Samuel Warren

Samuel Warren (1781–1862) was a Wesleyan Methodist minister, who formed a breakaway group of "Warrenites", and in later life was an Anglican priest.

Early life He was the son of Samuel Warren, a sea captain of Great Yarmouth. He was an apprentice on his father's ship at the beginning of the French Revolutionary Wars, when it was captured in 1794 by the French. They spent 18 months in captivity. There, in 1800, he became a convert to Wesleyan Methodism, and after two years a minister. At the 1834 annual Wesleyan conference, Warren contested the establishment of a Wesleyan Theological Institution, without success, and the growing influence of Jabez Bunting.

Bunting and his supporters "stood for a conservative policy based on a close alliance with propertied members of the laity, the Established Church and the government, against the feared republicanism of the people." Warren's challenge resulted in his suspension as a minister, after his conference speech was published. John Booth Sharpley attempted to mediate.

The Warrenite Grand Central Association came into being during November 1834 in Manchester, where Warren was superintendent of the Oldham Street circuit of ministers. At issue was local lay control of the Methodist ministry. A legal case brought by Warren went against him in March 1835.

The opposition to the Wesleyan conference's authority was purged, and Warren was expelled from it in August of that year. He set up the alternative Wesleyan Association.

A Manchester guide of 1836 showed five Warrenite congregations. One of Warren's allies from the Theological Institution debate, Robert Eckett (1797–1862), took the Association forward (under the modified name Wesleyan Methodist Association). Thomas Pennock, a Wesleyan missionary in Jamaica who in the years immediately after the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 was driven into a dissident position by racially-based attitudes of Methodists there, brought his "Independent Methodists" into the Association in 1838. Pennock's opponent David Kerr that year drew a direct comparison between Warren and Pennock as schismatics.

Warren himself was the first president of the Association in 1836; he then met a rebuff in 1837 as the Association expanded its base, losing the presidency, being defeated by Eckett on restricting the composition of the annual assembly, and seeing his plan to merge into the Methodist New Connexion rejected. He soon left the Association. Of the Blackley group of followers, some returned to the Bunting Methodists, others joined the Church of England as Warren did, and yet others became Unitarians.

Later life

Warren in 1838 was ordained in the Church of England. In 1840 he was given the cure of the new Church of All Souls, Manchester in Ancoats, where he remained for the rest of his life. Sir Oswald Mosley, 2nd Baronet laid its foundation stone in 1839, giving both land, and some endowment.

Family In 1806 Warren married Anne Williams (1778–1823), of the Williams family of Gresford; John Williams (1705–1788) of Llay, an early Wesleyan in Chester, was her grandfather. Her father Richard Williams (1737–1816) settled at Rackery Farm (Racre) near Rossett in 1763, and married Elizabeth Gardner (1746–1824), sister of the Wesleyan preacher John Gardner. Samuel and Anne had six sons and a daughter, the eldest child being Samuel Warren the writer.