Joseph Bellamy

Joseph Bellamy (20 February 1719 – 6 March 1790) was an American Congregationalist pastor and a leading preacher, author, educator and theologian in New England in the second half of the 18th century. He was a disciple of Jonathan Edwards, and along with Samuel Hopkins, Timothy Dwight IV, Nathaniel William Taylor, and Jonathan Edward Jr., one of the "Architects of the New Divinity", a branch of the New Light movement that came out of the Great Awakening. A proponent of education for both clergy and laity, for a half century out of his rural Bethlehem, Connecticut church he trained fifty ministers, and founded what was possibly the first American Sabbath or Sunday school.