Background
Joel Parker was born on August 27, 1799 in Bethel, Windsor County, Vermont, United States.
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Joel Parker was born on August 27, 1799 in Bethel, Windsor County, Vermont, United States.
Before entering Hamilton College, from which Joel Parker graduated in 1824, he had been a district school teacher at Livonia, New York. He was a member of the Presbyterian church there. Joel Parker organized, under the name of the Catechetical Society of Livonia, what ultimately became a Sunday school. He spent two years of study at Auburn Theological Seminary.
In 1826, at the request of several Presbyterian residents of Brighton, near Rochester, New York, Joel Parker undertook to form a new church. This was organized early in 1827 as the Third Presbyterian Church of Rochester, and Parker was installed as pastor. In 1830 the "free-church movement" drew him to New York City, where he became leader of a group of Christians whose aim was to extend church privileges to the poorer people of the city, particularly to those whom they considered excluded from the Reformed Dutch and Presbyterian churches by high pew rents. The First Free Presbyterian Church of New York was organized that year with sixteen members, and with Parker as pastor. So marked was the growth of the movement that within six years four other free churches had been formed, including Tabernacle Church. After using the Masonic Hall on Broadway for a time, the First Free Church erected on Dey Street a building, the first floor of which was given over to stores, and the second to an auditorium; all seats were free. Nearly seven hundred members were received during Parker's three-year pastorate.
In 1833, Joel Parker left New York for New Orleans, where he was pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, but in 1838 he was recalled to New York by Tabernacle Church, with which his Dey Street parishioners had united. For two years, beginning in 1840, Parker was the president of Union Theological Seminary, then in its fifth year, and was also its professor of sacred rhetoric and its financial agent. For a long period the institution's financial condition was precarious, largely owing to the business crisis of 1837, and professors' salaries could be paid only in part and irregularly. Accordingly, when, in 1842, Parker received a call to the pastorate of Clinton Street Presbyterian Church at Philadelphia, he accepted, and the office of president remained vacant until 1873. He retained a deep interest in the institution, however, and was one of its directors from 1857 to 1869.
In 1852, Joel Parker became pastor of Bleecker Street Church, New York. This, his third pastorate in that city, was followed by one of six years at Park Street Church, Newark, New Jersey, 1862 - 1868. Ill health compelled him to resign and his death occurred five years later in New York on May 2, 1873.
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On May 9, 1826, Joel Parker married Harriet Phelps of Lenox, New York.