It is uncertain how or when Christianity first came to Kent.  However, Kent is the nearest part of the country to Europe and must have been a major entry point for new ideas and influences from other countries.  There is strong evidence that there was an organised Christian Church in Kent in the early 4th Century.  The first known Christian place of worship in Britain was at Lullingstone in Kent, which has been dated by archaeologists at about 350 A.D.

As a result of the Anglo-Saxon invasion during the 5th Century, there was a reversion to paganism.  Christianity began to grow again in Kent in the 6th Century when Ethelbert, King of Kent married Princess Bertha, daughter of Charibert, King of Paris.  Bertha was a Christian and brought her Chaplain with her to Kent.  Although Ethelbert was not a Christian, he repaired the little church in Canterbury for his wife.

In 597, Pope Gregory sent Augustine and forty monks to England.  They landed at Thanet and, with Ethelbert's permission, they rebuilt the Roman churches of St. Martin's and Christchurch in Canterbury.  Christchurch was built in the middle of Canterbury for Bishop Augustine and became the first Canterbury Cathedral.  Augustine's monks re-introduced Christianity to the rest of Kent as they continued to preach all over the country.

After the death of King Ethelbert in 616, Kent relapsed into paganism again.  However, the complete failure of Augustine's Christian message was prevented by his successor Archbishop Laurentius.  He was supported by Eadbald, King Ethelbert's son.  668 A.D. saw a new Archbishop, a Greek monk called Theodore.  He aimed to establish the authority of Canterbury throughout England and unite Christians into one Anglo-Saxon Church.  He travelled throughout the country where he organised the monasteries, set up schools and generally put the churches' affairs in order.

Diocese as we know them today owe much to the way in which Archbishop Theodore increased the number of bishops and subdivided large areas of the country.  Nobles were persuaded to have a church and a Christian teacher on their estates, so laying the foundations of the parochial system.  When Theodore died in 690 he had laid the foundations of what has been called the Golden Age of the Church in Britain.  Nine monasteries had been founded in Kent by Ethelbert and his family.  Four of these were where former palaces of Kentish kings had stood.  They were of the Benedictine order to which St. Augustine had belonged.

Christchurch, St. Augustine's at Canterbury and St. Andrew's at Rochester had all been founded by Ethelbert by 605.  In 620 his son Eadbald founded Dover Priory.  In 630 Eanswythe, daughter of Eadbald, became the Foundress and first Abbess of Folkestone.  It has been estimated that by the time Edward the Confessor came to the throne in 1042, there were over 400 Saxon churches in Kent.  The Parish system in Kent had grown up in Saxon times.  Land-owners built churches on their land near the Manor Houses, as they had first been encouraged to do so by Archbishop Theodore some 400 years earlier.  The church was part of the land-owner's property and the priest serving the church was regarded as one of his servants.

Changes came when, under Norman law, churches were taken over by the monasteries who put in their own vicars.  The establishment of monasteries in Kent continued to increase from the 11th Century onwards, and by 1253, five more monasteries of the St. Augustine order had been founded, one of them being in Tonbridge.  Church and state did not always get on well, as witnessed in Kent by the infamous murder of Thomas à Becket in Canterbury Cathedral.

By the 16th Century, new religious ideas had come to Britain and the Church in England finally broke away from Roman Catholicism when Henry VIII was king, initially due to the pope's refusal to grant Henry a divorce. In 1534, under Thomas Cromwell's Act of Supremacy, the monarch became the head of the English Church.  Bibles in England also first became available to the churches then.  The dissolution of the monasteries took place partly because Henry believed that they might be centres of opposition to him, and partly because he needed their revenues.  Henry ordered a visitation to the monasteries so that they could be valued, the first of which were those in Kent.

Edward VI ordered the removal of plate, vessels and ornaments from the churches after he came to the throne in 1547.  Parishioners in many parts of the country took advantage of this to raise money for other things.  In Kent at Godmarsham, Chilham and Crayford, as in many other places, the sale of church plate and other valuables provided funds for building work, books and other church needs.  However, steps were soon taken to stop this and the wealth was claimed for the Royal Treasury.

There was complete reversal of policy for the Church when Mary came to the throne in 1553 and the clergy were ordered to revert back to the Roman Catholic ritual.  Any opposition to this was treated harshly.  Archbishop Cranmer was one of those burned at the stake for opposing Mary.  During her reign, fifty people were burned at the stake in Kent because of their religious beliefs.  In Canterbury, forty-one Kentish Martyrs were burnt to death during Mary's reign, between 1555 and 1558.  Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of Rochester for two and a half years, was one of these martyrs on October 16th, 1555.  John Frith from Sevenoaks was another who bravely died.  He prayed that God would forgive the priest who had told the surrounding crowd that they, "should not pray for Frith any more than they should pray for a dog."  Sadly, there were many martyrdoms on both sides of the religious divide during the first two-thirds of the 16th Century.

The religious tide turned again under Elizabeth I.  Her reign between 1559 and 1603 saw some freedom, allowing different styles of church to flourish.  The Church of England was formally established in 1559.  Some of these became the focus of opposition to King Charles I and paved the way for civil war in England after 1640.  In Kent, Sir Henry Vane of Shipbourne negotiated an agreement with the Scots to establish Presbyterianism in England in return for Scottish support in the Civil War between the Parliamentarians and the King.  However, the attempts to establish Presbyterianism in England met with strong opposition from many groups, including Anglicans, Unitarians, Baptists and Quakers.  Religious unrest continued throughout the country.  The abolition of all church festivals in 1648 led to riots on Christmas Day in Canterbury.

More changes took place during the time when England had no king.  In 1653, Parliament ordered that all the Cathedral Churches should be pulled down and the materials sold.  Both Canterbury and Rochester Cathedrals fell into ruinous condition.  By 1673 there were seventeen Presbyterian, twenty-four Baptist and twelve Congregational churches licensed in Kent.

In 1737 Bishop Potter of Oxford, who ordained John Wesley as priest, became Archbishop of Canterbury.  It was during his Primacy that Methodism was founded.  'The Method', which gave to Wesley's followers the name of 'Methodists', was the strict observance to the form and disciplines of the prayer book to which they held.  Wesley paid many visits to Kent and Methodism grew rapidly in the county.  By 1844, there were eleven Methodist circuits in Kent.

Early in the 19th Century, the Relief Act was passed.  This meant that Catholic churches, including those at Woolwich, Ramsgate, Canterbury and Margate in Kent, could be built.  Meanwhile, the non-conformist Churches continued to grow in strength, especially the Methodist and Baptist Churches.

For a summary of the main events in Kent's Christian history, see the Kent Timeline.

Why not read about the development of Christianity and the churches in Tonbridge?