William O’Bryan
The Bible Christian movement was founded by William O’Bryan (Later William Bryant) he was born near St Austell, his family were farmers and Weslyan Methodists.
William applied to be a Weslyan preacher but was rejected and eventually broke away to form his own ministry. In 1815 he was in Week St Mary in Cornwall and established an independent circuit on 1st October of that year.
James and John Thorne met William O’Bryan in Cookbury, on two occasions and during the second invited him to preach at their father’s farm in Shebbear. On 9th October William preached to a group of Devon farmers and their wives and afterwards 22 of them stayed behind to encourage him to form a religious society, a third of them were the Thorne family. So, in 1815 the Bible Christian movement was born in Shebbear.
Lake farm being the home of the Thorne family it naturally became the home of the Bible Christian movement. John Thorne, James’s father, donated land for a chapel.
The original Bible Christian Ebeneezer Chapel built in 1817 still stands as an extended Lake Chapel which is used today by the Methodist church.
Next to the chapel is the old school room and behind both these buildings is the graveyard with many of those prominent within the Bible Christian movement buried there.
The Thorne Family
O’Bryan fell out with the Bible Christians in the same way that he did with the Weslyan Methodists. This led to him losing the leadership of the Bible Christians to James Thorne in 1829.
Whilst the whole Thorne family became Bible Christians and even Mary Thorne, James’s mother, went off to preach around the countryside, it was James and Samuel who made the greatest impact upon the movement with John, their brother, leaving the farm and emigrating as a missionary to Canada.
Samuel Thorne established the Bible Christian printing press at Stoke Damerel in Plymouth, where he married William O’Bryan’s daughter, Mary.
The press was subsequently moved to Prospect House in Shebbear. Samuel and Mary had nine children of which Samuel Ley Thorne was the best known as a preacher. As well as running the Bible Christian press, Samuel also ran Lake Farm.
From the beginning of the 1830’s the Bible Christians had begun sending missionaries abroad. There was no shortage of volunteers to join the significant amount of emigrees amongst the followers of the Bible Christians. and it’s estimated that over 55,000 Bible Christians emigrated from North Devon and Cornwall to China, North America, Australia and New Zealand by the end of the nineteenth century.
Last updated on 17 March 2025 by Paul Watts