Beyond the “Halfway Covenant”: Church Membership, Extended Baptism, and Outreach in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1656–1667

Jonathan Mitchel, minister of the Cambridge Church (1656–67), used the extension and liberalization of baptism in the 1650s and 60s–later denigrated as the halfway covenant–to bring the unchurched and their children into fellowship, thus indicating a strategy of reaching out to the community, not of appeasing a lapsing or fastidious second generation.