From the time that English settlers began arriving on our shores in the early Seventeenth Century, the clergy have played a decisive role in securing and sustaining civil and religious liberty in America. From Rev. Robert Hunt in April 1607 at Cape Henry, VA, to Puritan leader John Winthrop, the first Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, to Rev. Johnathan Mayhew, Boston’s Congregationalist minister, who John Adams referred to as “Morning Gun of the Revolution,” whose 1750 sermon condemned unlimited submission to the arbitrary dictates of King Charles I, to Rev. Jonas Clark, Congregationalist minister of Lexington, MA, who helped Deacon John Parker train Lexington’s militia (the “Minutemen”), and many more. The British designated the American clergy, primary instigators of “the Rebellion” (American Revolution) calling them the “Black (Robed) Regiment,” a derisive reference to their full-length pulpit robes, and rightfully so, for John Adams accurately observed that preaching had “effected a revolution in the hearts and minds of the people before the war commenced.”

Pastors today continue to bear responsibility, not only for the eternal welfare of their flocks, but also for their temporal welfare by leading resistance to arbitrary governance (Tyranny) and promoting God’s gift of Liberty.