Helwys, Thomas

(c. 1550–c. 1616)

   Polemicist and Denomination Founder.

   Helwys was born in Nottinghamshire, England. In 1608 he became a member of the ‘Brownist’ Church in Amsterdam, which had been founded by John smyth in 1606. However, both he and Smyth were expelled from the congregation because they rejected infant baptism. They formed a new Baptist congregation which, in 1611, issued a declaration of faith defining baptism as ‘the outward manifestation of dying with Christ and walking in newness of life: and therefore in nowise appertaineth to infants’. In 1611 Helwys returned to England and established his headquarters in Newgate Street, London. Although this was probably the first general Baptist church in England, in fact the community followed the Mennonite practice of baptism by affusion rather than total immersion. Helwys is also remembered for his Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity in which he made a plea for full freedom of individual conscience.

   W.H. Burgess, John Smith, the Se-Baptist, Thomas Helwys and the First Baptist Church in England (1911);

   A.C. Underwood, A History of English Baptists (1947).