Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
Description
Dictionary.com defines it as:
- a secret or unauthorized meeting, esp. for religious worship, as those held by Protestant dissenters in England in the 16th and 17th centuries.
- a place of meeting or assembly, esp. a Nonconformist meeting house.
- Obsolete. a meeting or assembly.
Wikipedia
A conventicle is a small, unofficial and unofficiated meeting of laypeople, to discuss religious issues in a non-threatening, intimate manner. Philipp Jakob Spener called for such associations in his Pia Desideria, and they were the foundation of the German Evangelical Lutheran Pietist movement. Due to concern over possibly mixed-gender meetings, sexual impropriety, and subversive sectarianism conventicles were condemned first by mainstream Lutheranism and then by the Pietists within decades of their inception. In Finland conventicle has remained the base activity especially in the Finnish Awakening revivalist movement. Today, the cell groups used in some churches are similar.
[edit] See also
- The Conventicle Acts of 1593, 1664 and 1670 in English Parliamentary history.
Annotations
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English Dissenters religious and social, by sect, prior to, during and after the Civil War:-