The Heart of the Holiness Movement (Joanne Lyon)

Joanne Lyon is stepping down from being General Superintendent of the Wesleyan Church. There is much news to share here. Wayne Schmidt, my old boss at Wesley Seminary, is replacing her. Dr. Lyon is going to switch places and give oversight to the Seminary this year.

But what I wanted to post was the testimony she gave when the General Conference made her a General Superintendent Emerita. There were many excesses to the holiness movement in the 1900s. There were nonsense arguments over trivial matters like wedding rings and television in the age of Leave it to Beaver. The holiness movement was embarrassingly silent at best during the civil rights movement or on the wrong side at worst (not unlike some of the nonsense I hear today on other issues).

But if you want to know what the holiness movement at its heart was about, then listen to Dr. Lyon's testimony in this clip. If you are a pastor in the Wesleyan Church and this type of testimony is completely foreign to you, then you aren't yet a heart Wesleyan.

Dongell on Love, Purity, and Power

1. I had the chance to have lunch with Joe Dongell a couple weeks ago in Atlanta. He's a Wesleyan professor at Asbury Seminary and one of the smartest people I know. We have a lot in common, including similar backgrounds and similar educational pathways. I always know I'm going to be laughing when I'm having a meal with Joe, his brother Pete, and other friends from the Asbury era of my life.

Recently, Joe read through all of Wesley's works multiple times. I believe he will put out a book with his reflections, but he has spoken several times on his conclusions in various circles. I wanted to explore and expand on one train of thought emerged from that study.

2. It is well known by now that Wesley did not talk about entire sanctification in terms of the book of Acts. His preferred phrase was "perfect love" and he much preferred the books of John and the Sermon on the Mount in his preaching. It was John Fletcher who equated this experience with Acts, which gave the experience a much clearer experiential template.

There is some evidence that Wesley didn't have a problem with this approach, but you practically have to be a Wesley scholar to argue for it. It just wasn't a primary way he thought about entire sanctification.

3. One train of thought Joe has explored is that the shift from preaching on being perfected in love to preaching on Acts entailed some shifts in the way the American holiness movement thought about entire sanctification. In particular, Joe believes it shifted the focus from love to a focus on purity and power. I'll let the church historians hash out the details, but I want to dance a little with Joe's thoughts here.

One thing I think is clear is that the shift to Acts eventually shifted the American holiness movement away (not completely, but in focus) from the substance of the doctrine (love) to the experience of the doctrine. For example, Joe would argue that Wesley did not really specify any timetable for having this experience. In the late 1800s, the holiness movement would shift toward having a second experience ASAP after conversion.

Joe is suggesting that when Fletcher preached sanctification by way of Acts, he presupposed the substance of Wesley's teaching on love. But once the focus was on Acts, Joe argues, it became possible to preach sanctification without the substance of Wesley's teaching.

This shift inevitably made a lot of room for a certain shallowness to the experience, what Keith Drury once called, "two-tripism." At the beginning of the twentieth century, people were asking questions like, "Did you jump when you were sanctified?" "Did you shout?" In a slightly different context, "Did you speak in tongues?"

4. At some point, another shift happened. Sanctification shifted from a positive dynamic--love toward others--to a negative move. Holiness somewhere shifted to being against things. This was a twisting of the heart of the doctrine. Holiness was now about what you didn't do, about stopping certain behaviors, and holiness preaching was often dominated by preaching against relatively external things like what you wear or where you go. The holiness movement became heavily infected with legalism and Pharisaism.

(Soon forgotten was the social activism of the mid 1800s, when Wesleyans were activists against slavery and for women's right's.)

Not everyone, to be sure, not every sermon. There was still preaching about being saved from anger or self-destructive behaviors. I especially prize the preaching I heard on selflessness and self-denial, of doing everything for the glory of God. It was only the content toward which that teaching was directed that I question.

Could it be that the prevailing sense of holiness in the mid-twentieth century became a negative movement, and often about relatively superficial things? Holiness preachers were conceived along the lines of the prophets of the OT, but they missed a key dynamic. The OT prophets preached more for people than against sin. The prophets railed for social justice and against idolatry. They didn't primarily preach against breaking the Law.

5. It's no wonder that the Boomers of the Wesleyan Church largely rejected holiness in the late twentieth century. They saw neither purity nor power in the movement. They shifted their focus to the church growth movement.

Even moreso, those groups that continued to focus on this shell of a doctrine understandably confused a certain kind of cultural conservatism with holiness. A place like Bob Jones or Liberty University felt more holiness to them than a place like IWU, which actually promotes Wesley's actual values and the values of the nineteenth century church. Holiness became cultural and political conservatism, not perfect love.

Indeed, it was fascinating recently to hear the question of when Wesleyans shifted from a holiness emphasis to an emphasis on love, as if holiness was ever for Wesley anything but perfect love!

In short, we lost our way.

"Holy Jumpers" to the End

This is my third and final installment reviewing Bill Kostlevy's book called Holy Jumpers: Evangelicals and Radicals in Progressive Era America. Here are the first and second installments. Keith Drury and Bob Black were reading through the book, and Dave Ward and I joined Keith for some lunches to discuss it.

1. The last three chapters of the book were somewhat sad, as we watched this powerful phenomenon of the Metropolitan Church of America (MCA) slowly unravel and wither away. At the same time, we continue to see that it was right there in the mix as some of the most significant Christian movements of the twentieth century were forming.

One of the founders, E. L. Harvey, had been a successful businessman and owner of eleven hotels in the Chicago area. But he came to believe that God demanded Christians to sell all their property if they were to be true Christians. I've already mentioned that this was the point of entire sanctification for Harvey and his wife. He did not "get the victory" until he sold all his hotels and moved onto the Chicago campground.

Of course he believed that Jesus was coming back to earth any day, and this played a significant role in this notion that only those who sold everything could make it to heaven. In about 1922, the debt of the MCA community had risen to about $200,000 (it apparently peeked at $300,000). Harvey was convinced that the debt would be irrelevant because of the return of Christ.

Harvey even kiboshed a great money making/sustaining venture that Frank Messenger had started. Messenger is the one who had once managed the textile industry of North Grosvenor, Connecticut. The MCA was putting out a very successful Scripture Text Calendar, along with its songbooks and magazine, The Burning Bush.

But Harvey came to see the calendar in particular as a money-making venture and in 1913 killed the very thing that might have kept the MCA afloat.

Harvey had a heart attack while preaching in 1922 and would be dead by 1926. Messenger meanwhile became a Nazarene and continued the Scripture calendar elsewhere. The company still exists today in Auburn, Indiana, primarily serving the funeral industry.

He seems to have been a warm-hearted, well-intentioned man. He was just theologically ignorant. The emotion burned brightly for a moment, then it burned out.

2. Messenger's administrative skill kept this communal group going for a while. Keith and I both agree that the real turning point of the group was in 1906 when they left Chicago and set up a commune in Waukesha, Wisconsin. In the old Fountain Spring House, the people lived and worked in common. No one took a wage, and the community sent out evangelists to speak to anyone who asked.

But with the financial woes, the pressure to get people to sell all their property and give it to the community became a distraction. Intentions were good--they truly believed people should sell their farms and move into the community. But family members saw these evangelists as preying on old people and trying to take their farms away from them.

Basically, socialism is almost always a complete failure. It's noble. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." It sounds very Christ-like indeed. It just doesn't work. The MCA is yet another testimony to its utter bankruptcy as an economic system. (Dave Ward called it a Ponzi scheme.)

3. Money increasingly became the central preoccupation of the community, as it became overcrowded with individuals, many of whom could not give anything back. In 1925, W. S. Hitchcock took over to fix the situation.

At least from the description in the book, I don't like the man. Mind you, he had eliminated the community's debt by the early 1930s, in the middle of the Great Depression. That's no mean feat! And of course E. L. Harvey and Duke Farson were ultimately blame for moving the community in a property-less direction in the first place.

Farson went belly up in 1918 because his money was in municipal bonds and the war shifted the market to war bonds. As he tried to make internal changes in Wakesha, the Farsons blocked him and he was expelled. He started a group that died with him in LA in 1929.

Hitchcock did what no doubt needed to be done. He kicked a lot of people out of the commune. What is so disturbing about this move is the fact that some of these were old people who had been convinced God wanted them to sell all their property, give it to the MCA, and then come live in Wakesha. Instead they ended their lives in public homes for the aged.

Hitchcock sent out every able bodied person to go door to door, not as evangelists, but as a sales force. But what I find most detestable about this man is that he humiliated the leaders who had been willing to give everything up for the community. He made the economic troubles of the community a spiritual problem for which they needed to repent rather than what it was--economic and theological ignorance. One leader walked around the service with a teapot on his head.

It had a curious effect. It energized the children of the leaders. High school youths who had been a growing problem were now sold on the mission of the MCA. That's about the only good thing I could see in this man, and that was despite his seeming vileness.

4. Messenger ended up joining the Nazarenes. The Nazarenes feature heavily in these last chapters. They come across as the sane holiness denomination and one of the fastest growing Protestant churches of the day. One of the secrets to IWU's growth is that it hit distance education at just the right time. I wonder if the Nazarenes hit these holiness revivals at just the right time.

They were middle of the road enough to gather the reasonable, leaving these other kooky groups. They were out west and so somewhat removed from these intrigues. And they were perfectly okay with being a denomination for a decade before WW1 hit, two decades before the Great Depression.

The Nazarenes were the targets of a good deal of The Burning Bush's wrath in the teens. Messenger, interestingly enough, would end up setting up the Nazarene pension plan, despite the fact that he had mocked insurance and such things when he was part of the MCA.

The MCA mocked the Nazarenes for allowing the "innocent party" in a divorce to remarry. They believed you were married in God's eyes for life to the first person you married. So even if your spouse divorced you and remarried someone else, if you then remarried, you would commit adultery every time you had sex. You were expected to remain celibate for the rest of your life. This is a position that I have heard even within my lifetime.

The MCA also mocked the Nazarenes and many others on tithing. Because they believed in giving everything to the Lord literally by selling all your possessions and becoming part of their end times community, tithing wasn't giving enough. Under Hitchcock, of course, they would adopt tithing, a tenth, as the least you should give.

There is some fun history on tithing in chapter 6. The practice did not enter American Christianity until after the Civil War as America shifted from a trade economy to a monetary society. This was also, I believe, part of a wave of biblical interpretation that considered Old Testament law as more or less binding on Christians just as much as New Testament instruction. The importance of keeping the Sabbath is another example of this hermeneutical wave.

When I was at SWU in college, churches in the southeast could ask for a team of ministry students to come sing and preach for them. I don't know how the funding worked, whether the church had to pay for gas and lodging or whether the school paid for it. But it was truly one of the highlights of my college days.

I remember one Sunday that a church asked for someone to come preach on tithing from the New Testament, and I was the one sent to preach. I quickly realized that the only text that really mentions a tithe in the NT is in Matthew 23:23 where Jesus commends the Pharisees for tithing their spices but then condemns them for missing the weightier parts of the Law. So you can imagine how difficult a sermon that was!

Tithing was controversial when it was introduced, but those churches that adopted it as a practice found themselves on a much surer financial basis than those that didn't, despite the fact that the NT never indicates that it is part of the new covenant.

5. We also get in these chapters the birth of tongues in America and the Azusa Street revivals. Interestingly enough, both the holiness movement and the MCA intersect with its beginnings (see also Don Dayton's work here). The real spark behind the Azusa Street revivals was a man named William Seymour.

He was an African-American who had studied at God's Bible School and then had gone out to California, stopping on the way at the Pillar of Fire community in Denver. Denver is where Alma White had ended up after she split with the MCA in 1906.

An aside here that I haven't fully managed to work in. These were truly communities where women were fully spiritual leaders. These were in many cases communities where African-Americans could play full spiritual role alongside those of European descent. These were truly egalitarian movements, truly progressive movements. These were radicals.

I want to mention also after last week that God's Bible School is alive and well, probably doing better than it ever has. God's Revivalist is still being published even after all these years.

6. The MCA had dispatched A. G. Garr to LA to work there. But when that work entered difficult waters, Garr closed the doors and sent his congregation to the mission on Azusa Street, where Seymour was preaching that the Acts 2 church included speaking in other languages. By then, tongues had already begun to take place but was not in full force yet. It was a fully integrated experience at that time, blacks and whites worshiping together, with several of the blacks speaking in tongues. The founder of COGIC was part of those days.

Farson had ordered Garr not to go to the mission without permission, but Garr ignored and in 1906 became one of the first white people at the mission to speak in tongues. Kostlevy wonders if the speaking had actually plateaued at that time and if, in effect, the addition of the new MCA worshipers rekindled the fire that would not stop until the whole world was ablaze with Pentecostalism.

Garr himself was convinced that he was speaking in an Indian or Chinese language. But when he actually arrived in India, apparently not. His presence in northern India proved to have a very negative attitude toward tongues in the MCA community there. Eventually he would reinterpret the experience as a heavenly language rather than an earthly one.

Of course the personal dynamics between Farson and Garr led to The Burning Bush going inflammatory, and one wonders if the rest of the holiness movement was poisoned against tongues as a result. It has only been in the last couple decades that holiness churches have even begun to consider the possibility that their members might privately speak in tongues at home.

7. Healing was a major part of the holiness movement at the turn of the century and we still believe in it on paper. And of course it continues to be a major element of the Pentecostal movement to this day. I hope you can see that Pentecostalism grew out of these same waters of the holiness movement.

The MCA did not believe in medicine. Medicine was seen as contrary to faith. There is a story in these chapters about two men who went to India as missionaries. One was secretly inoculated against smallpox, the other wasn't. The one who wasn't inoculated died. The other one didn't.

8. The MCA petered out. Hitchcock was removed as president in 1950. In 1956 it sold its Waukesha property. The last MCA church in North America sold its building in 2004. But there are still perhaps as many as 50,000 members still in India. There are some 1600 members in Africa and twenty churches still in Mexico.

When I was a boy, Arthur Bray was pastor of the Brooksville Wesleyan Church in Florida. Little did I know his story at the time. He was one of those youths who dedicated their life to God under Hitchcock. His father was one of those leaders who went on evangelistic missions teaching people that they needed to give everything they had to the Lord.

Arthur became a Wesleyan Methodist in 1941, and was president of the Illinois conference from 1950 to 1968. His son Don was Secretary of World Missions for The Wesleyan Church for many years, and his son John just retired from pastoring one of the largest churches in The Wesleyan Church.