page_title: Shubael Dummer
section_title: Ministry
hierarchical_section_title: Shubael Dummer / Ministry
caption_attribution_description: English: The Second Meetinghouse at York, Maine
context_page_description: Rev. Shubael Dummer was an American Congregational church minister who was killed in the Candlemas Massacre in York, Maine. Described as a man of "beautiful Christian character", Dummer founded the First Parish Congregational Church of York, the oldest church congregation in the U.S. state of Maine.
context_section_description: At the age of 24, he became a preacher in Salisbury, where he remained for two years, before settling in York in 1662. In 1660, the town of Salisbury tried unsuccessfully to obtain his services as minister.
  Dummer was made a Freeman of Massachusetts Colony on 3 May 1665.
  The meeting house at York was built in 1667 on "land given to the use of the ministry", part of it a glebe granted by Governor Edward Godfrey for the maintenance of a "house for the worship of God and endowment of minister." It was situated at what is now Lindsay Road close to Barrells Millpond.
  On 3 December 1672, he was ordained to the Ministry and settled over the church at York, on the recommendation of Richard Banks, his brother-in-law, and Edward Rishworth. At his ordination, he preached a sermon from Psalm 80:14 based on the lines: "Return, O Lord, and visit this vine".
  On 7 July 1674, his father made over to him lands at Byfield. The following year, he was listed as administrator of the estate of his father-in-law, John Alcock, together with his brothers-in-law, Joseph Alcock and Richard Banks.
  At this time, the people of the church were poor with the early settlers in the town being adventurers; the town had had no one preacher for any length of time and was seen as "an asylum for excommunicated and itinerant ministers". According to the writer Cotton Mather, Dummer "spent very much of his own patrimony to subsist among the people". In 1690, he went to Boston to secure help, for at that time things were hard-going for the people of Maine and southern New Hampshire.
  The parish records were lost when the church was destroyed by fire, and consequently there is little detailed information about Dummer's thirty years at York. Dummer is known, however, to have officiated at the wedding of James Smith of Berwick and Martha Mills at Wells in June 1677.
  Despite his family advising him to find a safer ministry, Dummer continued to support the people of the town through their various trials and sufferings on account of the Indian wars and urged the townspeople to maintain their ground, and not allow their homes and farms to be destroyed by the enemy, as had some of the surrounding settlements. According to Cotton Mather:
  Though solicited with many temptations to leave his place, when the clouds grew thick and dark in the Indian hostilities, and was like to break upon it, he chose, rather, with a paternal affection to stay amongst those who had been so many of them converted and edified by his ministry.
  After Dummer's death, Mather gave this eulogy:
  Our Dummer, the minister of York, was one of whom, for his exemplary holiness, humbleness, modesty, industry and fidelity, the world was not worthy. He was a gentleman well descended, well tempered, and well educated . . . He might have taken for the coat of arms, the same that the holy martyr Hooper did prophetically, - a lamb in a flaming bush, with rays from heaven shining of it.
caption: The meeting house at York
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