Michael Brown

Michael Brown served as minister at the Gainsford Street Baptist Chapel, Blackfields, from 1778 into the 1820s. Like Mary Hays, he moved into Arianism and Socinianism in the 1780s, having rejected the Calvinism he initially preached in the Blackfields chapel. If John Eccles was already more amenable to an Arminian position on free will, then Mary Hays's movement away from orthodox Calvinism probably began at this time and was not solely the result of her correspondence with Robert Robinson in the 1780s. John Dunkin, Jr., remained a staunch defender of Calvinism, though more from an evangelical position, as evidenced in his 1783 pamphlet, The Divinity of the Son of God, and the Complete Atonement for Sin . . . in a Letter to a Friend, a response to Joseph Priestley’s An Appeal to the Serious and Candid Professors of Christianity, which appeared that same year. Dunkin appears to have left the Gainsford Street Chapel by that date (he was involved in founding another Baptist chapel in Southwark) which further suggests Brown's movement into heterodoxy by that date.