Pennock, Thomas

Thomas Pennock spent much of his life in the West Indies and the details of his life outside the ministry are, as yet, elusive.

Ministry

He entered the Wesleyan Methodist ministry in 1818, and spent the following twenty-five years, with two brief breaks, as a missionary in the West Indies. His work among the people in  plantation societies, where both the members and the ministers were persecuted,  and where the membership were from all races, led him to the view that how Methodism operated in Britain might not be the best guide to the circumstances overseas. He appears to have come to a view on adult immersive baptism that was at odds with Wesleyan Methodist doctrine. He left the Wesleyan Methodist ministry in 1837, taking his congregations with him.  The histories of Jamaican Wesleyan Methodism are silent on this point, although the later official history of the Wesleyan Missionary Society does tell the story.

At first he led an Independent Methodist congregation, but having received news from England of the Wesleyan Methodist Association he, and his congregation, decided they had enough in common with the English reformers to officially join them,

He came to England to establish contact with the WMA, toured the country, and then returned to Jamaica in 1842 leading a WMA mission with Matthew Baxter. Within a year, however, he had seceded again., at which point he disappears from view.

Family

Thomas married  Maria Samuels  on 4 Dec 1836 , in Trelawney, Jamaica.

After her death he remarried Ann Dudley on   10 May 1843, in Kingston WMA chapel.

Circuits

• 1818    West Indies
• 1819    St. Christopher’s
• 1820    Tortola
• 1821    St. Eustatius
• 1822    Antigua
• 1823    St. Martin’s
• 1824    Tortola
• 1825-26 St. Christopher’s
• 1827    Dominica
• 1828    Durham [England]
• 1829-32 Kingston North, Jamaica  (1831-1834 Chair of Jamaica District)
• 1833    Spanish Town, Jamaica
• 1834    Returning home
• 1835    Montego Bay, Jamaica
• 1836    Grateful Hill and Unity, Jamaica
• 1837    Seceded from Wesleyans to Wesleyan Methodist Association
• 1838-41 Jamaica
• 1841    To England
• 1842    Jamaica
• 1843    Seceded from Wesleyan Methodist Association

References

Minutes of the Methodist Conferences Vol. VIII [1836-1839] (1841) p152

Wesleyan Methodist Association Magazine Vol 5, 1842 p76

Samuel, Peter The Wesleyan-Methodist missions in Jamaica and Honduras deliminated (1850)

Foster, Henry Blaine Rise and progress of Wesleyan-Methodism in Jamaica (1881)

Findlay, G. and Holdsworth, W.W.  The History of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society . Vol,2 (1921) pp330-332

Grant, Sharon. “The Reverend Thomas Pennock, Wesleyan Methodist missionary in nineteenth century Jamaica: a case study of acculturation, enculturation, or something else?” Wesley and Methodist Studies, vol. 4, 2012, pp. 117–28. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42909831. Accessed 30 Mar. 2026.