· 1649 Abingdon Baptist Church was founded
with John Pendarves as their first minister. Pendarves was a Cornishman, educated at Oxford, who was vicar of St. Helen's Church,
in Abingdon until 1647, when he became convinced of the Baptist understanding of scripture and left the established church. He died
aged 36 in 1656 and an orchard on Ock Street was bought as a burial ground. At this time the congregation met in a house in the area
now covered by West St. Helen Street car park.
· 1660 Charles II was restored to the throne and in 1660 a period of persecution began for dissenters, including Baptists. There were
laws enforcing worship at state churches and those who refused were liable to fines and imprisonment. Amongst Abingdon dissenters
the most notable was the assistant pastor, John Tomkins, who on one occasion hid in a wooden chest to escape his pursuers.
· 1686 Then pastor, Henry Forty, who had already spent a number of years in Exeter jail, was brought with others before the Assizes for absenting themselves from the Parish Church and not receiving the Sacrament at Easter. However James II granted a dispensation and they were acquitted. The next day, Sunday July 11th 1686, large crowds gathered at the church for morning and afternoon worship.
· 1689 After
the accession of William and Mary, the Act of Toleration was passed, granting dissenters freedom of worship.
· 1700 The first "Meeting House" was built by Abingdon Baptists on the present site, in the orchard that had been bought 44 years previously. Part of one of the old walls is said to be still standing near the east boundary.
· 1714 - 1824 The Tomkins family had been an active part of the church from its foundation until the late nineteenth-century. Many of them were buried in the Church graveyard. Yeoman farmers, they built up a successful malting business and in the eighteenth century also went into banking. They also contributed some of Abingdon town's most distinguished buildings - Stratton Lodge, Twickenham House and the Clock House. They also endowed the Tomkins Almshouses in Ock Street. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries they, along with other Baptists, and Congregationalists, ran many of the trades and businesses in the town. They played an influential part in its civic life.
· The most distinguished minister of the Baptist Church in Abingdon was undoubtedly the poet, preacher and scholar, Daniel Turner whose service spanned fifty years, 1748-98. His library is now part of the Angus Library, Britain's premier collection of antiquities at Regent's Park College in Oxford. The church manse, now called 35 Ock Street, seems to have been used as an early theological academy for training Baptist ministers.
· 1714 After many years of peaceful liberty, restrictions on dissenters were again threatened by the passing of the Schism Act which would have dealt a fatal blow to the growing number of schools set up and run by dissenters. However Queen Anne died on August 1st, the very day the bill was to have been given the royal assent. The "good news" was conveyed to a minister preaching in a Baptist church in London by the dropping of a white handkerchief from the gallery, and has been remembered in Abingdon Baptist Church ever since by the Schism Sermon delivered traditionally in the evening of the first Sunday in August.