In Depth:  Ruth Eardley

According to theologian Jim Packer, John Newton was ‘the friendliest, wisest, humblest and least pushy of the 18th -century evangelical leaders’. At a recent church history lecture by Dr Lesley Rowe, Leicestershire folk were also pleased to learn that Newton had a special place in his heart for the county and visited on several occasions.

Newton was motherless from the age of six, boarded at a harsh school from the age of eight, taken to sea at 11 and an accomplished blasphemer by age 12. He was press-ganged into the Navy, flogged, enslaved and, famously, became captain of a slave-trading ship.

In late April, a church history lecture by Dr Lesley Rowe (Associate Fellow in History, University of Warwick) drew striking parallels with fearful plagues of the past.

The nations were gripped by fear and uncertainty; little wonder since the Black Death wiped out a third to a half of the population of Europe. In 1625, 38,000 died in London alone and the streets were eerily quiet. An eyewitness was struck by ‘the stillness of the city’. Many died ‘without the comfort of friends who dare not visit them’.

It was the week of the ‘Beast from the East’, but in late February around 80 people attended the first of three historical lectures at Little Hill Church in Leicester.

The focus was on John Wycliffe (c.1330-1384) and the Leicestershire Lollards, but the whole was a masterful exploration of pre-Reformation years in England. Under the title ‘Anticipating the Reformation’, Dr Lesley Rowe (Associate Fellow in History, University of Warwick) showed how God worked in and through men like Wycliffe and prepared the ground for the Protestant Reformation over a century later.