The cause was founded in 1763 by members of a chapel at nearby Ditchling; Henry Booker and other worshippers seceded and began to meet at Wivelsfield after hearing a sermon by George Whitefield.

Although some members of the new church soon returned to the Ditchling congregation, the cause thrived under Booker's leadership, and the present chapel—a building of "quiet and unassuming elegance"[1] set in its own graveyard—was erected in 1780.

It has served the Strict Baptist community continuously since then, and members founded other chapels elsewhere in Sussex during the 18th and 19th centuries.

[3] The area around Lewes, the present county town of East Sussex, was a hotbed of Nonconformist worship, and Baptists of all types were well represented.

[2][4] Ditchling, a village near Lewes, also supported several chapels in addition to the Anglican parish church,[5] whose vicar said in 1780 that "this place is noted for Dissenters of almost all denominations".

In 1755, Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon moved to Brighton,[9] then a small but increasingly popular seaside resort.

These did not agree with the principles of the Ditchling chapel, which by the 1760s was mostly Unitarian in character, and Booker was presented in front of 15 General Baptist ministers and asked to justify his beliefs.

[11][12] Almost immediately, Booker moved to nearby Wivelsfield—taking several members of the Ditchling congregation with him—and together with some Baptist friends in the village he registered a house, Fanners, as a place of worship.

He had been a minister at the Ditchling chapel since 1762,[15] but he too had been dismissed: it was stated in 1764 that "this Church[note 2] hath sett very unesey under the Hearing of Our Friend John Simmonds ... [we do] not approve of him in the office of the Ministry".

He moved to Wivelsfield from Wadhurst, another East Sussex village with a strong Baptist heritage, and many members of his family followed.

[27] It is one of three places of worship in Wivelsfield village: St Peter and St John's Church, the Anglican parish church, has much 13th- and 14th-century work and is listed at the higher Grade II*, and the Grade II-listed Ote Hall Congregational Chapel was founded by the Countess of Huntingdon in 1778, by which time she had moved to the village and founded her own Calvinist denomination (the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion).

George Virgo, the pastor at Wivelsfield from 1874 until 1903,[23] founded a Strict Baptist chapel at Mighell Street in the Carlton Hill area.

The chapel was compulsorily purchased in 1961, and four years later the congregation moved into the present Brighton and Hove National Spiritualist Church on nearby Edward Street.