Wesleyan-Holiness Churches in Australia

Hallelujah under the Southern Cross

Glen O'Brien

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351189217
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Denominaciones cristianas

Most Wesleyan-Holiness churches started in the US, developing out of the Methodist roots of the nineteenth-century Holiness Movement. The American origins of the Holiness movement have been charted in some depth, but there is currently little detail on how it developed outside of the US. This book seeks to redress this imbalance by giving a history of North American Wesleyan-Holiness churches in Australia, from their establishment in the years following the Second World War, as well as of The Salvation Army, which has nineteenth-century British origins. It traces the way some of these churches moved from marginalised sects to established denominations, while others remained small and isolated.

Looking at The Church of God (Anderson), The Church of God (Cleveland), The Church of the Nazarene, The Salvation Army, and The Wesleyan Methodist Church in Australia, the book argues two main points. Firstly, it shows that rather than being American imperialism at work, these religious expressions were a creative partnership between like-minded evangelical Christians from two modern nations sharing a general cultural similarity and set of religious convictions. Secondly, it demonstrates that it was those churches that showed the most willingness to be theologically flexible, even dialling down some of their Wesleyan distinctiveness, that had the most success.

This is the first book to chart the fascinating development of Holiness churches in Australia. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of Wesleyans and Methodists, as well as religious history and the sociology of religion more generally.

1 Introduction

Religious ‘outsiders’ have become the central interest of religious historians over the past forty years, especially in the United States. Indeed, according to Stout and Hart, ‘the language of outsiders-become-insiders, and peripheries-become-centers, is now a commonplace in the literature on religion in America.’¹ Jon Butler has described an ‘evangelical paradigm’ as ‘the single most powerful explanatory device adopted by academic historians to account for the distinctive features of American society, culture, and identity.’² One result of this new interest has been that formerly marginalised groups, such as Pentecostals, Fundamentalists, and Evangelicals, have taken centre stage in social and historical research. The Wesleyan-Holiness movement has not attracted the same degree of scholarly attention, and there is a need for more recent historical studies to appear.³

This book describes the process of accommodation that took place in order for Wesleyan-Holiness churches, most of whom had their headquarters in North America (the exception is The Salvation Army), to gain entrance to Australian Evangelicalism whose roots were in the British religious world. Those Wesleyan-Holiness churches that have moved from ‘outsider’ to ‘insider’ status have done so because of two broad developments. They demonstrated an ability to reflect those broader aspects of Americanisation that had been integrated into Australian Evangelicalism and to minimise those that had not, and they were willing to sacrifice certain distinctive features of their beliefs and practices, which propelled them along the church-sect continuum toward greater acceptance.

This interesting story has not previously been told, and it is hoped that this book will fill a gap in the history of both Australian Evangelicalism and the Wesleyan-Holiness movement. Carey and O’Brien’s Methodism in Australia: A History provides a long overdue scholarly history of Australian Methodism.⁴ Prior to this, readers have had to rely on state-based histories of varying quality, including Irving Benson’s now very dated collection of essays on Victorian Methodism,⁵ Arnold Hunt’s excellent history of South Australian Methodism,⁶ and Wright and Clancy’s solid treatment of Methodism in New South Wales (NSW).⁷ However, the story of those smaller Holiness denominations and movements, who also identify their roots in John Wesley and in early Methodism, has not until now been given similar attention. The Wesleyan Methodist Church of Australia, commencing work in November 1945 under the leadership of the Rev Dr Kingsley Ridgway, and being formally organised on 8 June 1946, is the only one of the Wesleyan-Holiness churches in Australia to have produced a denominational history.⁸ Lindsay Cameron’s 2017 doctoral thesis provides a good deal of valuable information, though it pursues a polemical argument about the perceived negative impact of liberal theology on Australasian Methodism and the failure of the Wesleyan Methodist Church adequately to apply John Wesley’s priorities for original Methodism.⁹ An official biography of Kingsley Ridgway, the founder of the Wesleyan Methodist Church of Australia, was published in 1996 as part of the Church’s Jubilee celebrations and a second edition appeared in 2011.¹⁰

Ward and Humphrey’s Religious Bodies in Australia lists six churches as belonging to the ‘Holiness tradition’ under the larger title of ‘Evangelical Protestant.’¹¹ Five of these six have their roots in North America, the exception being The Salvation Army, founded in England by William Booth, a former Methodist minister. In addition, Ward and Humphreys list two denominations as ‘Holiness stream’ under the title of ‘Pentecostal.’ These also have their roots in the North American Holiness movement.¹² The former are all characterised by the distinctive doctrine of ‘entire sanctification’ understood as a second work of grace subsequent to conversion, whereby the believer is said to be cleansed from sin and filled with perfect love for God and neighbour. The ‘Pentecostal-Holiness’ groups also teach ‘entire sanctification,’ but posit a ‘third blessing,’ a ‘baptism of the Spirit’ evidenced by ‘speaking in tongues.’

All of these groups find the impetus for their teachings in the life and theology of John Wesley, the eighteenth-century Anglican priest who founded the Methodist movement after his heart was ‘strangely warmed’ by a profound sense of religious assurance in 1738.¹³ That Wesley taught the kind of ‘second experience’ held by today’s Wesleyan-Holiness churches is well established.¹⁴ Since the 1970s, however, Wesleyan theologians have sought to demonstrate that in the recovery of this neglected aspect of Wesley’s teaching by the American Holiness movement of the nineteenth century, elements of imbalance were introduced that may be seen as aberrational.¹⁵ The classic treatment of the American Holiness movement, especially in its relationship to mainstream Methodism, remains John Peters’ Christian Perfection and American Methodism.¹⁶ Donald Dayton has traced the theological roots of Pentecostalism in the Holiness movement,¹⁷ and Vinson Synan has done the same in his study of the Pentecostal-Holiness churches.¹⁸

Pentecostalism has attracted more scholarly interest in Australia than has its near cousin the Holiness movement. Barry Chant has traced the influence of Wesleyan revivalism on the rise of Australian Pentecostalism, though he did this with only passing reference to the American Holiness movement and, indeed, was concerned to show that Australian Pentecostalism was not an American import.¹⁹ Stuart Piggin asserts that Australian revivals stemmed more from the Holiness movement wing of Australian Methodism, rather than from Pentecostalism, and that this wing of Methodism was aligned with British influences.²⁰ An extensive treatment of the influence of Wesley’s doctrine of ‘entire sanctification’ on Australian Methodism has not been written.²¹ This book will show a trajectory of Holiness teaching reaching its peak in late-nineteenth-century revivalism, and then declining to the point of dropping out of sight almost entirely by the mid-1940s, when the American Holiness churches emerged in Australia.²² Ironically the strategy of minimising emphasis on the doctrine of ‘entire sanctification’ in order to gain a place in Australian Evangelicalism has meant that the Wesleyan-Holiness churches in Australia have had minimal impact on reviving Holiness teaching among their fellow Evangelicals.

The Wesleyan-Holiness churches in historical context

The doctrine of ‘entire sanctification,’ to be experienced as a definite work of grace subsequent to conversion, was a characteristic teaching of John Wesley. When Methodism was planted in America with the formation of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1784, Wesley’s Plain Account of Christian Perfection was included in its entirety in the first Discipline of that body. American Methodist preachers generally included in their preaching the calling of sinners to salvation and of believers to entire sanctification. At the heart of this sanctifying experience was a negative cleansing from sinful motives and attitudes (sinful behaviours were already thought to have been dealt with at conversion) and a positive filling with love for God and neighbour. By the 1860s however the doctrine had fallen into neglect. The Methodist Episcopal Church had moved significantly toward the ‘church’ end of the church-sect continuum so that Methodism had become more fashionable, more middle-class and respectable, and thus much less given to religious ideals such as perfectionism. There were many reform-minded people in the Methodist Episcopal Church, including Nathan Bangs and Bishop Jesse Peck, who issued an ad fontes call back to Wesley’s original teachings. However, in 1867, the formation of the National Camp-Meeting Association for the Promotion of Christian Holiness in Vineland, New Jersey, gave organisational clout to a strong group of radicals, many of whom were ready to break ranks with mainstream Methodism, and form their own churches and associations.²³ This diverse movement, a precursor to Pentecostalism, emerged from Methodism’s more radical wing in the late nineteenth century, as well as from other Pietist and Revivalist sources, and is generally referred to in the literature as ‘the Holiness movement.’ It may, however, be better to think in terms of ‘movements’ plural, as the variety of expressions and multiplicity of nodal points makes it clear that this was not a centralised organisation so much as a renewal emphasis pervading Evangelical Protestantism both across and beyond denominational lines.

The Wesleyan Methodist Church (originally ‘Connexion’) of America became an active participant in this new Holiness movement, though it had already separated from the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1843 over the issue of slavery.²⁴ Radical abolitionists such as Luther Lee and Orange Scott organised the new church (or ‘connexion’) in Utica, New York, on a platform of anti-slavery and anti-episcopacy. Though not originally formed around the ‘Holiness’ message, it saw itself as calling Methodists back to John Wesley’s original apostolic fire, and was the first Methodist denomination to formulate an explicit doctrinal statement on ‘entire sanctification.’²⁵

The earliest Church of the Nazarene was formed in Los Angeles under the leadership of the former Methodist District Superintendent, the Rev Phineas F. Bresee, and the physician Dr Joseph P. Widney, in October 1895.²⁶ There followed numerous mergers between a number of independent Holiness organisations, all of whom had their origins among Methodist ‘come-outers.’²⁷ The date of the organisation of the Church differs in various sources. Ahlstrom cites 1908, the date of the Second General Assembly, when Bresee’s group merged with other Holiness groups at Pilot Point, as the year of establishment. This is the denomination’s official starting date, which was confirmed by the Church celebrating its Centenary in 2008. Even so, it is clear that Bresee’s earlier urban mission work in Los Angeles formed ‘the nucleus of the later Church of the Nazarene.’²⁸ Winthrop Hudson cites 1895 as the founding date and an ‘enlargement’ by mergers in 1907 and 1908.²⁹ The resultant group of the 1908 merger was designated ‘The Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene.’ In 1919 the Church officially dropped ‘Pentecostal’ to avoid confusion with tongues-speaking groups. The three main groups that formed the Church of the Nazarene, however, precede the 1908 merger. The Western Group (founded by Bresee and Widney in October 1895) was called ‘The Church of the Nazarene.’ The other groups, ‘The Association of Pentecostal Churches of America’ (December 1895) and ‘The Holiness Church of Christ’ (November 1904), have antecedent congregations that date from 1887 but no earlier. A contrary position is that of Ernest R. (‘Bu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Holiness at the ends of the earth: The Salvation Army in Australia
• 3 ‘A beautiful virgin country ready for a revival of Bible holiness’: early visiting Holiness evangelists
• 4 ‘Dark days and long, hard pulls’: the post-war emergence of Wesleyan-Holiness Churches
• 5 ‘A modern heresy’: opposition on theological grounds
• 6 ‘Just another “queer sect” from over the Pacific’: Americanism and anti-Americanism
• 7 Joining the evangelical club: moving along the Church-sect continuum
• 8 They ‘made a Pentecostal out of her’: fire-baptised Holiness
• 9 ‘Old time Methodists in a new world’: the continuing viability of conservative religion
• 10 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index