A Planter’s House Became a Chapel: How Jamaica’s Early Denominations Got Their First Buildings

• The Anglican Church became the established church, with a parish church in every parish
• Early Methodists outgrew a meeting place at Hannah Town and bought a planter’s house in Parade
• Parade Chapel opened in 1792 on the site of today’s Coke Memorial Methodist Church
• Kingston’s Scots Kirk took five years of fundraising and opened in 1819

When the English took Jamaica from Spain in 1655, the Church of England replaced the Catholic Church as the established church. The island was divided into parishes, each with a parish church, and other Anglican churches were built across the island until the church was disestablished in 1870. Paul H. Williams set out this history in the second part of a Sunday Gleaner series on religion in Jamaica’s heritage, published on October 12, 2025.

Other denominations came as missions. The Moravians, a church persecuted in Europe that found refuge on Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf’s estate, sent missionaries at the invitation of two absentee landowners, William Foster and Joseph Foster-Barham. The three who arrived at Black River on December 9, 1754, came to convert souls, but the Moravians themselves were to become holders of enslaved people.

Methodism arrived with Dr Thomas Coke, who landed at Port Royal on January 19, 1789, followed in August by the first Methodist missionary, at a time of widespread persecution. A place of worship set up at Hannah Town soon proved too small, and in late 1790 the Methodists bought a planter’s house in Parade to use as a chapel and residence. “Parade Chapel opened in 1792, and is the location of the present Coke Memorial Chapel, the ‘Mother Church’ of Methodism in Jamaica,” the article records.

The Presbyterians took longer. A 1788 petition for a Scots Kirk in Kingston was denied, but the Kingston Common Council approved it on December 20, 1813. That set off a large fundraising campaign, and the building took five years to finish, opening on April 4, 1819, at 56 Duke Street. Lloyd A. Cooke describes it as “a Church for the white settlers and business class of Kingston”, not meant to reach the enslaved. The series was to continue with the Baptists and the anti-slavery movement.

The history shows three ways Jamaican churches came to own property: by state establishment, as with the Anglican parish churches; by buying and converting an existing building, as the Methodists did in Parade; and by raising money to build from scratch, as with the Scots Kirk. All three are still in use today. Congregations still buy and convert houses, still fundraise for years for a new building, and still inherit property from a larger body. The Parade purchase, a home turned into a place of worship in the heart of Kingston, is an early example of adaptive reuse.

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