Notes Along the Way -- 4.1 A Fork in the Road, with a side of Ordination

Last week I finished my reminiscences on my student years at Asbury Seminary.
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1. Asbury had a sweet set up where each year they would choose a graduating senior to be a Teaching Fellow for two years. The task was primarily to teach Greek, but I was privileged to get to teach Hebrew as well.

I applied that final year and waited to see what door might or might not open. I put out a sort of fleece. If I was chosen as the Teaching Fellow for that year, I would teach my two years and go on to do PhD work in New Testament. I would minister primarily as a teacher of ministers. If I was not chosen, I would take a church in Florida and perhaps go on to do graduate study at some point in the future.

Perhaps this is a good place to say that, when I first felt a call to ministry at Central, my first thought was to focus on theology. This reflected my philosophical bent. Besides, I thought, the meaning of the Bible is pretty obvious. But I thought there would be all sorts of puzzles to solve in theology.

This was the naivete of my unreflective youth and pre-modern background. As it turned out, there were countless puzzles to solve in biblical studies. Meanwhile, the basic beliefs of Christendom had been established for over 1500 years. When Thomas Oden set out to write his three volume systematic theology, his goal was to have no new idea.

Of course, I would eventually become sympathetic to constructive theology, a theology that engages with the contexts of those who reflect on it. There's a lot of synthesis to do there. But that's not important right now. 

The bottom line is that my attention shifted to biblical studies when I realized how many challenges there were there. And, I think somewhere deep down, I realized the power and authority that an expert on the Bible had in my circles. Subconscious, not noble, but alas.

Of Old and New Testament, as I've said, I was far more attracted to the New Testament. The New Testament is more directly theological; the Old more poetic and ancient. Mind you, I love the Old Testament world.

There seemed far more landmines in Old Testament studies than in New Testament studies. I taught Old Testament Survey my first semester at IWU. What should I mention? What not? I also remember a girl coming up after I made a joke about the King James being good enough for Peter and Paul. She sincerely asked after class, "Peter and Paul didn't use the King James?"

Finally, the New Testament is determinative of Christian faith. The Old Testament certainly provides critical background. But, in some ways, even then it was the Old Testament as interpreted in the Intertestamental Period that provided the framework from which first century Judaism emerged.

I realize there is much to debate in that paragraph, but I'll let it fly. Perhaps to be continued.

So, I put out the fleece. A fork in the road. Biblical studies or the pastorate.

2. I had done supply pastoring for a few months over two summers at Zephyrhills Wesleyan. I believe the summer after graduating from Asbury was when I was the youth pastor for my home church in Fort Lauderdale -- now New River Church. My sister Sharon was pastor at that time.

I should point out that my sister is ultraconservative by any reckoning. She hasn't cut her hair since she was a teenager, only wears skirts or dresses, has no jewelry, doesn't buy on Sunday. AND, she is an ordained minister.

It is a reminder that women in ministry is not a liberal or secular feminist thing for the Wesleyan tradition. We were ordaining women in the 1800s before it was cool. The United Methodists didn't start ordaining women till the 1950s. It goes back to the fact that we were a "Pentecostal" tradition before tongues got involved.

3. My sister had been Assistant Pastor for a while under Dr. Everett Putney. He had been so kind and gracious. He's the one I had asked about Hosea 11:1 after my first year at seminary. He was also a middle school principal, I believe in one of the public school systems in the western part of Broward County. At that time, it was up against the Everglades, but I imagine "civilization" has pushed much farther inland since then.

An interesting window into my holiness background was the question of whether we should eat in the fellowship hall where we had children's church. By the time my family arrived in Fort Lauderdale in 1970, they had expanded the original building so that, across a cemented hallway outside the original back of the church, there was a series of Sunday School classrooms, a pastor's study, and a larger room for children's church. That room was used as a fellowship hall when we would have a church pitch in dinner.

However, at some point, because it was now under the same roof as the sanctuary, there was a question whether it was appropriate to eat there. I can't remember the reason. As far as I know, no one had ever asked that question in the early days of the church. It was an extension of not eating in the sanctuary. I'm sure there was a prooftext. Maybe it was 1 Corinthians 11:22, where Paul asks if the Corinthians don't have homes to eat and drink in? 

But there was also a tendency to see the church as a kind of version of the temple. It was holy ground and so you shouldn't run or eat in it. You should dress up in honor of God. My father always wore a suit and tie to church--to the day before he died. Maybe it was something like the moneychangers violating sacred space?

4. I haven't fully studied this tendency, but I think it finds its origins in Scotland. Remember Chariots of Fire when he won't run on Sunday, which he understands to be the Sabbath (which it never was). The holiness movement was "sabbatarian," if that is an appropriate word for it. We ate pork chops, but there was a strong tendency to consider Old Testament law as still binding on Christians.

We find this tendency in many circles today despite what seems to me to be the clear teaching of Paul in relation to Gentile believers. Paul does not bind the Sabbath on Gentiles. Mark 7 does not bind the food laws on Gentile believers (perhaps any believers, despite a valiant attempt at reinterpretation by Logan Williams). Hebrews does not bind the sacrificial system on anyone anymore. The New Testament does not really talk about a tithe as the basis for giving in the church.

It is a misinterpretation of Matthew 5:17-19 to say that all the OT laws are still binding, despite the interpretation of my mother and many others. The rest of chapter 5 makes it clear what fulfilled law looks like and it changes some things (e.g., an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth). The final paragraph of 5:43-48 makes it clear that the fulfillment of the Law is love, which 7:12 and 22:40 confirm.

All of that is to say that, by the summer I was youth pastor, all fellowshiping was done in a duplex behind the church that they had bought for such purposes--ultimately so we didn't eat under the same roof as the sanctuary.

5. This seems as good a place as any to note that I was ordained the following summer of 1991 in the Florida District. With an MDIV, you only needed one year of further ministry service. Without, you needed two. Between my summers of supply and youth pastoring and my year under appointment as an educator at Asbury, they considered me cooked enough to ordain.

I had gone back to Central for two weeks to do my remaining ministerial courses. I believe it was my first summer after graduation from Central. I believe it was Wesleyan Church History and Discipline that I needed. Perhaps I also took the Theology of Holiness at that time with Herb Dongell. Those are the two that usually slip through the cracks.

Those were the days when the process wasn't nearly as rigorous as it can be sometimes today. I met one time with the whole District Board of Ministerial Standing (as it was called back then). My father was on it, and my brother-in-law Dennis Waymire head it up as Assistant District Superintendent.

I had all sorts of things bouncing around in my head. I was frankly worried where my head would end up going, but I felt like I was able to affirm all the requirements. Rev. Noel Taylor asked the most discerning question. "Kenny, we've known you since you were a boy. But sometimes people change their minds as they grow up. Have you changed your mind on any of your beliefs?"

It was a great question. I said that, while I had made many of the beliefs my own, I still affirmed the teachings of the Wesleyan Discipline.

6. I never expected to end up teaching at Indiana Wesleyan University. Young and immature, we had laughed when it changed its name from Marion College. "You can't make yourself sophisticated just by calling yourself a university," we said. I don't remember who the "we" were. I would later admire President Barnes for his business savvy.

Tom Sloan had tried to recruit me to Marion out of high school, I think I said. The Bostics were good friends of Marion College and they spent the winters in Fort Lauderdale. Big donors to IWU--Terry Munday mentioned them to me just last week. As a reflection of his virtue, he took care of them till Mrs. Bostic eventually passed at Colonial Oaks. They were close friends of my parents, and they often had breakfast together at their favorite diner. They would have been delighted for me to go to Marion.

To go even further down the rabbit hole, I don't think I've mentioned what Wesleyan/Methodist "royalty" my home church had attracted in my childhood. Clayton Luce, an old time Methodist and beneficiary of the Blue Bird Bus company attended our church with his wife and her nurse. I was able to take a ride on his yacht once.

Rev. and Mrs. C. Wesley Bradley also attended. He had been a Wesleyan Methodist District Superintendent in Jersey. My father was executor of his will and we ended up with much of his Wesleyana collection.

There was another Pilgrim General Superintendent of old, William Neff, who attended our church when I was a boy. (These were the days when my brother-in-law Dennis was pastor.) I remember he would pray up a storm when called on. 

7. So many diversions. Making Wesleyan theology my own.

I bring up teaching at Indiana Wesleyan because returning to a Wesleyan context after my doctoral work pushed me to refine my Schenckification of Wesleyan doctrines. But I had worked out the seeds in time to be able to make the appropriate affirmations for ordination.

I think I have already mentioned my journey with entire sanctification. Having detached the doctrine from Acts, I reformulated it in a more "Wesley"-an way. At some point I had read Wesley's sermon on the new birth, where he talks about not always being able to discern the moment of death, but you know that there is a point when you know someone is alive and you know when someone is dead.

Wesley was not specifically talking about entire sanctification there, but I thought it might apply as well to sanctification. I reimagined entire sanctification logically, the transition from not surrendering everything to God and surrendering everything to God. Bounds of course helped perfect my understanding later. Sanctification is God's work, not a work of our will, although full surrender is a prerequisite. 

In any case, you can read how it all ended up here.

On inerrancy, I found Asbury's statement, "without error in all it affirms" to be helpful. That raises the question, "What does the Bible affirm?" In other words, it allows not only for interpretation but for theological integration. It thus can be taken in terms of the whole counsel of God as the final answer more than atomized pieces. Indeed, we can even go further to think about a Christian reading of Scripture. 

Here is an early attempt to capture some of these thoughts in 2005.

I was asked what version of the Bible I would like to be given at the ordination service. I chose the NASB because I thought it would be more intelligible to the Florida District than the RSV they used at Asbury, which might be thought liberal. I had moved beyond the KJV of course. I didn't respect the NIV at that time and wouldn't be very comfortable with it until the revision in 2011. I used to make fun of its random insertions of words that weren't there so it could smooth out evangelical theology (like "now" in 1 Peter 4:6).

I used the NIV at IWU because Lennox had used the NIV Study Bible as his textbook for Old Testament and New Testament Survey. With each passing year, I was becoming more and more of a pragmatist, having started out as an idealist.

But I didn't really like the NASB, to be honest. I found it's translation too stilted. But it was considered respectable and conservative enough in my circles. Also, to be honest, I didn't like the formatting of the RSV. Too much block text. It worked for inductive Bible study. Not so much for good reading, IMO.

8. I was grateful to be chosen as a Teaching Fellow in 1990. That was a fork in the road. The rest of my life followed.

The Wesleyan Church 2035 (in honor of Keith Drury)

Two men sit down at a coffee shop. One looks to be in his late 60s. The other is relatively young, maybe in college. The young man has a tablet to take notes on.

Aaron: Thanks for agreeing to meet with me on such short notice. My paper's due tomorrow.

Keith: (with a grin) If I'd have known that, I wouldn't have agreed to the interview. You'll never be successful in ministry if you don't learn to plan ahead and get things done in a timely way.

Narrator: A slight look of horror came over the student's face.

Keith: So, you're writing a paper about the recent history of the Wesleyan movement?

Aaron: Yes, in particular I'm supposed to write about the split that happened recently.

Keith: Well, that's the first thing to get straight. It wasn't a split.

Aaron: What? Isn't there The Wesleyan Methodist Church, The Wesleyan Connection, and one other I can never remember the name of.

Keith: The Wesleyan Holiness Church?

Aaron: Yes, that's it. 

Keith: Yes, and there are also a number of congregations that don't belong to any of these any more.

Aaron: Right. So a split.

Keith: Nope. 

Narrator: The puzzlement on Aaron's face was plain as day. He was a twenty-one year old young man studying to be a full-time minister. It was a rare approach to ministry those days, since most pastors were now co-vocational.

Keith: Let me explain. It wasn't a split. It was a fizzle.

Aaron: A fizzle? What's that?

Keith: OK. Let's go back about ten years, and I'll tell you my interpretation of what happened.

Aaron: That would be great. You're already different than a couple others I've interviewed. But I'm supposed to let you tell the story your way without interfering. So fire away.

Keith: Ten years ago in 2025, America was very divided. You'll remember that Trump was president at that time. Some of the divisions in America were present in the church as well. But those weren't the primary reasons behind the fizzle. They more came into play after the fizzle.

Aaron: You're kind of hurting my brain. Could you back up and start again.

Keith: Sure. Let me start again. 

Ten years ago, there were already cracks in The Wesleyan Church that had been steadily widening. For example, the church had been struggling over the issue of drinking for decades. One wing of the church -- especially large church pastors and younger pastors -- saw a prohibition on drinking as a hindrance to evangelism and church growth. And they just didn't see an absolute prohibition on drinking as biblical. They thought the church's position should be moderation, not total abstinence.

Aaron: That's the position of The Wesleyan Methodist Church, right? 

Keith: Yes, and The Wesleyan Connection. The only one of the three that prohibits drinking now is the Wesleyan Holiness Church. In fact, that's one the main reasons it exists. 

Aaron: Really? I didn't know that. What about homosexuality? Was that part of the cause of the split?

Keith: It wasn't a split. And no. 

It's true that, for a long time, there were voices that warned about The Wesleyan Church splitting over homosexuality. It just was never a real threat. It was more of a fear about something that could happen in the future.

The Global Methodist Church had pulled out of the United Methodist Church over the ordination of gay ministers. And there were many in The Wesleyan Church who warned that The Wesleyan Church might undergo the same split if we didn't "tighten the ship," so to speak. They believed that we were getting more and more liberal. 

Aaron: So, was there ever a group of Wesleyans fighting to affirm homosexuality?

Keith: No, but the fear of it was a crucial element in the dissolution of The Wesleyan Church.

Aaron: Dissolution?

Keith: The fizzle I've been talking about. Have you learned about the "trust clause" yet? 

Aaron: No, what's a trust clause?

Keith: Well, you'll need to learn about it because The Wesleyan Methodist Church put it back in. But it doesn't exist any more in the other two branches of the Wesleyan fizzle. 

For a very long time, the property of local churches was technically owned by the districts they were in. There was a line in the property deed that said it was held "in trust" for the denomination. A local church thus couldn't vote to leave the denomination and take the property with them. And the denomination held authority over the local church.

Aaron: Really? Even if the church paid for the building and all?

Keith: Yes. Part of the idea was that local churches usually had a lot of help getting established. The denomination might invest a lot into a local church and then, if the local church got some new pastor next year who wanted the church to leave with the property, the denomination could lose the church and it wouldn't be fair. There were a lot of churches that left the church with their property in the 1960s.

There was also the desire to make sure local churches didn't start teaching heresy. Owning the property gave the district ultimate control over the church. 

On the other hand, for those afraid the church would drift into accepting homosexuality, there was the fear that the denomination would go liberal and then local churches would be forced to accept homosexuality or lose their property. That's somewhat what happened in the Global Methodist Church.

Aaron: OK. So did the trust clause go away before or after the "fizzle," as you call it.

Keith: Before. It was one of the key steps in the denomination dissolving.

Aaron: I'm still not quite sure what you mean by fizzling or dissolving.

Keith: Maybe it would help if I talked about where most of The Wesleyan Church ended up. That's in The Wesleyan Connection.

Aaron: And they call themselves a "connection" rather than a "church," right?

Keith: Yes. A lot of the larger Wesleyan churches had never really believe in denominations, in my opinion. They were almost a denomination to themselves. 

Aaron: So what exactly is a "denomination"? 

Keith: A denomination is a collection of churches that have an official structure of authority, organization, rules, etc. The local church is part of and under the authority of a larger organization.

Aaron: Like the Wesleyan Methodist Church. 

Keith: Yes, or the Wesleyan Holiness Church.

Both churches have a Discipline. Both churches have general superintendents. Even though the Wesleyan Holiness Church doesn't have a trust clause, it is organized into districts and has district superintendents. In their case, they don't have much teeth if a church wants to leave, which has already happened in a few places.

Aaron: So what does The Wesleyan Connection have? 

Keith: It has a President and Connectional By-Laws. But membership in the Connection is purely voluntary. It lets you participate in certain common goals like the Wesleyan Planters Association. There are benefits to partiipating, but it isn't a denomination per se any more.

Aaron: So how did that happen?

Keith: Well, like I said, there were many who thought that we should be more like they saw the New Testament church. And they liked to say that John Wesley started a movement and that the early Wesleyan churches were part of a movement. They became organized churches later. 

These voices thought we too would be more biblical if we were a Spirit-led movement rather than an organization that was also a business. A hidden assumption here was that our goal should be to make the church today be just like the church was in the first century.

Aaron: And isn't that what we're supposed to do?

Keith: The church of the first century fit the shape of the world in the first century. There are groups today who might say we shouldn't have guitars in worship because they didn't have guitars in Bible times. But surely we should focus on the goals of the church, not the various forms the church has used to reach those goals over the centuries.

Aaron: So you're saying they mistook the forms for the substance.

Keith: Yes. It was much the same as those who say we should meet in house churches because the early Christians met in houses. They just applied it to denominations. They said, "They didn't have district superintendents in the Bible so we shouldn't either" or "They didn't call them local boards of administration in the Bible so we shouldn't either." In the end, they didn't see that every generation has to play out the gospel in the most helpful forms for its own day.

Aaron: So how did that play out?

Keith: Like I said, the larger churches had already largely run to a large extent like they were their own denominations. They sometimes felt like district leadership was less capable of leading than they were. They sometimes felt like smaller congregations were either failing at the mission or were small-minded in their thinking.

So in the late 2010s and early 2020s, there was a shift toward putting the larger churches in charge of the districts. Districts were combined, which lessened the voices of more traditional Wesleyans -- especially the ones that eventually ended up in the Wesleyan Holiness Church. 

The Boomer layer of the denomination was finally in charge. They emphasized evangelism and lay leadership. There was a big emphasis on equipping non-ministers to do the work of the ministry. There was less and less a sense that a minister was someone called and set aside specially for full time ministry.

Meanwhile, larger churches and many in the denomination had long been absorbing ideas from other mega-churches and broader evangelicalism. The church was absorbing a lot of Baptist and broader evangelical thinking and assumptions in the process. The broader church culture of America was pulling us into its gravitational pull.

Aaron: Like how? 

Keith: For example, many in the church had a low view of the sacraments.

Aaron: You mean baptism and communion?

Keith: Yes. The larger churches and a lot of pastors believed that any Christian should be able to baptize a new believer or lead at communion.

Aaron: That's not what the Wesleyan Methodists do, right?

Keith: Right. The Wesleyan Methodists only let a licensed or ordained minister serve communion or baptize, except in emergency situations.

Aaron: And Wesleyan Methodists allow infant baptism?

Keith: Yes, it's somewhat rare, but it is not allowed in either The Wesleyan Connection or the Wesleyan Holiness Church.

Aaron: And what about women in ministry?

Keith: Women cannot be lead pastors in The Wesleyan Connection, but they can be staff pastors. That's one of the reasons the Wesleyan Methodist Church isn't part of the Connection any more. In the Wesleyan Holiness Church, women can't be pastors at all. But in the Wesleyan Methodist Church, they can be any kind of pastor up to General Superintendent.

Aaron: So what led to the fizzle?

Keith: Well, there was this slow movement behind the scenes. The headquarters was sold without anyone hardly even noticing it. The trust clause was done away with. The financial institution of the church went independent.

Aaron: So it was slowly moving away from a denomination toward a connection for a while?

Keith: Yes. At the 2030 General Conference they made it official. In 2032, they would meet to draft the By-Laws of the new "Wesleyan Connection." 

This move solved several problems. It let local churches and former districts that wanted to prohibit drinking prohibit drinking. Meanwhile, churches who believed in moderation could adopt that position. 

Every church would agree to the by-laws of the Connection and would enjoy the benefits of pooled resources. But they could follow their conscience on "non-essential" items. The leaders of the move championed it as "becoming like the New Testament church."

Aaron: So did they meet and set it up in 2032?

Keith: Yes, but it didn't play out quite like the leaders of the move thought it would. It's funny how so many think that a church might just follow the Bible alone. But there are always different interpretations of Scripture -- even in a small denomination like The Wesleyan Church.

A Task Force came with its recommendations. The move on drinking was obvious. There would be no prohibition on drinking in the By-Laws. It didn't make a lot of churches in Tennessee and Kentucky happy, but I think initially they were planning to go along with it.

Aaron: But they didn't in the end? 

Keith: No, in the end there were several features that led them to walk away. They thought the position on entire sanctification was too watered down. There were some strong voices that didn't believe in women in ministry at all. And they obviously didn't like the allowance of drinking. 

They had felt shoved in the corner for too long and missed the days when they played a more central role in the church. The year after the Connection formed, they came together and re-formed as a denomination again, the Wesleyan Holiness Church. It mostly consists of smaller churches. A lot of them were churches that had once been Pilgrim Holiness churches before the 1968 merger.  

Aaron: So why did the Wesleyan Methodists leave the Connection?

Keith: That's where some of the social and political dimensions of the last decades came into play. Both in the Connection and the Wesleyan Holiness folks, there were some strong feelings against things they called "woke" or "social justice warriors." Following the flow of 2020s politics, they saw things like women in ministry, racial reconciliation, taking care of the poor, helping immigrants get documented -- they saw these values as "leftist liberal."

Aaron: Really? I've been taught that those values were part of the founding of The Wesleyan Church and John Wesley. And don't those values come from the Bible?

Keith: Well, The Wesleyan Methodist Church sure thinks so. But the leaders of the other churches didn't so much. Or they thought those issues were too secondary to let interfere with the greater good that was happening. Some had actually come to see such values as evil and preached against them. The culture and political landscape at the time was strongly pushing them in that direction. We don't always know why we see what we see in the Bible.

Aaron: So the Wesleyan Methodists left the Connection too?

Keith: Well, they never really joined. It was mostly the Millennial layer of the church. They just couldn't agree with some of the values and direction of the Connection. Like the Wesleyan Holiness Church, they re-formed as a denomination again the next year in 2033.

Aaron: And that was just two years ago! Wow.

Keith: We'll see how the three bodies go. The Connection is going strong. Lots of baptisms. Very white upper middle class.

The Wesleyan Methodists are growing too. It's finding a lot of forty somethings coming back to the church after leaving in the 2020s. It also seems to speak to your generation well.

Aaron: And the Wesleyan Holiness Church? 

Keith: My impression is that it is holding its own so far. A lot of older congregations in small churches. 

Aaron: Wow. This has been very helpful. The paper has practically written itself.

Keith: Next time, do it in plenty of time. Don't be a last minute minister. Plan your responsibilities out. You never know when an emergency is going to pop up.

Aaron: Understood. Thanks so much for letting me interview you.

Keith: Thanks for the coffee!

A Brief Thought on Wesleyans and Baptism Debates

Someone asked me, given the recent article in Wesleyan Life, how the son of a Wesleyan minister might never have been baptized. Many Wesleyans do not know that the Pilgrim Holiness Church was not strong on baptism.

For example, my grandfather was a Quaker minister before he switched when the Pilgrim church was officially formed in the early 20s. Asked to perform a baptism in his 50s, he decided he should be baptized too first. My mother was not baptized until she was in her 40s (and our family was good friends in Florida with the Coates, with a similar background). [1]

If you find this incomprehensible, there is a key factor in play. Few of us realize that we wear glasses when we read the Bible. This was true of the Quakers, but it's also true now of us as Wesleyans. America is Baptist country. It suits our culture like hand in glove. Quakers and Salvation Army folk are wearing a different set of glasses and don't generally baptize at all.

I believe in baptism as a norm. I love that you can still be baptized as an infant in the Wesleyan Church, following our Wesley roots. I love that we don't specify immersion, pouring, or sprinkling.

Wesleyan Church Wesleyans generally borrow their thinking from others. The more academic side says, "But we're Wesleyans; it needs to be more sacramental." The more populist side feels the forces of baptistification and says, "Acts, Acts, Acts."

And I feel like we Wesleyans have been doing just fine with our big tent position on baptism. Paul looks on at our current debates and says, "Were you baptized in the name of believer's immersion? I thank God I didn't baptize any of you (to your horror). Ok, maybe I did baptize a handful." We all think we're just reading the Bible and doing what it says. And so do the other 20,000 denominations.

Here was my attempt to capture what I perceive to be the Wesleyan Church position on baptism (now in this). Here is another piece I wrote before that, "The Skinny on Wesleyans and Baptism."

[1] As an artifact of her upbringing, I remember my mother noting in Mark 16:16 that while baptism is mentioned as part of being saved, the second part only says that those who do not believe will be condemned. In other words, it does not say that those who are not baptized stand under condemnation.

Preface: A Sanctification Story

I want to take a brief pause from my writing on hermeneutics to crank out a little book I've been wanting to write on entire sanctification. I'm thinking of the title, "A Brief Guide to Wesleyan Holiness" (suggestions welcome). Last year Chris Bounds did an ordination course on Holiness, not to mention a book he co-authored. Steve Deneff also did a microcourse on "Understanding Holiness."

But none of these really satisfy me. Not long after working with these courses, I thought I would take a shot. I've played around with the outline, trying to find an optimal approach. So here we go. A Preface and five chapters. Here's the Preface.
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Preface: A Sanctification Story
1. I grew up regularly hearing sermons about “getting sanctified.” As a boy, I quickly learned that I needed to “get saved” so I would go to heaven when I died (or when the rapture happened). But salvation wasn’t the end of the journey. There was another crucial experience after salvation that I needed as well, and I needed to begin seeking it as soon as I was saved. That is, I also needed to be entirely sanctified.

I was never a touchy-feely, experiential person growing up. I often felt like I stood outside my emotions looking on. I identified with Spock in the original Star Trek series. He had deep emotions, but they were buried out of sight and under lock and key. Probably because of what I heard preached and modeled, I associated the experiences of salvation and sanctification with emotional experiences -- experiences that I did not immediately find forthcoming despite my willingness and regular prayers for them.

2. As a side note, I have found Chris Bounds’ analysis particularly insightful on the timing of sanctification. [1] He observes that the Wesleyan tradition has sometimes preached a "longer way" to sanctification, sometimes a "shorter way," and sometimes a "middle way." In his later years, John Wesley himself (1703-91), the originator of our tradition, tended to see "Christian perfection" as something that only a few would experience. Even then, it would mostly be toward the end of their lives. However, there are precedents for all three views in Wesley's preaching and writings.

In the 1830s, a woman in New York City named Phoebe Palmer (1807-74) tried to reclaim some of Wesley's earlier optimism that sanctification could happen much sooner in life and be the regular experience of believers. In Palmer’s time, many Methodists leaned toward the "longer way" view of sanctification, seeing it as a gradual process rather than an immediate experience. [2] She began to teach a "shorter way" to sanctification -- one available immediately by faith.

This is the view that would inspire the holiness revivals of the late 1800s, and it was the view of holiness with which I grew up in the late 1900s. Unfortunately, it sometimes disintegrated into what Keith Drury called "two tripism" in his classic book, Holiness for Ordinary People. [3] There are stories of people who, after just returning from the altar to get saved, were told that they needed to turn around and go right back to get sanctified. You might get saved one Sunday and then go to get sanctified the next.

In Holiness, Bounds describes the view of the Church of the Nazarene as one where, if you completely surrender everything to God, you should believe by faith that you have been entirely sanctified whether you have a noticeable emotional experience or not. [4] You might call it a "name it claim it" view. Say everything is God's and claim by faith that you are sanctified.

By contrast, Bounds suggests that the most appropriate approach is the "middle way." [5] On the one hand, it is more optimistic than to relegate sanctification to a few lucky ones right before they die. At the same time, the shorter way can border on a heresy known as Pelagianism. Pelagius (ca. 354-418) more or less taught that we had it within our own power to choose God and do good. The church would deem this a heresy, teaching that we can only do good and choose God when God empowers us to be able to do so. [6]

The "name it, claim it" view of sanctification seems to put sanctification into our hands and into our power. Some versions of the "shorter way" risk making sanctification seem like a human decision rather than a divine work. We can become sanctified at a time of our choosing. Bounds, on the other hand, insists that sanctification is always a matter of God's choosing. By God's grace, we can prepare ourselves. We can cooperate with God's grace to consecrate and surrender ourselves, but sanctification is ultimately God's act rather than our act. Accordingly, the timing is up to God. 

3. After much agony, I did testify to salvation. I experienced a moment of peace that I could point to as the moment of my salvation. Then, the agony began again – seeking the experience of sanctification. If I had known the teaching of Bounds, I could have rested in God’s timing. But that is not the way I heard the preaching on this topic. Whether intentional or not, the preaching I grew up with put the responsibility for sanctification on me.

More than once, I heard sermons use the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel in Genesis 32 as a model for sanctification. “If you want to be sanctified enough,” the sermon went, “if you will not let God go until he blesses you, then he will sanctify you.” In other words, being sanctified was about how much I wanted it. If I would truly give everything to God, then he would certainly bless me with sanctification if I wanted it enough.

In my opinion, this preaching was basically Pelagian. Yes, we need to get to a place of full surrender to God. When the Spirit reveals aspects of our lives that we have not given fully to God, we need to hand them over. But then the waiting begins. God gets to choose when we will experience his work in us. We have no reason to think he will delay long, but it is an important truth that it is God's decision.

4. It was a January morning in my first year of college. I would drive back to college in two steps. The first stint would take me four hours to my sister's house. Her husband pastored a church and the parsonage was next to the church. Then the next day I would drive the rest of the way.

As I drove north, I began to agonize over entire sanctification. "If you really wanted the experience," the voice in my head said, "you would not leave Lakeland for Central until you had received the blessing." I had the picture of Jacob wrestling with the angel in my mind. "If you were really serious about entire sanctification, you wouldn't go back to college until you were sanctified."

My past experience told me that it could be a long time before I felt something. I had struggled off and on to have the feeling that I was saved for years. How long would it take before I felt like I had experienced sanctification? I wanted to get back to college!

Yet I felt like I must wait. I had just felt a call to ministry. My whole vocation was going to be focused on preaching the word and being a spiritual model. I had to clear up the matter of my sanctification. 

I finally surrendered. Yes. I wouldn't leave Lakeland until I had experienced entire sanctification -- even if I missed the spring semester.

At that moment of surrender, I felt a release and a great peace. When I arrived at the church in Lakeland, I went into the sanctuary and thanked God. My trip was not delayed.

5. Looking back, I thank God for his mercy. I doubt that God was behind the moments of torture that I experienced on that drive. Perhaps it was my own neurosis. Perhaps it was the Devil testing me. But the Lord stooped to my weakness, and for that I am grateful.

I have reflected much more extensively on the Wesleyan doctrine of holiness since those days in college. My ministry came to focus especially on teaching Scripture, and I was particularly interested in the biblical view of holiness during my studies. In fact, part of the reason I ended up focusing on Hebrews was its teaching on sanctification.

In the following pages, I want to share some of the insights that I believe came out of those years of study. I have remained Wesleyan. Nevertheless, my understanding of various verses has been refined over the years. I continue to believe that all believers will ideally come to a point where they need to surrender everything to God. And it is only then that we can have the fullness of the Spirit empowering our lives. 

I invite you to explore the topic of "entire sanctification" with me.

[1] Matt Ayers, Christopher T. Bounds, Caleb T. Friedeman, Holiness: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Theology (InterVarsity, 2023), 334-41.

[2] Kevin M. Watson, Doctrine, Spirit, & Discipline: A History of the Wesleyan Tradition in the United States (Zondervan, 2024), 204-7.

[3] Keith Drury, Holiness for Ordinary People 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, 2004).

[4] Holiness, 337.

[5] Holiness, 355-58.

[6] The difference between Wesleyans and Calvinists is not about God's empowerment but about the role of our wills. Calvinists view God's grace as entire and all-or-nothing. Saving grace is like an on-off switch that God either turns on entirely or he doesn't. Salvation is a matter of "monergism" -- the sole action of God.

By contrast, I've likened the Wesleyan view of God's grace to something more like a dimmer switch. God turns up his grace enough for us to signify a desire for more if we choose. Then he turns his grace up more until eventually we are regenerated. In this case, our empowered wills cooperate with God's grace. Salvation is a matter of synergism -- a working together of God's will with our will.

Wesleyans therefore reject Pelagianism just as Calvinists do.

3.3 The Merger of Three Churches

My journey through the ideological history of the Wesleyan Church finally reaches the merger. The video to the left is from the Wesleyan Church History and Discipline course that you can watch for free or take for ordination licensing through Kingswood Learn.

In some of the material that follows, I am operating from memory. For this reason, I strongly ask for correction if I have gotten any of the information wrong. Normally, I would ask Keith Drury, but he is quite enjoying heaven at the moment and has decided not to answer my emails.

Here are the previous posts in this series:

Preface to Wesleyan Ideological History
1.1 Wesley and High Protestantism
1.2 An Archaeology of Wesley's Thinking 

2.1 Methodist Ideology in the Early 1800s
2.2 Founding Perspectives of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection
2.3 The Birth of the American Holiness Movement

3.1 The Holiness Revivals of the Fin de Siècle
3.2 Modernism on the Outskirts

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12. Bob Black has said that the Pilgrim Holiness Church never saw a merger that it didn't like. Merger was in the water in the 1960s. In the late 50s, the United Church of Christ was a merger of the Congregational Christian Churches and the Evangelical and Reformed Church. In 1962, three Lutheran denominations merged. The United Evangelical Brethren and the Methodist Church merged in 1968 to form the United Methodist Church. 

The Wesleyan Methodists had already merged with the Reformed Baptist Church of Canada in 1966, also the year they voted to merge with the Pilgrims. A Pennsylvania district, the Allegheny Conference withdrew from the WMC over the merger, as did a number of churches in Tennessee and Ohio. About 13% of its churches and 11% of its membership was lost.

The reasons had a good deal to do with standards (dress, jewelry, matters relating to divorce). There was also a sense that mergers were a movement toward the one-world religion of the Antichrist. Some of my extended family did not go with the merger from the Pilgrim side for the same reasons. 

The WMs had come very close to merging with the Pilgrims in 1959 but didn't for logistical reasons and because of the resistance of the Allegheny district. I've already mentioned that Stephen Paine regretted spending so much time trying to appease that district as president of Houghton. It brought little result. 

I had Don Boyd as a worship professor at Asbury in the late 80s. You'd have never guessed that he was the district superintendent of this district when they split from the church. From my standpoint as a young Wesleyan, he was hyper-liturgical and quite foreign to me. I guess sometimes we go to the opposite extreme of where we start. It's not necessarily out of rebellion. Perhaps having grown up in a generally low church background, Boyd was attracted to elements that were missing from his WM worship growing up. Opposites attract

The Wesleyan Methodists had almost merged with the Free Methodists before, and many of us thought we merged with them in 1976. The presiding General Superintendent that year, O. D. Emery, thought the Free Methodists were liberal on inerrancy and so used a parliamentary trick to kill the merger. Ironically, the Free Methodists had actually added inerrancy language to their Articles of Religion so that we could merge.

The report of the committee recommending merger with the Free Methodists was brought to the floor of the Wesleyan General Conference in 1976. But instead of moving that the conference "adopt" the motion of the committee, Emery had all who wholeheartedly thanked the committee for their work stand to "receive" their report. Everyone stood and clapped. A whole lot of us thought we had just merged, but of course, nothing had been adopted and we never merged.

13. Now to the ideologies. Although there was substantial agreement between the Reformed Baptists of Canada, the Wesleyan Methodists, and the Pilgrims, there were some interesting differences that have left traces in the church even today. Sometimes Wesleyans will think that something seems obvious only to find out that there are other Wesleyans with quite different perspectives on the same thing. Sometimes these are artifacts of our parent denominations.

For example, the Reformed Baptist Alliance had two conditions for merger, where they sought slightly different rules for their churches in Canada. One had to do with divorce. I welcome insights here from those who might know for sure, but I can mention some of the issues that I have encountered with groups that did not go with the merger. I can think of three:

• Whether it is ever permitted for a Christian to initiate a divorce. Matthew 5:32 allows for divorce if a spouse has an affair, but 1 Corinthians 7:12 says not to divorce if an unbelieving spouse wants to remain with you. Someone might put these two together and say a Christian can never initiate a divorce. You could argue that although it's technically allowed for cheating, a couple should stay together if the cheater is willing.
• What are the obligations of the "innocent party," the person who is divorced but didn't seek the divorce? Many ultra-conservatives believe that a Christian must remain unmarried for the rest of his or her life even if they are not the one who initiated a divorce. "They're still married in God's eyes." Matthew 5:32 can be interpreted to say that you can never marry a divorced woman. I know some who even think that, if you repent after you have remarried, you should divorce your second spouse and go back to your first one (in stark contrast to Deut. 24:4).
• Can a divorced person even be a minister, or are they permanently disqualified? Can a minister be married to a divorced person (cf. Lev. 21:7)?

I'm guessing (please correct) that the RBs did not allow for any of these. I'm guessing they did not allow for divorce at all, did not allow for remarriage after divorce, and did not allow divorced individuals to be ministers. The Wesleyan Methodists allowed divorce for cause and remarriage if you divorced for cause or were the innocent party.

Interestingly, the WMs from Tennessee who did not go with the merger formed the Bible Covenant Church in 1966 in part because of the WM's "looser" standards on divorce. Then, ironically, the daughter of the leader of the new denomination sought a divorce from her husband. The leader supported her. The Bible Covenant church disintegrated.

14. A pattern of church change is for the denomination to appoint a study committee of scholars to investigate an issue and come back with a recommendation at the next General Conference. This is of course what had happened with the proposed merger with the Free Methodists. I remember three or four such study committees of note. One was on divorce and two have been on tongues.

From my standpoint today, these study committees are stacked. You appoint people to them whom you know are going to come out with the conclusion you want them to reach. The divorce study committee recommended the position that the next GC adopted. The first study on tongues retained a restrictive view on the use of tongues. The one brought to the more recent GC for the first time made tongues acceptable in public worship as long as there is interpretation.

Nothing to see here. Everything done decently and in order. Change management. I believe a study on membership preceded changes made in 2016. 

15. The other issue on which the Reformed Baptist's sought an exception was on the flexibility the WMC had on baptism. As an heir to the Methodist tradition, the WMC still allowed for infant baptism. The reason why infant baptism remains a possibility in TWC today is because of this heritage. However, the RBs insisted that they continue only to practice believer's baptism.

Meanwhile, the Pilgrims were rather lax on the question of baptism. Interestingly, the Salvation Army -- another Methodist offshoot -- does not require baptism as well. I remember my mother pointing out a known Pilgrim interpretation of Mark 16:16. It says that whoever believes and is baptized will be saved. But it doesn't say that those who are not baptized will not be saved.

I've already mentioned (I think) that my grandfather had been a Quaker before becoming a Pilgrim. When he was in his 50s (I believe), he was asked to assist in a baptism. So he thought that he should get baptized himself. My mother, similarly, was not baptized I believe until she was in her late 40s in Florida.

The merged Wesleyan Church did require baptism for membership. But it retained all the options: believer's baptism or infant baptism, immersed, poured, or sprinkled. Most Wesleyan churches do believer's baptism by immersion. At the moment, I sense a strong movement to baptize individuals as soon as possible after they confess faith. This follows the most visible model in Acts. 

However, historically, there has often been a time of catechesis before baptism. In my own view, both approaches should be allowed. Baptism doesn't save you (1 Pet. 3:21 is figurative speech). So you won't go to hell if you undergo some instruction before you are baptized. I also think that Paul sat much more loosely to baptism than most Baptists do (1 Cor. 1:17). 

In keeping with Wesley, Wesleyans do affirm baptism as a means of grace and not as mere symbolism. I find it more difficult to pin down what the grace is. We can be justified, redeemed, regenerated, sanctified, and adopted without ever being baptized. Elsewhere, I have called it a sacrament of inclusion. 

In any case, the Wesleyan Methodists were more sacramental than the Pilgrims. They were, after all, more Wesley-an. The Pilgrims, like the Salvation Army, sat much more loosely to communion and baptism. The Quaker mixture in their roots shone through.

16. Baptism was not the only issue where the WMs and PHC had different flavors. As we have shown, the Wesleyan Methodist Church was born of social action. It had a "postmillennial" heritage that believed not only in saving souls but also in changing the world for the better. It had played a role in the women's rights and temperance movements of the 1800s.

The Pilgrim Church was firmly pre-millennial and dispensational. While it also had a very positive view of women ministers (by the way, so did the Reformed Baptist Alliance), the Pilgrims looked for the rapture to happen any day and the Tribulation to begin. If it had been up to the Pilgrims, a pre-trib rapture would have been part of the Articles of Religion as it had been for them. But a more basic eschatology prevailed with an allowance for different points of view.

17. In terms of inerrancy, I have already suggested that the Pilgrims were more charismatic and revivalist in their hermeneutic of Scripture. God could say whatever he wanted to say through the words to you. The WMs had better scholars and had more modernists like Stephen Paine around, and the new evangelical concept of inerrancy made it onto the books... in the original manuscripts.

Two superintendents were chosen from each main parent denomination. Two from the WMs and two from the Pilgrims. Parity was very important, with each side winning out on about an even number of things. The choice of J. D. Abbott as one of the Pilgrim GSs perhaps signaled a move for the Pilgrims toward greater respectability and class (I was named after his son).

Those in both parent churches who focused on standards were increasingly marginalized and, in many cases, did not go with the merger. Keith Drury once told me that he was specifically sent to preside over a West Virginia district conference because he was the only general official with a wedding ring. He said that as he moved his hand in preaching, the eyes of the audience followed it like they were watching a tennis match.

Finally, it was so distracting that he asked, "Is this a problem?" And he actually took the ring off. He said there was an audible sigh of relief and, from that point on, there was a delightful engagement with the sermon.

Increasingly, those women who had buns and only wore skirts/dresses were mostly found in small churches and camp meetings. There was increasingly a movement away from camp meetings, some of it no doubt intentional. Wesleyans were becoming a little more mainstream and "respectable." It was the Wesleyan version of what the Methodists did on a higher social scale in the late 1800s. 

Women began to wear earrings and jewelry, not to mention wedding rings. Now we began to eat out on Sunday. Wesleyans "secretly" went to movies although it would be discouraged in the Discipline until as recently as the last decade. Dancing wasn't common but its prohibition would largely be a joke on college campuses. Prohibitions on "mixed bathing" (men and women swimming together) would eventually phase out.

The denomination adopted a clever tactic to move toward change in these areas. These disputable issues were moved from membership requirements to a new section of the Discipline called "Special Directions." The Special Directions allowed for the older customs to be displayed prominently but there were no teeth to them. There were no consequences in not following them.

There would eventually need to be clean up here, but it could take decades. It is not ideal to have things you consider to be very important sitting next to items that are joked about and no one follows. It trivializes the important (and in some cases, could create legal problems).

Nevertheless, this was a fairly peaceful way to bring change to the church. Attempts to do similar things on the issue of drinking have not completely succeeded. Indeed, attempts to get around this issue have led to fundamental changes in the church's ecclesiology. Hopefully, such flux can be resolved in the next General Conference or two.

18. This was a different church than the Wesleyan Methodists of a century earlier. While there may have been a few lone rangers here and there participating in the civil rights movement, the annals of both denominations were pretty silent on the movement (Tony Casey did quite a bit of research here). In fact, the tone among many in my Pilgrim circles was more on the side of law and order, grumbling about the troublemakers protesting. MLK was no hero in my circles in those days.

When Roe v. Wade came through in the 70s and a position was discussed on abortion, one of the general superintendents argued there should be exceptions for rape using the illustration, "What if a woman were raped by a black man?" I don't know whether he put it that way because he himself was racist or if he was trying to appeal to individuals on the General Board who were.

It seems possible to me that the Wesleyan Church -- and maybe evangelical culture in general -- goes through phases. Periods with more focus on social issues are followed by phases with more emphasis on soul-winning and inner spirituality. It is a hypothesis. 

The focus on abolition and women's rights in the mid-1800s was followed by the inner focus of the late 1800s holiness/revival movement. Is it possible that, after there was a time of push for equality on matters of race and gender in the 1960s, the church turned into a "let's focus on winning souls" phase in the 1970s? The 1960s did not see the church pushing for civil rights, but the 70s soon followed with a push for evangelism. 

The surge of socially conscious young evangelicals in the 2000s (Millennials) gave way to a surge of Boomer leadership in the 2010s that was more interested in evangelism. And after the recent push for race adjustments in the late 2010s, the church has turned strongly away from social justice to talk more about marketplace evangelism. It's almost like the church can't stomach too much talk about social issues for too long. Perhaps it's too painful. It naturally retreats into an otherworldly (and less sensitive) focus? Again, it is just a hypothesis.

19. The time of merger was also the time of the Vietnam War. The 1950s had seen a surge in civil religion with "in God we trust" put on the dollar bill and "under God" added to the pledge of allegiance. McCarthy had led the Senate in a witch hunt for communists among us. At Houghton College, Wilbur Dayton was recruited as president in 1972 to try to get those young people in line. He would be ousted by 1976. He was a nice man, godly, intelligent. But he wasn't what the young people of the 1970s wanted in a president.

Civil religion was the name of the game. Civil religion is when there is a swirl of patriotic fervor mixed in with one's religious fervor. To question the war was almost like questioning God. So the church focused rather on evangelism and the 1970s version of church growth. There was Ezekiel's Wheels where young people rode their bikes around the country witnessing. A young John Maxwell was beginning to wow ministers with dramatic soul-winning techniques. 

Maxwell's GRADE program sorted the church into Andrews (evangelists), Timothys (disciplers), Barnabases (encouragers), and Abrahams (prayer warriors). It was an early version of APEPT today (apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers). The Abrahams prayed while the Andrews went door to door asking Evangelism Explosion's, "If you died tonight, would you have the assurance of going to heaven." Bus ministries blossomed.

The new church was off to the races... 

3.2 Modernism on the Outskirts

The history of the ideology of The Wesleyan Church continues. This entry is on the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy of the mid-twentieth century. The picture to the left is Stephen Paine, president of Houghton College (1937-1972). 

Previous posts have been:

Preface to Wesleyan Ideological History
1.1 Wesley and High Protestantism
1.2 An Archaeology of Wesley's Thinking 

2.1 Methodist Ideology in the Early 1800s
2.2 Founding Perspectives of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection
2.3 The Birth of the American Holiness Movement

3.1 The Holiness Revivals of the Fin de Siècle

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1. The Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy -- what was it? It was when the clash between the forces of theological liberalism coming out of the late 1800s finally came to a head with the forces of conservative, orthodox Christianity. The word liberal today is often used as a broad term of derision. But in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it referred to a somewhat clearly defined movement and group of Christians who were "free" from the moorings of historic Christianity and Scripture. (The word liberal comes from the Latin word that means "free.")

Following the Enlightenment of the 1700s, the late 1800s saw the rise of evolution in science and the rise of higher criticism in biblical studies. Many thinkers who came from the Christian tradition not only abandoned any sense of Scripture as the word of God, but they also ceased to believe in the divinity of Christ, miracles, and any sense of a need for atonement. They used frameworks from the latest thought of the time to restructure their religion. 

In the early 1800s, Friedrich Schleiermacher in Germany saved theology for the German university by making religion about subjective feeling and a sense of absolute dependence on something greater than oneself. But one of the results was that Christianity ceased to be about something that was real "out there," something that was objectively real. Instead, it came to be about something going in "in here," inside me as a human being. Christianity began to lose any need to be grounded in history or external reality. It was now about inner feeling.

The pain of these trends first began to impinge upon the broader Methodist church in the late 1800s. Because the Methodists did not initially have any graduate schools or seminaries, their academics were often trained overseas in Germany or at schools that were not Wesleyan in theology. When they returned, they taught little about anything truly Wesleyan. Instead, they taught the trendy and more respectable ideas of the time.

(As a side note, when Bud Bence applied to do his doctorate at Chandler at Emory University in the late 1960s, he was told in no uncertain terms that he would need to do so in the field of church history. He wanted to study the theology of John Wesley, and the theology department at Chandler made it clear that he could only study Wesley as a historical artifact. But they would not tolerate any foolishness that might suggest Wesley's theology was actually still viable for today.)

Charles Sheldon's celebrated WWJD -- "What would Jesus do?" -- is a great example of early twentieth century liberal theology. WWJD is a noble concept. But did you know that Sheldon did not believe that Jesus was divine or that Jesus performed miracles? Rather, Sheldon believed that Jesus was a supreme ethical example, a model human. Sheldon was half right... and also quite wrong on the other half.

In the early 1900s, some of these individuals had reduced Christianity to a "social gospel." Mind you, there was nothing wrong with their concern to help people. This is a classic mistake that some orthodox Christians made in that era. Seeing that many of those who were concerned for the poor did not believe in the divinity of Christ or the Virgin Birth, they mistakenly acted like concern for the poor itself was wrong. They threw out the good with the bad.

Both parties only have half a gospel. Those who had reduced Christianity to a social gospel only had half a gospel. And those who were orthodox in belief but rejected any concern for redeeming society also only had half a gospel. I am extremely grateful that, at least in this period, Wesleyans, Pilgrims, Nazarenes, Free Methodists, and Salvationists all had a whole gospel -- they believed in the essentials of faith, personal salvation, and the importance of the church addressing those in need.

2. In response to "modernism," from 1910 to 1915 various scholars wrote in defense of orthodox Christian positions like belief in the Virgin Birth. The series was known as The Fundamentals. This was an attempt to push back against the teaching that was increasingly finding its way into the most prestigious American seminaries. In 1923, Asbury Seminary was founded for the Methodists as a ballast against the teaching coming out of Boston University. In 1929, Westminster Theological Seminary was founded as pull-out group from what was increasingly being taught at Princeton Seminary.

But the ultimate flash point was the Scopes Trial of 1925, in which a Tennessee teacher was fired for teaching the theory of evolution. In a nationally publicized circus, Clarence Darrow humiliated William Jennings Bryan before the nation for his literal interpretations of Genesis. The trial was so stressful that Bryan would die five days after it ended. Fundamentalism had lost its first main battle. It would lose a second in 1933 when Prohibition was revoked. 

Then again, liberalism would face its own crushing blow with World War II. One of the core features of theological liberalism was an optimistic view of human nature and human progress. It had the flavor of a postmillennial outlook and expected the world to get better and better. WW2 and the Holocaust rather confirmed that humanity was just as depraved as it had ever been. And, as astute as German scholarship may have been, it went right along with the immense darkness of Nazi Germany.  

The "prophecies" of Nietzsche had come true. A world without God is not a dreamy world of human goodness and progress. It is rather a world in which anything is permissible, and humans are free to pursue whatever they can get away with. It was a world without any objective meaning. 

3. So, what did these controversies have to do with the Pilgrims and Wesleyan Methodists? Almost nothing. Don't get me wrong. My Pilgrim grandparents made jokes about the idea that we evolved from monkeys. But these weren't hot issues in Wesleyan circles. No statements or actions were taken about any of these things in the first half of the twentieth century by Wesleyans. They were not part of any General Conference resolution. They were largely irrelevant to the forebears of The Wesleyan Church.

Why? Because no Pilgrims and Wesleyans believed these things. They largely weren't going off to seminary. They didn't have teachers at their Bible colleges who had gone off to Germany to study with F. C. Baur or Julius Wellhausen. Houghton, Central, and Marion College didn't have any professors who had studied with Bordon Parker Bowne at Boston University. The issues of modernism just weren't their issues. They were concerned about whether you kept the Sabbath or wore jewelry. They were concerned about whether you testified to an experience of entire sanctification.

As interpreters, the Pilgrims especially were what we might call "pre-modern" interpreters of the Bible. Like the Pentecostal movement that came out of the holiness movement, they were not wired to read the Bible in its historical context. Rather, they heard words directly from the Lord in the words of the Bible.

Let me give you an example from 1970. My family was trying to decide whether the Lord wanted us to move to Florida with my father's job. We prayed. We read the Bible, asking the Lord to show us what we should do. Judges 1:15 in the King James jumped out at one of my sisters, "Thou hast given me a south land." She felt like the Lord was saying, "I want you to move to Florida."

I would be careful about being too critical of this kind of interpretation. It is not unlike some of the exegesis used in the New Testament. For example, in Acts 1:20, Peter hears God saying to replace Judas as a disciple based on the words of Psalm 109:8, an imprecatory psalm originally about the enemies of the psalmist, calling for their demise. Peter lifts the words out of context and applies them directly to his situation in a way that was not part of the psalm's first meaning.

My point is that the Pilgrims heavily interpreted the Bible in a non-contextual or "spiritual" way. They had a largely "pre-modern" hermeneutic or paradigm of interpretation. They were open to allegory while high Protestants had tried to shut it down back in the days of Martin Luther. They tried to hear fresh words from the Spirit every day in their daily devotions. They did not try or really know how to read the Bible in its historical-cultural context.

The Wesleyan Methodists in general were more scholarly than the Pilgrims, but these issues still were not the issues they were focused on in the 1920s and 30s. Perhaps if there had been a General Conference in 1925, something might have been said about evolution. But since the Scope's Trial happened in the middle of the stretch between 1924 and 1928, the controversy had died down by the next General Conference. 

By contrast, those who had actually been fighting these battles largely stopped fighting in the public sphere. They had lost the war for the public imagination.

3. But that would not last long. After WW2, some new kids on the block chastised their predecessors for giving up. Harold Ockenga would start a new movement he called "neo" evangelicalism. Public activism would be a key feature of this movement. But the movement would have a different flavor. It would be good news rather than having the flavor of a war against evil.

Soon a young preacher named Billy Graham would become associated with this movement. He might very well have gone unknown except that, in a spur-of-the-moment decision, William Randolph Hearst put his money and newspapers behind him. Suddenly, a relatively insignificant rally in LA became national news, and a movement was born. Hearst would pay for every pastor in America to regularly receive a copy of a new magazine, Christianity Today, having an immense impact on American Christianity. C. F. H. Henry would be the editor.

I have a bit of a bone to pick with the way the history of this stretch is often told by people like George Marsden and Mark Noll. I can't blame them entirely because they built their reading of the history in part out of the way the leaders of the movement told the story, people like Harold Ockenga. When Noll identifies who the "fundamentalists" were before the neo-evangelicals rose, he identifies "dispensationalists, holiness folk, and Pentecostals." 

Wrong. We were never in that game. The "fundamentalists" these new evangelicals should have criticized for retreating were intellectuals of the early 1900s like J. Gresham Machen, and they were overwhelmingly Calvinist. (This telling of the history of evangelicalism is similar to the skew Donald Dayton faced in relation to the 1800s. The Princeton Calvinists of the 1800s were not evangelicals in the sense of Wesley or Whitefield. Finney and Moody were.) Holiness folk and Pentecostals were never in the modernist war such that they might retreat. 

The neo-evangelicals had a different post-war flavor from the real fundamentalist fighters before them. But they were in direct continuity ideologically with the "fundamentalists" they were now being condescending about. The difference is that they were riding a wave of post-WW2 optimism -- fertile soil for revival and the return of God and hope to American culture. It was the context that changed, not their ideology.

Get our name out of your mouth. We were never fighting that battle. Your "parents" were.  

4. What is fundamentalism? Let's bring some clarity here. The Pilgrims and Wesleyans were largely "pre-modern." That is, they read the words of Scripture without a strong view to its historical context. They read the Bible devotionally. When we talk about lectio divina today, it is essentially a return to reading the Bible this way. You read the words. You chew on them. You meditate on them. You let the Spirit speak to you however he wants to.

Modernism promoted reading the Bible in its historical context. There's nothing wrong with this. After all, the Bible says it was written to people who've been dead for thousands of years. If you want to know what the Bible first meant, you have to read it the way its first readers read it. And that means you have to read it in its literary and historical context.

The problem is that these two readings are completely different hermeneutics. When Augustine and those throughout Christian history affirmed the truthfulness of the Bible, they felt a freedom to hear the words in accordance with Christian tradition. Similarly, when the Pilgrims and Wesleyans read the Bible, they could hear whatever they thought the Spirit was telling them in the words.

Modernism changed the ball game. Now, the words of the Bible took on a more fixed and definite meaning. Context locked down the possibilities to a much larger extent. Now, for the Bible to be truthful, its original meaning had to be true, not just its words. Before, only the words had to be true. Now, after studying the literary and historical context, the resulting interpretation had to be true. This is a significant paradigm shift. [1]

Similarly, we now have the rise of archaeology and science to contend with. What if someone excavates Jericho and argues that there is no evidence for an Israelite invasion in the years 1500-1200, as happened with Kathleen Kenyon in the 1950s? The game has wildly changed from believing the words are true to coordinating the discoveries and evidence of the modern world with the words of the Bible.

Further, the criteria of truthfulness have subtly changed in the meantime. The truth of Scripture is no longer a matter of whether it is theologically true. Ironically, accepting the standards of modernism, fundamentalism now insists that the Bible can only be true if it reasonably matches modern understandings of history and science. Ironically, fundamentalism has adopted the paradigm of the modern world in its way of approaching Scripture.

Again, the Pilgrims and Wesleyans were blissfully making their way along with their "Pentecostal" modes of interpretation. These debates were largely taking place on the side, bypassing us. We were not the original fundamentalists. The forebears of the neo-evangelicals were.

So a fundamentalist is not simply someone who believes in the essentials of Christian faith. Fundamentalism has a flavor. It is combative. It is in a fight against modernism. It is anti-modernist while, ironically, using the very tools of modernism to fight against it. 

Pilgrims and Wesleyans of the early twentieth century largely were not fundamentalists. We were revivalists, trying to get people saved and sanctified. We weren't in that debate.

5. The neo-evangelicals of the late 1940s were a mixture of elements. There is what I might call the intellectual half, and there is what I might call the evangelistic half. Billy Graham was the face of the evangelistic half. He was the one in continuity with the evangelicals of the past. John Wesley, George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, Charles Finney, D. L. Moody, and Billy Graham. These all go together. Let's get as many people saved as possible.

I might add that, although the General Board of the Pilgrim church stopped to pray when they heard about Billy Graham's LA revival, he was always "other" in my family. He was that Baptist preacher who thought it was enough to get those people to pray a sinner's prayer and then, because of eternal security, never do anything more with them. We criticized him for, at least in the early days, not having any real system for discipleship to plug new converts into churches.

It was the same with Jerry Falwell in the 1980s. He was always "other." He had nothing to do with us. (He had a lot to do with the culture, as we will argue in a later post.)

The other half of neo-evangelicalism was the intellectual part. It was heavily Calvinist and was in the ideological tradition of A. A. Hodge, B. B. Warfield, and J. Gresham Machen. They drew a word straight from the Princeton Calvinists of the 1800s: inerrancy. Again, although it sounds like you're saying the same thing as all the prior Christians who affirmed the truthfulness of Scripture, the word now has a distinctly new connotation. The word now assumes the fundamentalist side in all the debates of the previous century against modernism. Its use assumes the standards of history and science that were on the playing field of previous debates.

Again, these debates were largely foreign to Pilgrims and Wesleyans. We simply weren't fighting these battles. At least most of us weren't. There was one Wesleyan who was deeply involved in these things. He was a Wheaton grad. When Houghton hired him as a professor in the 1930s, some wondered if he was Wesleyan enough. His name was Stephen Paine.

6. Paine brought all these issues to Houghton College and the Wesleyan Methodist Church. Paine had been in the swirl of all these movements. In fact, in 1960 he ran as the presidential candidate for the Prohibition Party. From 1966-68, Paine served as president of the National Association of Evangelicals, one of the organizations formed by the neo-evangelicals in the late 1940s. After retirement, he was the lead editor of the New International Version, which finally came out fully in 1984. Paine was a neo-evangelical's evangelical.

As a former Pilgrim, I suppose it is no surprise that Houghton always seemed to be on the edges of the Wesleyan Church to me. But I think that was also true of the Wesleyan Methodist Church too. For example, Paine expressed near the end of his presidency that he wished he had not spent so much time trying to appease the Allegheny district on matters like dress and standards. It was all for naught anyway, since that group didn't even end up going with the merger. 

But note the contrast. Paine wanted to be in the center of evangelical debates. The WMs were arguing over dress and standards.

In 1955, Paine brought a motion to the Wesleyan Methodist Church that the statement on Scripture be revised. He proposed that the phrase, "inerrant in the original manuscripts" be added to the Articles of Religion. Of course, the WMs had no problem with this addition. Certainly they believed the Bible was without error.

Similarly, when the Wesleyans and Pilgrims merged, the Pilgrims gladly voted for inerrancy to be in the new denomination's Discipline. The term had not been in their Manual. But of course, who wouldn't agree that the Bible is without error?

My historical point is that what was going on in Stephen Paine's mind was not the same as what was going on in the minds of the Wesleyan Methodists and Pilgrims. He was in a war, and the word carried immense assumptions for him. It had a history for him that it did not really have for the rest of the church. For him, it was ensconced in decades' long debates.

Note also his addition of "in the original manuscripts." As a Greek scholar, Paine did not think that the King James Version was accurate to the original manuscripts of the New Testament at a number of points. (Note: he would be quite different from the Wesleyans and Pilgrims at this point too, since everyone used the KJV at that time.) Neo-evangelicalism rejected "higher criticism" like Wellhausen's JEDP, but it did not reject what they called "lower criticism" to determine what the original text might have said.

7. When Bud Bence tells the history of The Wesleyan Church, he talks about forks in the road where the trends of the time led the church to pick between options. [2] For example, Orange Scott and Luther Lee picked abolition at that fork in the road. Coming mainly from a Wesleyan Methodist perspective, Bence identifies the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy as one of those forks where the Wesleyans picked fundamentalism.

I would say that was true of a few intellectuals in the WM church at the time. And it has had some ripple effects on the church. But I would argue that most of those debates happened in parallel to us. 

They did bring a polarization in some circles. Asbury Seminary had been founded by Henry Clay Morrison in 1923 largely to provide the Methodists with an orthodox option to the other Methodist seminaries of the time. (As a side note, my mother once heard Morrison preach in Kentucky in the 1930s during the year her family spent at Kingswood.) That means Asbury was founded in the wake of that battle. But Morrison was also wanting to promote holiness revivalism, which respectable Methodism had rejected.

There is almost always collateral damage in battle. Asbury's was Professor Claude Thompson. [3] Thompson was no modernist. He was in fact a strong supporter of Wesley's theology, and he had studied with a strong supporter of Wesleyan theology at Drew University -- although he had his own set of accusations. Thompson joined the faculty of Asbury Seminary in 1947.

But this was also the moment when neo-evangelicalism was on the rise. Although no one could point to any clear point where Thompson was teaching heresy, he smelled fishy to the new kids on the block. He was not a dispensationalist. He did not use the new term inerrancy with all that it now implied. Although he had the support of the trustees and the faculty, six faculty threatened to resign if he was not fired. Stephen Paine caught wind and also sought reassurances of Thompson's bona fides -- which he received -- from President McPheeters.

Initially, McPheeters tried repeatedly to assure all these internal and external voices that Thompson was not a modernist. But eventually, Thompson did the Christ-like thing and -- for the good of the school -- resigned in 1950. It was a wound he carried for the rest of his life because teaching at Asbury was his dream. Asbury would lose its accreditation with the Association of Theological Schools over the debacle as well as its status as a Methodist-approved seminary. Only when McPheeters resigned in 1962 did Asbury regain its accreditation.

You could argue that, in this moment, Asbury shifted for a time from being a Wesleyan-holiness seminary to being a neo-evangelical seminary. The neo-evangelical movement had a strong Calvinist-fundamentalist flavor to it. At its founding, Asbury had more of a holiness, revivalist flavor. 

When I came to Asbury in the late 1980s, David McKenna was president of the seminary. Asbury's statement of faith read that the Bible was "without error in all it affirms," as it still does. Beyond that, McKenna refused for Asbury to get embroiled in debates over inerrancy. Ken Collins has recently presented the ongoing flavor of Asbury on this issue in a recent issue of Firebrand. [4] He suggests that Asbury's statement has more in common with the Lausanne Covenant rather than the Chicago Statement of 1978.

I once argued that the Wesleyans have never really defined the term, which I think is wise. Asbury's sense that the Bible is "without error in all it affirms" is nice because it both affirms the truthfulness of Scripture and yet allows us to do the hard work of determining what Scripture affirms. Stephen Paine and those who went after Claude Thompson had very specific ideas about what the Bible affirms, and they insisted everyone else must agree with their conclusions. 

I had Harold Kuhn for a class at Asbury in the late 80s. He seemed like a nice guy. I enjoyed the class on biblical theology. He was the ringleader of those who went after Thompson in 1950. I'd like to think that, four decades later, he had some remorse for crucifying someone who, by most accounts, was more Christlike than he was. I suspect McPheeters would rather have taken his resignation.

[1] For more on pre-modern hermeneutics, see Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (Yale University, 1980).

[2] Elesha Coffman takes a similar approach in Turning Points in American Church History: How Pivotal Events Shaped a Nation and a Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2024).

[3] I take some of this information from Darius Salter's work, The Demise of the American Holiness Movement: A Historical, Theological, Biblical, and Cultural Exploration (First Fruits, 2020), 212-15.

[4] Kenneth Collins, "Should Wesleyans Embrace a Doctrine of Inerrancy?" Firebrand. June 4, 2024.

3.1 The Holiness Revivals of the Fin de Siècle

My exploration of the history of the ideology of The Wesleyan Church continues. In this next set of installments, we explore the twentieth century up to the 1968 merger. The picture to the left is Seth Cook Rees, one of the founders of the Pilgrim Holiness Church. 

Previous posts have been:

Preface to Wesleyan Ideological History
1.1 Wesley and High Protestantism
1.2 An Archaeology of Wesley's Thinking 

2.1 Methodist Ideology in the Early 1800s
2.2 Founding Perspectives of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection
2.3 The Birth of the American Holiness Movement

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1. The turn of the century (1900) was a time of conflicting eschatologies. The Wesleyan Methodists were postmillennial in their founding. They were activists who believed in changing society to look more and more like the kingdom of God. Slavery was wrong so needed to be ended. Similarly, women should be empowered to preach and vote like men. At the end of the 1800s, there was a spirit of inevitable progress in the world.

Accompanying this progress was the acceleration of foreign missions. The Methodist movement had always been evangelistic. The young Wesley himself had come to Georgia as a missionary. Now, as "manifest destiny" held that the United States should take over the entire continent, Methodism followed closely to the west with missions. And as the US increasingly forced open trade overseas in places like Japan and Korea, missions soon followed. Foreign missions fit the spirit of manifest destiny.

Interestingly, women played a crucial role in much of this mission work. Some of the most important mission organizations of the late 1800s were run by women. This was true for the Methodists, for the Free Methodists, and for a century, Wesleyan missions were heavily powered by the "Women's Missionary Society." One wonders if men were less worried about what went on overseas, so this was an area where women could have more freedom to lead. So lead they often did.

At first, the eschatology in play was postmillenial. Christianity should spread throughout the whole world as part of the world getting ready for the arrival of the kingdom of God. The flavor was one of taking over the world, in religion as in politics -- colonialization, in other words.

There's little question but that the participants in these missions genuinely wanted to see the world come to Christ and be saved. At the same time, we exported American Christian culture as well. Brainerd "Indian" School in South Dakota had Native American women in buns and skirts without make-up or jewelry -- looking just like the holiness women missionaries. If there were African or Native American dances that were part of those cultures, they were prohibited because dancing was not allowed in American holiness circles.

That is to say, there was a lack of understanding of culture -- both the missionary's own and that of the target countries -- among these early missionaries. Indeed, these missionaries generally received no training at all. The "faith principle" expected them also to go overseas immediately without having raised any support. Many died from diseases their bodies had never encountered. 

2. But there was a new eschatology on the block too in the late 1800s, one that would increasingly capture much of the American church. From its very beginning, the Pilgrim movement would be premillennial and dispensational. The cultural influence at play was the arrival of John Nelson Darby on the scene in the late 1800s.

Darby had stitched together a new and ingenious system of end-times preaching, weaving together passages from Daniel, Revelation, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, Mark 13, Ezekiel 37, and beyond. This was a new eschatological brew that had never existed in the history of Christianity. But it was ingenious and had the enticing flavor of secret knowledge. 

Things would get worse and worse until there would be a rapture of all Christians. Then a seven-year Tribulation would ensue with an Antichrist. During this time, God would finish up his business with Israel, playing out the seventieth "week" of Daniel 9. The temple would be rebuilt. Sacrifices would resume. There would be a final battle between Magog and Israel. The scheme was modified in 1948 when Israel was reconstituted as a nation ahead of schedule.

This eschatology had a completely different flavor than the postmillennialism that had preceded it. Most significantly, it entailed a pessimism about the direction of the world. The return of Christ had always been part of Christian expectation, but pre-millennialism expected Christ to return very, very soon. It hyped up a vigilant eye on current events, expecting the worst, and seeing every earthquake or rumor of war as a sign that it was about to happen.

This paradigm permeated my childhood in the Pilgrim Holiness Church and my strand of the Wesleyan Church. Even today, you will regularly see posts about us being in the end times. Of course, we could be, but people somehow don't notice that we've been seeing the end times in the bushes for 150 years. People have set dates over and over again with a 100% failure rate. There was a famous book, Eighty-Eight Reasons Why the Lord Is Coming Back in 1988.

My family wondered if FDR could be the Antichrist. They wondered if JFK could be the Antichrist. People wondered if Obama could be the Antichrist, and this recent election cycle has seen any number of people saying that the signs make it clear that we are in the end times. But we've been saying these things over and over for well over a century. Somehow, we haven't noticed the pattern of our culture. (I've evaluated these biblical interpretations in this book.)

We may be in the end times. But I also won't be surprised if I live past 100. Jesus will return. But let's work till Jesus comes. 

One revivalist of the late 1800s who particularly spread this "dispensationalist" view was D. L. Moody, who evangelized in parallel with the holiness movement, at one point even testifying to entire sanctification. His theology might be summarized as a "lifeboat" theology. The world is like a sinking ship. There's nothing you can do to save the ship. We just need to get as many people into the lifeboats as possible.

These sorts of cultural forces have an effect on our thinking of which we probably aren't aware. And, if we grow up with them, they make us unthinkingly behave in a certain way. We may not realize that there is even another way to think. We may automatically assume that those who think differently are heretical or perverse. Meanwhile, we are being tossed along without knowing it.

For example, this line of thinking tends to shut down any focus on changing the world for the better. As we'll see in the next installment, our engagement with the world becomes almost entirely limited to evangelism of the soul. Possible social dimensions of the good news are eliminated and even demonized. That is seen as a "social gospel" rather than a true gospel.

Missions also changes from conquering the world for Christ to trying to get as many people saved as possible before the Lord returns. Meanwhile, the corruption and pollution of governments and the world becomes expected. "Christ against culture" in Niebuhr's scheme becomes the name of the game. Our expectation that the world will get worse and worse can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

3. The Pilgrim Holiness Church was thoroughly founded in these waters. This was one of those minor tensions in the merger with the Wesleyan Methodists, although perhaps most Wesleyan Methodists had also become pre-millennial by that time. However, the merger had the wisdom not to specify a particular view on the end times in its founding Discipline. It simply affirmed that Christ is coming again.

The Pilgrim Holiness Church was officially founded in 1922, the coming together of several smaller groups that sometimes had come out of another church and sometimes were still in that other church but were meeting as a movement on the side. Older histories often point to 1897 and the founding of the International Holiness Union and Prayer League as the beginning. Perhaps more accurately, that was the beginning of the most prominent group that would become the Pilgrim church. 

The beginning took place in the front room of the house of a man named Martin Wells Knapp. That house is now on the campus of God's Bible School in Cincinnati. Also in the room was Seth C. Rees, an "Earth Quaker" of a man who often brought controversy along with his many conversions and experiences of entire sanctification.

Rees had originally been a Quaker, although he did not have the temperament of a Quaker. It is sometimes forgotten that there was a fairly significant Quaker component to the early Pilgrim church. My own grandfather would be one example. When the Pilgrims officially organized, both of my grandfathers were there. Both had been involved with another small group in Indiana that joined the new denomination, the Holiness Christian Church.

Given this Quaker element, the Pilgrims did not emphasize baptism. Again, we have some of the minor tensions at merger. The Wesleyan Methodists brought forward infant baptism from their Methodist roots. The Pilgrims brought forward a nonchalant attitude toward baptism because of Quaker elements. Meanwhile, Baptistic influences on modern Wesleyans make it difficult to imagine that anyone would baptize a child or not baptize at all. All of them were/are simply riding the waves of Christian subcultures without realizing it. 

3. Knapp would die in 1901, perhaps under suspicious circumstances. Rees would leave the Holiness Union in a huff and get into a mess in Pasadena, California with the Nazarenes. Keith Drury wrote a brilliant piece giving the Nazarene and the Rees side to the story. As I read the Nazarene side, Rees comes across as some of my Pilgrim relatives who were sometimes difficult -- always seeing "sin in the camp," always finding heresy in so and so's teaching or preaching. Difficult people who sometimes sowed dissension.

There was a highly charismatic flavor to Pilgrim worship. There was shouting, running the aisles -- some even did some "holy jumping." It was highly emotional preaching.

The Pentecostal movement actually came out of this soil. In fact, the holiness movement would struggle a little because the new tongues-speakers used a lot of the same language -- baptism in the Holy Spirit, for example. They would try to sharply distinguish themselves from the new Pentecostals, leading to some of the strong anti-tongues sentiment in the Wesleyan Church. It has only been in recent days that the Wesleyan Church has toned down what used to be a virulent anti-tongues posture. 

Once again we see that our positions often have everything to do with historical circumstances. We forget the historical and cultural origins of these sentiments -- if we ever realized them. Then we pass strong sentiments on to the next generation, who thinks they are just reading the Bible and doing what it says. 

The Pilgrim Holiness Church finally came together as much for practical reasons as any. The original groups had much more the flavor of a movement than a church. The first Manual was three pages long, the first of which was a title page. But in 1922, we organized not least so that Pilgrim ministers could qualify for a ministerial train discount.

Helping the poor and those in squalor remained a strong emphasis of Pilgrims and Wesleyans in this period. In Cincinnati, the Holiness Union addressed those in the slums, those in prison, and those in the hospital. There was no division between helping people spiritually and helping people economically or socially (see Rees' book, Miracles in the Slums).

Camp meetings were core events for the Pilgrims and the Wesleyan Methodists. At least once a year, families would meet at the appropriate camp meeting in their area for a week, hearing preachers morning, afternoon, and evening.  

4. The flavor of the Wesleyan Methodists and Pilgrims in this period was quite different. The WMs were more structured and less emotional. The Pilgrims were revivalists and quite entrepreneurial. Both founded several colleges, but the Wesleyan Methodist ones were of a higher academic caliber and had a better survival rate. Several of the WM colleges became liberal arts institutions (e.g., Houghton, SWU, IWU), while the Pilgrim ones tended to be Bible colleges (Frankfort, Miltonvale). You can see which institutions survived better.

The origins of the Pilgrim Holiness Church fall in the same era as the founding of the Nazarene Church, and you can see above that Seth Rees danced with both. Phineas Bresee founded the first Nazarene church in LA, California in 1895. All the same marks were there as the founding of the WMs and Free Methodists -- clash with a ME bishop, insistence on preaching holiness "old school" rather than the "new school" respectability.

In Bresee's case, he had been appointed to a mission in LA and the bishop refused to reappoint him. Here again we see that helping the poor was an essential part of the holiness movement at this time. Bresee was also a vigorous supporter of women in full ministry, while the ME church would only let them be deacons at that time.

This quote from Rees captures the absolute support of women in ministry among the early Pilgrims: "Nothing but jealousy, prejudice and bigotry and a stingy love for bossing in men have prevented women’s public recognition by the church. No church that is acquainted with the Holy Ghost will object to the public ministry of women." The founders of the Free Methodist and Nazarene churches agreed.

Next: the Fundamentalist/Modernist Controversy