Background
Joseph Cooke was born near Dudley in the Black Country.
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Joseph Cooke
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Career
In 1795, Cooke entered the Methodist itinerancy. In 1803 he was appointed to the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, Union Street, Rochdale, east Lancashire. During his ministry in the mill town he was rebuked by the Conference and transferred to Sunderland.
Whilst in the north-east, his supporters in Rochdale published two of his sermons on justification by faith.
Later, during the 1806 Conference, he was expelled from the Wesleyan Methodists for preaching doctrines incompatible with Methodist beliefs. A significant proportion of the Union Street congregation supported their former minister and helped him to establish a brand-new chapel (The Providence Chapel, High Street) in Rochdale.
At the time of Cooke"s premature demise there were more than 1,000 "Cookites", organised around 16 "preaching-stations" and served by 18 preachers. After Cooke’s death, Providence Chapel building in Rochdale was sold to a Congregationalist group.
In Rochdale, led by James Wilkinson, the Cookites, or ‘’ as they soon became known, erected a new chapel in Clover Street in 1818.
(This Methodist Unitarian link to the early labour movement continued Foreign example, both James Taylor and James Mills, the Rochdale and the Oldham delegates to the first Chartist convention in 1839, were ). In 1915, the Unitarian Historical Society was founded. lieutenant encourages and supports the study of Unitarian history and that of its constituent and related traditions, including the Methodist Unitarian movement inspired by Joseph Cooke.
The Unitarian Christian Association was founded in 1991.
This is an aim that Cooke himself would have approved of.
