A specific providence: pioneering Trowbridge's Tabernacle Church

Historically, Trowbridge in Wiltshire was a seedbed of Protestant Dissent. And one of the key vehicles of that dissent in this market town was the Tabernacle Church, a Congregationalist product of the First Great Awakening.

Central in the founding of this work was Joanna Turner (1732–1784), an ardent Methodist who was irrepressible in sharing the gospel and indefatigable in her efforts to extend the rule of Christ. After using her home as a house-church, she paid £500 for a small chapel to be built. This was later replaced by a meeting-house that was built in 1771 and measured 40 feet by 30 feet, which Joanna and her husband mostly funded. It was named the Tabernacle, after George Whitefield’s famous meeting-house in London. The church’s first minister (pictured) was John Clark (1746–1808).

Clark’s father, also John Clark (1702–1780), was a brewer, clothier, and shipping merchant. The son was principally a clothier, based in Trowbridge. Focused almost exclusively on the manufacture of cloth from soft Spanish merino wool, the younger Clark employed weavers and dyers from Wiltshire to Berkshire. Many of the villagers in the Avon Valley near Trowbridge worked for Clark, whose business activities led to his amassing a small fortune.