In January 1780, the Reverend John Newton accepted the benefice of St Mary Woolnoth with St Mary Woolchurch, an elegant church designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor (1662?–1736), and situated on Lombard Street in the heart of the City of London. It was a far cry from Olney, the lace-making market town in rural Buckinghamshire where he had ministered for the previous sixteen years. And it was worlds away from his early employment in the transatlantic slave trade. For Newton's had not been a conventional career. After almost a decade serving in slave ships, and a vivid conversion experience during a period of fever, he spent several years as a tide surveyor at Liverpool. He was denied ordination in the 1750s, not owing to his former occupation but to his flirtations with ‘Methodism’, i.e. the early evangelical movement, which spanned Church and dissent and paid little heed to the divisions between them. Being well known in that intimate milieu, his reputation was cemented by his spiritual autobiography, An Authentic Narrative of some Remarkable and Interesting Particulars in the Life of – (1764), which brought him to the notice of a young Evangelical nobleman, the Earl of Dartmouth (1731–1801). Dartmouth secured him Anglican orders and the role of curate-in-charge at Olney, while another Evangelical layman, the merchant philanthropist John Thornton (1720–1790), supplemented his stipend and in 1780 orchestrated his move to London. Newton emblematizes the earthiness and ecumenism of early evangelicalism, which valorized emotional religious experiences, had relatively little regard for ecclesiastical and sometimes social niceties and depended on a handful of prominent patrons. Yet Newton's change of scene also serves to underline the growing ambition of Evangelicals by that point. Having previously ministered among the ‘half-starved and ragged of the Earth’ for only £60 a year, Newton now rejoiced in a cosmopolitan congregation which, as his reputation grew, travelled across London to hear him. He was alive to the benefits of such a prominent post. ‘It would be a pretty exploit if the Lord should enable you to catch a Lord Mayor, & a Sheriff or two in the Gospel net,’ he chuckled to a friend in 1783.