to the Geneva translation’s marginal notes, was ‘miraculously stirred up by God to pitie them ampentity deliver them’. It was Turner’s grace made manifest by her conversion (or her ‘new birth’ as other Baptists called it) that had allowed her such ‘social and cultural authority’ in the ‘true’ Baptist churches. ³ This chapter, therefore, will focus on women’s contributions to the Baptist movement as mothers, mediators, and advisors, committed to nurturing their congregations and seeking after Christ by contributing to doctrinal controversies, particularly arguments over baptism’s correct practice, as well as evangelising their followers.