Mervyn Himbury migrated to Melbourne, Australia, in 1959. Through the sheer force of his personality, he led the transformation of a small, impoverished Baptist seminary to the premier Baptist institution in Australia. From the humble life of a Welsh mining village, Himbury proceeded to university studies in Cardiff and then Oxford. The story begins with the cultural and religious background of Himbury’s early life as a Welsh Baptist, exploring the distinctive ethos of the institutions where he studied during and just after the Second World War. Himbury’s lifelong passion for history is revealed through an examination of his Oxford thesis and subsequent publications about the puritan groups from which the Baptist movement arose. In Melbourne, he quickly became known as a brilliant preacher and media presenter. As professor and principal of Whitley College, Himbury’s central concern was ministerial education that would serve the churches in a rapidly changing world. For Himbury, the central task of ministry was preaching, and it is with this dimension of his life that the biography begins and concludes, drawing upon sermon records to demonstrate his commitment as a servant of the word of God.

Mervyn Himbury migrated to Melbourne, Australia, in 1959. Through the sheer force of his personality, he led the transformation of a small, impoverished Baptist seminary to the premier Baptist institution in Australia. From the humble life of a Welsh mining village, Himbury proceeded to university studies in Cardiff and then Oxford. The story begins with the cultural and religious background of Himbury's early life as a Welsh Baptist, exploring the distinctive ethos of the institutions where he studied during and just after the Second World War. Himbury's lifelong passion for history is revealed through an examination of his Oxford thesis and subsequent publications about the puritan groups from which the Baptist movement arose. In Melbourne, he quickly became known as a brilliant preacher and media presenter. As professor and principal of Whitley College, Himbury's central concern was ministerial education that would serve the churches in a rapidly changing world. For Himbury, the central task of ministry was preaching, and it is with this dimension of his life that the biography begins and concludes, drawing upon sermon records to demonstrate his commitment as a servant of the word of God.

The five-volume Oxford History of Dissenting Protestant Traditions series is governed by a motif of migration ('out-of-England'). It first traces organized church traditions that arose in England as Dissenters distanced themselves from a state church defined by diocesan episcopacy, the Book of Common Prayer, the Thirty-Nine Articles, and royal supremacy, but then follows those traditions as they spread beyond England -and also traces newer traditions that emerged downstream in other parts of the world from earlier forms of Dissent. Secondly, it does the same for the doctrines, church practices, stances toward state and society, attitudes toward Scripture, and characteristic patterns of organization that also originated in earlier English Dissent, but that have often defined a trajectory of influence independent ecclesiastical organizations. The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume III considers the Dissenting traditions of the United Kingdom, the British Empire, and the United States in the nineteenth century. It provides an overview of the historiography on Dissent while making the case for seeing Dissenters in different Anglophone connections as interconnected and conscious of their genealogical connections. The nineteenth century saw the creation of a vast Anglo-world which also brought Anglophone Dissent to its apogee. Featuring contributions from a team of leading scholars, the volume illustrates that in most parts of the world the later nineteenth century was marked by a growing enthusiasm for the moral and educational activism of the state which plays against the idea of Dissent as a static, purely negative identity. This collection shows that Dissent was a political and constitutional identity, which was often only strong where a dominant Church of England existed to dissent against.