The Rev Daniel Taylor was the founder of the New Connexion of General Baptists, a revivalist offshoot from the Arminian Baptist tradition, one of two main strands within the British Baptist movement.
Background
Dan Taylor was born at Sourmilk Hall, Northowram, near Halifax, Yorkshire, on the 21st December 1738 to Azor Taylor and his wife Mary (Willey). Like his father he was a coal-miner who joined the Wesleyan Methodists in 1761, during his early twenties.
Career
The following year the Birchcliffe group built their own chapel. Taylor, a young man used to manual labour, quarried the stone himself. Traditionally non-creedal, many General Baptist congregations were becoming increasingly liberal in their doctrine, obliging the more orthodox and the more evangelical among them to reconsider their allegiance.
Well organised from the outset, the Connexion thrived, particularly in the industrial areas of the English Midlands.
By 1817, a year after Taylor’s death, the Connection had 70 chapels. Taylor ministered to the Birchcliffe Baptist Church for twenty years until 1783 when he moved to a chapel in Wandsworth, south west London.
In 1813 it moved to Wisbech, Cambridgeshire. Daniel Taylor’s younger brother, John Taylor, was also a Baptist pastor.
Views
Whilst never straying from Wesley’s Arminianism, Taylor quickly tired of what he saw as Wesley’s authoritianism.