Somewhere, sometime, you know you've thought of this.
Load up Deacons!
- Thread starter NaphtaliPress
- Start date
He's sleeping, not praying! 
Ed Walsh
Puritan Board Graduate
Yes.
Fact stranger than fiction.
In early New England, there was a church "officer" called the tythingman. Among his duties was keeping churchgoers from dozing off. He had a pole with a feather at one end to wake sleeping or distracted women. On the other end was a brass ball to get the men's attention.
Here's some more information from Gemini:
In 17th- and 18th-century Puritan New England, a tithingman (or tythingman) was an elected local officer tasked with enforcing public morality, church discipline, and strict Sabbath observance.
The title derived from the old Anglo-Saxon tithing system—where a community was divided into groups of ten families held mutually accountable for law and order. In colonial Massachusetts, Connecticut, and neighboring colonies, the General Court formalized the role to ensure towns maintained both civil and spiritual discipline.
Key Responsibilities
- Maintaining Order in the Meetinghouse: Puritan Sunday services were compulsory, unheated in winter, and routinely lasted three to four hours. The tithingman sat in the gallery or paced the aisles holding a long wooden staff:
- One end featured a hard knob or brass tip to rap misbehaving boys or sharply poke sleeping men.
- The opposite end had a soft hare’s tail, fox tail, or feather used to gently brush the faces of sleeping women and children.
- Neighborhood Moral Oversight: Each tithingman was assigned to monitor 10 to 12 neighboring households. They conducted regular home visits to verify that families maintained daily prayer, taught children the catechism, and were not harboring unauthorized strangers or idlers.
- Sabbath Enforcement ("Blue Laws"): From sundown Saturday through Sunday evening, tithingmen patrolled roads, commons, and waterways to stop unnecessary travel, manual labor, excessive noise, or secular recreation.
- Tavern and Inn Inspection: Tithingmen were empowered to search public houses without a warrant to ensure innkeepers were not serving alcohol during church hours, harboring disorderly patrons, or permitting unlawful gambling.
SojourningSøren
Puritan Board Freshman
I still try to convince my superiors at the Regent University library to allow me to use a nerf gun to deal with overly-loud patrons…I can sympathize with the deacons!
jhcampbell
Puritan Board Freshman
Bring back the tythingman
SojourningSøren
Puritan Board Freshman
Seriously..folks not singing during worship, but chit-chatting during the sermon…drives me crazy!
Ed Walsh
Puritan Board Graduate
Maybe I'm not observant enough, but I don't see this kind of problem in my church at all.
I wonder why you're no observing it!
Seriously, it is not a massive problem but often enough I made a meme.SojourningSøren
Puritan Board Freshman
Wish I could say I haven’t seen it in mine, but alas…it’s not frequent, I’ll say that. It’s just a handful of folk who come and go. I wouldn’t consider them members necessarily, even.
Ploutos
Puritan Board Graduate
darrellmaurina
Puritan Board Junior
He's right. The tythingman was real.
The Congregational church in which I grew up put on an annual Pilgrim Thanksgiving service, according to the order of the Pilgrim Fathers, with a (usually unsuccessful) effort to have unaccompanied psalmsinging. The tythingman, in full Puritan attire, was a staple of the service. Of course, he always found a person nodding off, whose presence would be publicly announced and either his head rapped with the brass ball or her nose tickled with the feather or rabbit foot. As far as I know, all the people "found sleeping" were actually church members who volunteered for the public singling out, and it was DEFINITELY public because the local TV stations would typically cover it, and the US Congressman representing Grand Rapids, unless unavoidably detained in Washington on business, would read the president's Thanksgiving Day proclamation, as would in fact have been done in Puritan New England by a representative of the civil magistrate.
That was one service per year when NOBODY was going to fall asleep!
The Congregational church in which I grew up put on an annual Pilgrim Thanksgiving service, according to the order of the Pilgrim Fathers, with a (usually unsuccessful) effort to have unaccompanied psalmsinging. The tythingman, in full Puritan attire, was a staple of the service. Of course, he always found a person nodding off, whose presence would be publicly announced and either his head rapped with the brass ball or her nose tickled with the feather or rabbit foot. As far as I know, all the people "found sleeping" were actually church members who volunteered for the public singling out, and it was DEFINITELY public because the local TV stations would typically cover it, and the US Congressman representing Grand Rapids, unless unavoidably detained in Washington on business, would read the president's Thanksgiving Day proclamation, as would in fact have been done in Puritan New England by a representative of the civil magistrate.
That was one service per year when NOBODY was going to fall asleep!
jwright82
Puritan Board Professor
That's pretty cool Darrell. I bet all the kids loved it and the publicity from the News is always a good thing.
darrellmaurina
Puritan Board Junior
Correct. In parts of the United States where Puritan history is also local community history, the idea of a "Pilgrim Thanksgiving Service" is sometimes done. I don't want worship to be entertainment and would not use a tythingman for that reason, but I don't have an objection to wearing a Geneva gown with Puritan bands or using an older form of worship on a Thursday morning for Thanksgiving that is actually MORE Reformed than what the church is doing on a "normal" Sunday.
In the last rural Congregational church I pastored, we did one ourselves and usually got at least a photo or two in the daily newspaper in the closest city to us, and always got one in our local weekly. We marketed it as "according to the order of the Pilgrim Fathers," but it was our regular Sunday order of service, though using psalms from Isaac Watts "Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs" since that was, in fact, what our church had been using when it was founded in 1837. I know other Congregational churches that have used the Bay Psalm Book. If I had been pastoring a church that was founded in the 1900s, not the early 1800s, I would have used the Bay Psalm Book or the Ainsworth Psalter to conform to actual Puritan practice in New England. (Before people ask, we were using the CRC's 1959 Blue Psalter Hymnal for regular Sunday worship, with a supplemental evangelical hymnal that I wouldn't recommend but was common at the time in the RCA and in evangelical churches that didn't want "happy clappy" stuff.)
The Congregational church in which I grew up almost always had the TV stations covering its annual Pilgrim Thanksgiving service.
Why?
The church in which I grew up was a "big steeple church," i.e., an "old mainline" church which was also one of the largest churches in Grand Rapids. When people asked why one of the largest churches in the city was a Congregational church -- actually, two of the largest were Congregational, "Old First" downtown was inside the UCC and Mayflower Congregational in the wealthy suburbs was outside the UCC -- the "old leaders" would smile and say, "It was the younger sons of New England Congregationalists who moved here, saw the potential for lumber mills on the Grand River in the era before electricity, and water transport to Chicago via the river and Lake Michigan before roads were common, and figured out Dutch workers brought high quality skilled labor and carpentry skills, and brought Dutchmen who didn't just want to farm but would help us build the furniture industry. Not only were we here before the Dutch, we brought the Dutch here."
That story is accurate. The earliest Dutch came to West Michigan as farmers, but the founders of the Grand Rapids furniture industry, some of whose descendants were still members of the church in which I grew up, who invited the younger sons of Dutch skilled tradesmen to come work in their furniture factories.
The question will be raised of why those Dutch tradesmen went to the RCA or CRC. Congregationalists actually tried, and largely failed, to start Dutch-speaking Congregational churches in West Michigan, and then later, tried to have English-speaking Congregational churches in Dutch communities for the second generation, since in that era, Congregationalists were a major force behind providing teachers for schools and used the school system to start churches. (That's the back story of Ichabod Crane, from Connecticut, in the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, discussed on another Puritan Board thread.)
The RCA ended up taking most of the second-generation Dutchmen who wanted to learn English. Being in an ethnic church matters for immigrants.
As for our own Puritan Thanksgiving service in the church I pastored, the only problem I ran into was that after my first Thanksgiving in the pulpit dressed that way with the Geneva gown and Puritan bands, the ladies of the church ABSOLUTELY INSISTED that I wear the Geneva gown, with the Puritan bands, every Sunday. Not something I would have done voluntarily but I couldn't think of a good reason to say "no," particularly since wearing the Geneva gown was something that had been done by pastors within living memory of the older people in the church. Not for a few decades, and the practice had become wearing a suit and tie in the pulpit, but the Geneva gown was not so far back that it was history nobody knew. The elderly ladies said when I wore a suit, "You look like a high schooler in our pulpit, we want visitors to know you are an adult." Looking young at my age now is good, and my wife is still laughing about a recent compliment that she looks "forever 30." It is NOT good when I was in my early 20s and looked like I might not yet be in high school, and way too young for college. Our wedding photos make us look like teenagers, which we definitely were not. People who know us generally know we met in graduate school, but our photos make us look like we might have had to ask our parents for permission to marry before 18.
I'm telling this story for three reasons:
First: We absolutely CANNOT allow something we do in worship to become entertainment. Even if it's not on Sunday. Period. No compromise.
Second: There was a day when churches were a deeply rooted part of our civil life. Today, the Reformed faith is largely unknown. But if I were serving a very old German Reformed, Dutch Reformed, Presbyterian or Congregational church in a community where the church was a major part of the community's founding, I would be a member of the historical society and actively doing things like a Puritan Thanksgiving service, or a "founders day" using the old orders of service and reminding people that being Reformed is **NOT** something new or strange, but a major part of why the town was founded back in the 1600s, 1700s, or early 1800s.
Third: What the man in the pulpit wears DOES matter. I am not a fan of "clerical clothing" but there was a legitimate reason why my church said I needed to look "old enough to be in the pulpit." Conversely, wearing ripped jeans and a T-shirt says something about how the church views the man in the pulpit and what the man in the pulpit thinks about his role as "just one of us" rather than set apart for a special office.
We need to think these things through before having special services and publicizing them widely to get people in the doors. I think they can be done well even if they are often done badly.
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