The Westminster Assembly of 1643 was appointed by the Long Parliament to restructure the Church of England. The Puritan faction in Parliament first attempted to appoint an assembly in October 1642, but the bill did not get Royal Assent from King Charles, and so Parliament issued its own command in June 1643.

The Assembly consisted of 30 laymen and 151 clergymen. The clergy were selected to represent four separate groups:

1. The episcopalians (who supported an episcopacy) included such figures as James Ussher, bishop of Armagh. The episcopalian group usually did not attend the sessions, because the king had not authorized them.
2. The presbyterians (who supported an assembly-based structure found in Puritanism), the largest group, included figures such as Edward Reynolds .
3. A small group of Independents (of the various Baptist views) were present and had the support of Oliver Cromwell, and these included Thomas Goodwin.
4. The Erastian representatives, such as John Lightfoot, who favored the state's primacy over the ecclesiastical law.

Its first meeting was in the Henry VII Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey on July 1, 1643. It later moved to the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster. It met over 1,100 times between 1643 and 1649, and it was never formally dissolved by Parliament. During the Interregnum, it met generally only for judicial matters to try ministers. The first act of the Assembly was the revision of the Thirty-Nine Articles. However, when the Assembly passed the Solemn League and Covenant, it abandoned the Thirty-Nine Articles entirely and established the Westminster Confession. It also produced a directory of worship and two Westminster Catechisms. All of these matters were debated fiercely. The Erastians and Presbyters would never agree on church government, and the Independents and Prebyters would not agree on the value and nature of sacraments.

The resulting documents of the Westminster Assembly were never wholly accepted in England, but they were accepted by the Church of Scotland. Further, they formed cornerstones of the Presbyterian Church as it established itself throughout Europe.

References

• Cross, F. L., E. A. Livingstone, eds. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. London: Oxford UP, 1974.

External links

• The 1646 Westminster Confession