Welcome back to another episode of Five Minutes in Church History.

On this episode, we'll be spending some time looking at church history in one of the middle colonies.

It's one of the colonies that doesn't get a lot of attention, and it is time to correct that. It is the colony of

Delaware. And the first date in church history is 1682. This is the year that William Penn wrote his frame of government.

But before we get into it, a little background. From 1614 through the 1660s, the Dutch

controlled much of what we would call the middle colonies. Now, there was also some independence

for a Swedish colony in there, and we'll get to that in a little bit. But then in the 1660s, the English took it over from the Dutch,

and William Penn first was in New Jersey and a proprietor,

and then he took his own colony, Penn's Woods, of Pennsylvania.

And Pennsylvania at that time included the lower counties along the Delaware River, and in 1704,

those counties became the colony of Delaware.

But back to 1682, Penn brought some significant political reforms to his colony.

He had a bicameral house. There would be a governor

with a provincial council on the one hand, and then a general assembly elected from freedmen

on the other. But what was unique about Penn's colony was religious freedom. In his frame of

government, he wrote that all persons living in this

province who confess and acknowledge the one almighty and eternal God to be the creator, upholder,

and ruler of the world, and that hold themselves obliged in conscience to live peaceably and justly

in civil society, shall in no ways be molested or prejudiced

for their religious persuasion or practice in matters of faith and worship. Nor shall they be

compelled at any time to frequent or maintain any religious worship, place, or ministry whatever.

This was unique among the Puritan New England colonies, the Anglican-controlled southern colonies,

...