Brougham Place, North Adelaide, church a peak of 1860s Protestant dissent declared in classical Venetian style

Brougham Place Congregational (later Uniting) church in North Adelaide, was a classical contrast with the nearby gothic St Peter's Anglican cathedral, but also opened with the liberal theology of its its first pastor James Jefferis.
Jefferis images courtesy state Library of South Australia

The opening of the imposing classical Venetian-iconic-style Congregational church in Brougham Place, North Adelaide, from the 1860s was a high point of South Australia as a “paradise of dissent” for its Protestant nonconformists. The church reflected the wealth and influence of the dissenters and nonconformists in the province.

Architect Edmund Wright, in partnership with E.A. Hamilton, won the design competition for the church that had its the foundation stone (taken from the River Torrens bed) laid on May 15, 1860. The window openings, with strong Venetian influence, were within pilastered wall surfaces robustly detailed with heavy string courses and set below a bracketed entablature with balustraded parapet topped with urns. The unusual composition evoked baroque designs and the classical style, contrasted with the nearby gothic St Peter's Anglican cathedral.

Working with bluestone from Dry Creek or Glen Osmond, the builders were Scott and Opie, and the clerk of works was Thomas Frost who later became an architect and designed the church’s lecture hall, added in 1878, after a tower in 1871 designed by Hamilton. The pipe organ built in 1881 was "the largest two manual organ in the colony", and restored in 1914.

As important as its physical features, the Brougham Place church became a “resort for enquiring minds” and important in the intellectual life of South Australia.

South Australian Congregational church pioneer Thomas Quinton Stow, a strong promoter of education, had long wanted to up a church fellowship in North Adelaide. He selected the Brougham Place site and started the building committee.

The North Adelaide’s church’s first minister James Jefferis had become a Congregational minister in England after declining a wealthy uncle’s offer to put him through Oxford or Cambridge with a guaranteed income if he entered the established Anglican church.

Instead, Jefferis was attracted to Protestant dissent. In 1852, he entered the Congregational New College, linked to the University of London. Here he reconciled scientific discovery with religious belief and liberal theology.

Because of his own health concerns, Jefferis accepted Stow’s invitation to come out to South Australia. From 1859, Jefferis’s preaching at the North Adelaide Congregational Church, initially with its services in the Temperance hall in Tynte Street, North Adelaide, attracted many with his liberal approach to religion. His evening sermons applied Christianity to topical questions.

During the 1860s, the church became a resort for “enquiring minds professing different creeds or having no settled belief”. Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Roman Catholics and Jews joined in worship in response to the Jefferis’s progressive theology where “science and philosophy were looked upon as handmaids to religion”.

Jefferis played an important part in moves towards setting up the University of Adelaide in 1874.