Quick question. How many towns or cities in America are named Lexington? Amazingly, the answer is 25. But the original Lexington, the one the others are named after, is the one in Massachusetts.

It was there (and at the sleepy hamlet of Concord six miles away) where the American Revolution began 250 years ago on April 19, 1775.

Both Lexington and Concord are gearing up to celebrate the historic semiquincentennial of the historic battles. It is from the “Concord Hymn” by Ralph Waldo Emerson that comes the phrase, “the shot heard round the world.”

What a lot of people don’t know today is that the church in Lexington and its minister, Rev. Jonas Clark, had a lot do with what happened that day.

A year before the Battles of Lexington and Concord, notes author Bill Federer, Minutemen were already beginning to enlist in the brewing conflict: “In 1774, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress reorganized the Massachusetts militia, providing that over one-third of all new regiments be made up of ‘Minutemen.’”

That congress told the Minutemen: “You...are placed by Providence [that is, by God] in the post of honor, because it is the post of danger....The eyes not only of North America and the whole British Empire, but of all Europe, are upon you. Let us be, therefore, altogether solicitous that no disorderly behavior, nothing unbecoming our characters as Americans, as citizens and Christians, be justly chargeable to us.”

Fast forward to the spring of 1775. The British troops marched through the night of April 18—on their way to secure gunpowder in Concord, Massachusetts. Lexington was on the way, and two of the key American rabble rousers (from the British point of view) were reported to be staying with the pastor of the church in Lexington.

Those rabble rousers were Samuel Adams and John Hancock. As a child, John Hancock had lived in that manse before. His grandfather had been the minister in Lexington for years. Now, as an adult, Hancock helped provide moral and financial support for patriot Samuel Adams’ crusade to insist on the God-given rights of colonists as British subjects, albeit on American soil.

A common view among some of the British leaders at that time was that if they just got leaders like Samuel Adams and John Hancock out of the way, all the turmoil in British North America would subside.

The Encyclopedia Britannica once said of Samuel Adams that he “did more than any other American to arouse opposition against English rule in the Colonies.”

Stacy Schiff, author of the riveting 2022 biography of Samuel Adams, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams observes, “His second cousin John swore that Samuel was born to sever the cord between Great Britain and America.”

Thomas Jefferson called Samuel Adams “the Patriarch of Liberty” and “the fountain of our important measures.”

So, the British plan was for their troops to arrest Adams and Hancock in Lexington and then march on to Concord and seize its munitions.

But patriot Dr. Joseph Warren of Boston heard about this and dispatched two horsemen to alert Lexington and Concord that the British were coming. One of those horsemen was Paul Revere.

Revere made it to Rev. Clark’s house in Lexington in the middle of the night and awakened them all to the impending danger.

Hancock wanted to stay and fight. Adams wisely noted they should flee so they could fight for another day—which they did.

Meanwhile, the men of Jonas Clark’s church had been drilling and preparing for this day. They didn’t desire the conflict, but this was the time to stand up for their God-given liberty.

Their military leader, John Parker, told them: “Stand your ground. Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.” And so it did.

When the British troops finally came to Lexington Green, in front of the church, around 5:00 in the morning of April 19, 1775, they found the Minutemen of Lexington, that is, mostly the leaders in Jonas Clark’s church, standing their ground.

There was a brief gun battle, and the handful of Americans were overwhelmed by the hundreds of British regulars. Eight of Parker’s men died; 10 others fell wounded. Historian George Bancroft says of those victims from the Lexington Church, “The ground on which they trod was the altar of freedom, and they were to furnish the victims.”

And the British marched on to Concord. There the Americans fired back in “the shot heard round the world.” At the end of the day, 49 American colonists had been killed and 73 British soldiers.

Anniversaries come and go. But the 250th marking of Lexington / Concord is a key milestone in world history. On the first anniversary of the battle, in 1776, Rev. Jonas Clark preached a sermon and stated, “From the nineteenth of April 1775, will be dated the liberty of the American world.”