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

2.3 The Birth of the American Holiness Movement

We continue our exploration of the history of Wesleyan ideology with a look at the holiness movement and Wesleyan Methodist Church in the late 1800s. The picture to the left is Phoebe Palmer, the one primarily responsible for how entire sanctification was preached for well over a century.

The 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

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1. After the Civil War, Luther Lee viewed the purpose of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection (WMC) as accomplished. In 1867 he returned to the Methodist Episcopal Church North (MECN) along with Lucius Matlack. All of the founders were now gone. Orange Scott had died of tuberculosis in 1847. Jotham Horton had returned as early as 1851. Why should the Wesleyan Methodist church continue when its primary reason to exist is gone?

There were still reasons to stay separate. In 1860, B. T. Roberts had been pushed out for his sustained critique of Methodism's increasing worldliness. He founded the Free Methodist Church, whose name opposes the way Methodism was increasingly adopting the "pay for your pew" fundraising method. In the more "modern" Methodist churches, you could tell who had money by where they sat. Just like the seats at a concert, you paid more to get closer to the front.

When you look at the cultural forces at work here, Methodism is becoming less and less a church for the common person and more and more a middle-upper class church. More than anyone else, Bishop Matthew Simpson was responsible for this change. He was proud of the increasing affluence of Methodists and he was a spiritual advisor Abraham Lincoln. The old story about the Pope who shows the grandeur of a church and says, "No longer do we have to say, 'Silver and gold have I none.'" The response of course was, "But can we still say then 'Rise up and walk'?"

Statements about avoiding showiness in adornment were toned down. Kevin Watson tells a story about how proud Bishop Simpson was that his wife and home were praised for their obvious culture and sophistication by polite society (Doctrine 215). Methodism had finally arrived.

Roberts was thus being countercultural when he insisted on the values of the roots of Methodism as a church that lived with the poor and did not just minister to the poor. In a couple posts, we will see that the notion that social programs are "liberal" or helping the poor is somehow unevangelical is completely foreign to the Wesleyan tradition. Those sentiments are an infection from twentieth century cultural forces. B. T. Roberts critiqued the "New School" Methodism of Simpson and others. 

In the contemporary landscape of evangelical Christianity, it is common to associate a concern for the poor with liberalism. This is deeply ironic since it is a pervasive, core biblical value. For the Wesleyan tradition it is deeply ironic because it is such a pervasive and core value of Wesley and Wesleyan history. How did we get here? I can think of three primary cultural forces that have led us to this place:

1. Remnants of the fight against a social gospel in the early twentieth century (more to come).
2. Reaction to the fight against communism in the twentieth century and the virtual enshrinement of capitalism as a Christian value.
3. The fusion of evangelicalism with Republicanism. Since FDR and LBJ were Democrats, their initiatives must be evil.

The Salvation Army itself is a Wesleyan church that started in England in the 1800s and transplanted to America in the 1880s. These examples should suffice to prompt reflection on the way our tradition may have been tossed around by Christian cultural forces that are not only thoroughly unbiblical but also quite unwesleyan. We can debate how best to implement that value in society, but the value itself is uncontestable.  

2. What kept the Wesleyan Methodists together in the late 1800s? No doubt its presbyterian church organization was still a plus -- versus the episcopal structure of the MEC. I might add that from where I sit, it was the bishops of the Methodist church of the 1800s that steadily led it off course. The WMC had lay representation while the Methodist church did not. Adam Crooks would take the lead moving forward after Lee and others had left.

Some of the values that we might put in the category of social justice (really biblical justice) continued in the WMC in the late 1800s.

The WMC ordained its first woman preacher in 1861, Mary Wills in the Illinois conference. Nevertheless, cultural forces would prevail for a brief period from 1879-91 when women were limited to the role of liscensed minister -- a secondary level of ordination. After 1891, however, the church returned to its core "Pentecostal" values and women were allowed to be ordained on any level to which God might call her. 

The church has never looked back sense. It has been counter-cultural -- including counter American church culture -- in its full support of women in ministry. This is an important point. There are cultural forces in the American church pushing us away from women in ministry right now. For the first 100+ years of our existence, we were countercultural in terms of the broader culture and American church culture. It is easy to be deceived into thinking our support of women in ministry is liberal, but we were ordaining women 100 years before the modern feminist movement.  

Of course, even though the ordination of women is on the books and taking place regularly, women find a hard time finding a church. Because a local church ultimately gets to decide, grass roots prejudices can ultimately trump the church's official values and they often do. The smaller the unit of the church, the easier it is for whachadoodle to prevail. The more of the church represented, the more likely it is for the Spirit to prevail.

Wesleyans stood for the empowerment of former slaves in the Reconstruction period. They opposed Andrew Johnson's support of Black Codes in the south and his veto of a federal Civil Rights bill. They opposed the newly formed KKK. The Indiana Conference opposed segregation. 

But culture would eventually impinge on the church in this area. In 1891, African-American Wesleyans were segregated into their own districts. This was done primarily for pragmatic reasons, but it fit the decade when Plessy vs. Ferguson would enshrine "separate but equal" in the broader American culture (1896). 

3. One social issue that played a prominent role in this period is the temperance movement. The WMs required abstinence of all its members, the first American denomination to do so. Interestingly, one of the founders of the WM church, Orange Scott, had a patent for an engine that ran on alcohol, which is how the statement that alcohol could be used for mechanical purposes got into the Discipline.

I might add that membership from Wesley through this period was understood to require a certain lifestyle. You committed to that lifestyle from the very beginning of becoming a member and a person was regularly held accountable. The recent shift in Wesleyan membership philosophy to "say yes and aspire to change later" is a fundamental change in Wesleyan ecclesiology. It's another example of American church culture changing our ecclesiology without us even knowing it. We say it's the Bible, but it's really culture. 

Our opposition to drinking was no doubt heavily influenced by the havoc that drinking often brought to families. In particular, an alcoholic husband might drink away a pay check, get involved in a relationship he shouldn't, or become abusive at home. Wesley himself had given warnings about the dangers of drinking.

At the same time, there were cultural factors hiding here too. Waves of immigrants from Ireland and Italy -- Catholics, no less -- made it easy to hide prejudice under the guise of morality. This is a constant trick of the Devil. I say I am against x, a clear moral issue. But what I am hiding -- perhaps even from myself -- is y, an underlying group dynamic, prejudice, or hateful attitude.

4. As the 1800s waned, a focus on personal holiness would steadily replace social concern as a focus of the Wesleyan Methodists. This was not conscious. We are seldom conscious of shifts like these. But the holiness preaching that was the core of my childhood, was shaped in the holiness movement of the late 1800s/early 1900s.

More than anyone else, the heart of this shift lands at the door of Phoebe Palmer (1807-74). What is funny is that I never heard her name until seminary or even later. This person who shaped the holiness preaching of my youth was unknown to a century of preachers who thought they were simply preaching the Bible.

What Palmer taught was a kind of "name-it-claim-it" version of entire sanctification. Christ has already done the work. You just need to claim it. Testify to it even if you don't feel like anything has happened. She wrote her book, The Way of Holiness, in 1843.

Now I did not grow up with that exact formula, although it seems similar to the way the Nazarene Church currently understands entire sanctification, where the event is largely reduced to a consecration of yourself to God. The part that I grew up with is the event focus. Keith Drury called it "two-tripism" in his Holiness for Ordinary People. You go to the altar to get saved. Then you go back to get sanctified.

Palmer called this approach to entire sanctification a "shorter way." In some respects, she was reclaiming Wesley's approach to sanctification in his sermon, "The Scripture Way of Salvation." Wesley waivered throughout his life on the timing of sanctification. In his more pessimistic moments, he thought a few might be sanctified around the time of death. But as this sermon indicates, there were times when he thought it might happen sooner.

The crucial element that was missing from Palmer's equation was waiting on the Lord. We cannot force the Holy Spirit to come on our lives by an act of our will. The movement of the Spirit is a matter of God's choosing. It is not that God plays games or doles out the Spirit whimsically -- we should assume that God wants to give us the fullness of the Spirit and in fact is the one leading us to seek it. Still, it is God's choice as to timing, not ours.

Watson talks about a similar shift that was taking place during this era from a sense of prevenient grace to a sense of "free will." In prevenient grace, the Spirit prepares the way for us to come to Christ. Although our wills are an essential element in the equation, the entire process is empowered by the Spirit. By contrast, the idea of free will suggests that I can come to Christ at any time because I have the power within me. This is a corruption of Wesleyan (and orthodox) understanding -- one that fits with American culture.

Chris Bounds has described the current Wesleyan view of sanctification as a "middle way" in Holiness. It is neither a "done deal at a time of my choosing" (Palmer) nor a "maybe a few lucky ones right before you die" (Wesley in his pessimistic moments and broader Methodism). It is rather a "give it all to the Lord and wait for his movement."

5. What Palmer facilitated was an event-focused entire sanctification. In broader Methodism, entire sanctification had come to be seen as a gradual process throughout one's Christian life. Wesley's sense that you could have an experience of the fullness of the Spirit had been lost to some extent. Palmer rekindled that flame.

One key element in this equation was the fusing of the idea of entire sanctification with the experience the disciples had on the Day of Pentecost in Acts 2. This is not the way that John Wesley had preached entire sanctification. This innovation in Wesleyan thinking comes rather from John Fletcher, an Anglican minister who was part of Wesley's movement in England in the 1700s. Larry Wood of Asbury Seminary has argued that Wesley knew of Fletcher's innovation.

This equation of the Spirit-fillings in Acts with entire sanctification would become a powerful preaching tool in the late 1800s and 1900s. Here was a clear biblical narrative that could be preached. The disciples were already saved but they needed to be sanctified, which happened at Pentecost. The believers at Samaria in Acts 8 had been baptized, but they needed to be entirely sanctified. The followers of John the Baptist had been saved in Acts 19, but they needed to be sanctified.

Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the meaning of the Spirit-fillings in Acts, and Bob Lyon of Asbury Seminary did the careful exegetical work to show it in 1979. Practically speaking, though, this was quite a blow to holiness preaching. Holiness is harder to conceptualize and preach without such a clear narrative framework. I personally think Acts 4 can still be used, but Melvin Dieter would blame Lyon for a sharp decline in holiness preaching, belief, and emphasis in the late 1900s.

6. The 1800s saw a hermeneutic in America that did not distinguish sharply between the laws and practices of ancient Israel and the way the New Testament teaches believers are not "under the law." Little distinction was made between what is sometimes called the "ceremonial law" of the Old Testament and what God expects of Christians today.

This sense was not applied consistently, of course. Christian groups did not practice animal sacrifice, for example. Most Christian groups did not give up eating pork or follow the Old Testament food laws. However, Seventh Day Adventists are a good example of an extreme version of this dynamic. They do not eat pork, and they do follow the Old Testament food laws. Similarly, they worship on Saturday, which is of course the biblical day of the Sabbath.

This was not Paul's hermeneutic, of course. He did not consider the Jewish Sabbath as binding on Gentile believers (Rom. 14:5-6; Col. 2:16). It was however a Puritan practice. Keeping the Sabbath was an important part of the Wesleyan tradition until the late 1900s. A person was not supposed to work, buy, or sell on Sunday. Even today, there is a strong emphasis on Sabbath in the Wesleyan Church, although the emphasis is on rest rather than a more rigid sense of a specific day with specific prohibitions. These are part of our cultural heritage more than a biblical mandate -- and of course it is a very helpful, beneficial, and hopefully spiritual practice as well. 

I grew up with a number of proof-texts from the Old Testament in use to justify certain practices. For example, women were not to wear pants or slacks because of Deuteronomy 22:5. Mustaches were inappropriate because of Leviticus 19:27. There was no sense that some of this legislation might have been directed at ancient Israel. There just wasn't that level of hermeneutical sophistication.

The tithe entered into Wesleyan practice as part of this hermeneutic in the 1920s and, of course, it helped solved the perennial problem of funding the church's activities. In 1923, the WM church made tithing its recommended approach to funding the church. At first, many were resistant to the tithe -- not because it asked too much but because they thought it might foster an attitude of "God gets 10% and I get the rest." Rather, as Ron Blue has put it, God owns it all. 

However, it would seem today that 10% gets Christians moving in the right direction from where they are. It all belongs to God, and there are offerings to be given beyond 10%. But even seeing 10% would be a dream for a lot of churches.

2.2 Founding Perspectives of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection

The series continues: "A History of Wesleyan Ideology." What ideological and cultural forces have converged to shape The Wesleyan Church as we know it today. The picture to the left is Orange Scott, one of the founders of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection.

The 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

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1. It is difficult to know what you would have done or thought if you had lived at another point in time. I know that if the current me was transported back to the 1840s, I would leave the Methodist Episcopal Church to be part of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection (WMC) in 1843. Taking one step back, if you took my current values and transported them back to the 1840s in America, I would support the abolition of slavery. I'm not sure what I would have thought was the best method to go about it.

But so much of who we are is a product of our specific history that I'm not sure how much we can say about what we would do or be in a different time and place. If you were born in India 200 years ago, you would very likely be a Hindu, right? If I were born 180 years ago in Georgia, I would likely be pro-slavery. The bottom line is that, if I were born with the same body in a different time and place, I would just very likely be a significantly different person in terms of what I believed. 

I do think that Orange Scott, Luther Lee, LaRoy Sunderland, Jotham Horton, and Lucius Matlock were perfectly reasonable to withdraw from the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) in 1843.

2. Wesley had urged the abolition of slavery in England, although he didn't live to see it. He called American slavery "the vilest that ever saw the sun." The original MEC in the U.S. had opposed slavery. But in the intervening years, the leadership of the MEC had tried to keep the peace by softening its stance toward slaveholding. They also didn't want to put anything in the way of the phenomenal growth they were experiencing.

We've already mentioned that the MEC would split in 1844 into north and south when a southern bishop who owned slaves was asked to step down. Perhaps the WMC would not have happened if that event had happened sooner. In fact, Horton would quickly rejoin the northern MEC. After the Civil War, Lee and Matlock would too, feeling that the WMC had achieved its mission. 

But the 1840 General Conference was particularly offensive to these abolitionists. They were censured for sowing seeds of disunity in the church by speaking out against slavery (while conferences that explicitly stated that slavery was not a moral evil were not addressed). A gag rule was passed forbidding the topic from being discussed at any Annual Conference or General Conference. Black people were prohibited from testifying in church trials in states where they could not testify in state courts. The church officially supported the relocation of slaves to Africa.

There seemed little choice for these men who saw this as the moral issue of the moment but to withdraw and continue the movement elsewhere. One of the mottos of the new WMC was "first pure, then peaceable," and the paper they started was the True Wesleyan (as opposed to the "fake" ones in the MEC). Them's fighting words. This is familiar rhetoric from any group that separates over what they see as a matter of principle to be faithful to the essential values of their tradition. The same language could be used by the Global Methodist Church today.

Indeed, Kevin Watson (Doctrine, Spirit & Discipline 185) points out that the very name "Wesleyan Methodist" was a slam at the MEC. Up to that point, the name Methodist was equivalent to Wesleyan. By taking the name Wesleyan Methodists, they were suggesting that the mainstream Methodists were no longer Wesleyan because of their appeasement on the issue of slavery. 

3. I don't blame them for leaving. The 1840 General Conference more or less said, "If this is a concern to you, shut up or leave the church." By temperament, I think I would have leaned gradualist if I were transported back in time to the north. These were those who wanted to abolish slavery step by step over time. I would have wanted to keep the peace until it just wasn't feasible. 

Lincoln started off that way, but the situation forced his hand. Similarly, the MEC ended up splitting anyway. Sometimes an opposing side is never going to change its mind. Sometimes that ends up in war. Sometimes your opposition wins and you lose. Sometimes you have to make a decision and face whatever the fallout is. If your position is the one with the wind of history behind it, eventually the other side dies off (see Thomas Kuhn).

Gradualism failed. The South just wasn't going to budge on this issue, ever.

4. Orange Scott and later Luther Lee were the key leaders of the new "connection." (The best source of course for the founding of the Wesleyan Methodist Church is Bob Black and Keith Drury's, The Story of the Wesleyan Church.) It was called a "connection" at this point rather than a "church," although for all intents and purposes, it was a church. (It would not be called a church officially until 1891.) 

There were two main issues in its founding. We've already touched extensively on the main one -- opposition to slavery. The other was the Methodist episcopacy. The new church would neither have bishops nor be a purely congregational church. It would use a "middle" structure -- a presbyterian one.

Notice how all three of these structures fit variously well in different cultures. An episcopal structure mirrors cultures with kings and queens, where the leader is there for life and wields immense power. A congregational structure fits American individualism well, where each local church is its own king. The presbyterian model fits the US and Western democracies well, where we have elections for leaders and leaders have significant but not absolute power. 

From a philosophical standpoint, I would argue that this "representational democracy" pattern, with a Constitution to set up the system and appropriate boundaries, has been the most successful in all of history. It has the most checks and balances. It is most likely to play out and preserve Judeo-Christian values in my opinion. 

Those who say, "It's not mentioned in the Bible" are usually unreflective of how biblical structures also were incarnated for their times as well. The Bible gives us principles. It doesn't ever say, "And if you ever get to decide on a governmental or church structure in the 21st century, here's what it should look like." We have to take the principles and play them out in different times and places.

There is a generally unnoticed section in the Wesleyan Discipline called "Elementary Principles." They are an artifact of the founding of the WMC, borrowed directly from the Methodist Protestant Church that split off in 1830. I have never heard anyone refer to them in any significant way. In terms of usage, they are like an appendix or a coccyx that is there but doesn't really do anything. Historical documents sometimes have things like these in them that can suddenly become very important if they somehow come into play in a political moment. They were of great meaning at the time when these individuals were protesting the abuses of power in the MEC.

So the new church would have no bishops. Offices would be elected but would not be held for life. A local church would also vote on whether they wanted a proposed pastor. Church bodies would have a parity between ministerial and lay delegation. There would be the equivalent of a trust clause.

5. The late Donald Dayton wrote a book called, Rediscovering an Evangelical Heritage that should probably be required reading for anyone becoming a Wesleyan pastor. The title has a story of its own. In the mid-twentieth century, the word evangelical was largely taken over by a movement involving Billy Graham and forces like Christianity Today. It was and remains a heavily Calvinist-centered movement. More on that in three posts down the line.

When Dayton first wrote the book in 1976, he wanted to point out that the line of evangelicalism in the 1800s largely did not run through the academics of Princeton that I call the "Princeton Calvinists." These were individuals like Archibald Alexander, Charles Hodge, and B. B. Warfield. In fact, these individuals never referred to themselves as evangelicals.

The original "evangelicals" in anything like the modern sense were people like John Wesley, George Whitefield, and Jonathan Edwards in the 1700s. Two of these were Calvinists, but what made them evangelicals was the way that they preached widely that individuals needed to have conversion experiences. Wesley used the term in reference to individuals who believed you could have an experience of justification by faith. Bebbington's four-fold definition fails because he doesn't take into account the fact that the referents of language change over time (see earlier post).

In short, the line of evangelicalism ran through people like Asbury, Peter Cartwright, Charles Finney, and D. L. Moody -- the revivalists of the 1800s. In the late 1800s, many of them were holiness folk. The "respectable" founders of neo-evangelicalism in the mid-twentieth century weren't so keen on these "emotional" types. Indeed, George Marsden and Mark Noll basically snubbed them in their treatments, calling them "fundamentalists" rather than true evangelicals. I'll unravel that skew in a few posts.

6. The individuals that Dayton covers in his book -- including the early Wesleyan Methodists -- were radicals for the time. They were abolitionists and champions of women's rights. If they were transported back in time, many Wesleyans today would consider them "woke liberals." They were social activists, "social justice warriors," if you would. Orange Scott and Luther Lee would have supported the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s if they were brought forward in time. 

They were post-millennials. That is, they believed that the church age more or less was the millennium. They were optimistic about changing the world to become more and more like the kingdom before Christ returned. The idea of a rapture or a Tribulation as things get worse and worse didn't really exist yet. That comes onto the scene in the late 1800s in the next post.

Some of these Wesleyan Methodists went into the south before the Civil War and preached abolition. Adam Crooks responded to a call to pastor a church in North Carolina in the 1840s, a perilous time. His church was called "Freedom's Hill," which is currently on the campus of Southern Wesleyan University. What a privilege and responsibility SWU has to steward that heritage.

The story of Micajah McPherson is often told. During the Civil War he was lynched and left for dead. But those who lynched him wanted to lynch more people, so they came back for the rope before he was truly dead. He would survive and serve in that church for another thirty years. Daniel Worth would spend the winter of 1859 in a cold cell in North Carolina for preaching abolition. Talk about counter-cultural! Black and Drury point out that Lincoln was too gradualist for these radicals (63-64).

Mark Noll wrote a book on the hermeneutics of this period (Civil War as a Theological Crisis). It is very relevant to debates over complementarianism today. The Princeton Calvinists of this period argued from the household codes that slaves were to obey their masters. They argued that it was unbiblical to be an abolitionist, much as contemporary complementarians are arguing that it is unbiblical to be an egalitarian. 

The Wesleyan Methodists in effect argued that one had to consider first what the overarching principles of Scripture were. Meanwhile, you had to consider the historical context of passages like the household codes and weigh them in the light of the unchanging, overarching core principles of Scripture. The Wesleyan Methodists strongly argued that in Christ there was "neither slave nor free." They saw the trajectory of Philemon as pointing toward the liberation of Onesimus.  

This is an important point. It is common for the person arguing from a clobber verse to accuse others of being unbiblical. In reality, the conflict may be between a verse-oriented hermeneutic versus a whole-Bible hermeneutic. It may be an argument of the letter versus the Spirit. In the end, these are hard debates that various communities of faith just have to wrestle through.

7. Luther Lee would famously preach the sermon at the first official ordination of a woman in the United States in 1853 (although Richard Allen of the AME church had given permission to Jarina Lee to preach in 1819). Lee's sermon is just as relevant today as it was then. Wesleyans also remember that the organizing meeting of the women's rights movement in America took place in a Wesleyan Methodist Church in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848.

The rights in question were primarily the right to vote, something that wouldn't happen until 1920. What was counter-cultural then at the time? The movement for women to be able to vote clearly went strongly against the culture of the time. 

Did all Wesleyan Methodists agree? Almost certainly not. For example, the WM pastor at Seneca Falls did not unlock the church. Oversight? They had to crawl in a window to open it up.

But Lee and others saw the Pentecostal principle. Whether you are a slave or a free person, black or white, a woman or a man, the Holy Spirit fills each person equally. Each person has equal value in God's sight. Experience demonstrates that the Spirit can speak and lead equally through all types of individuals. Doesn't it quench the Spirit to box people in based on such externals? Why not let God decide whom he calls?

8. A couple other tidbits from these early days. Few people know that Wheaton College was actually founded by the Wesleyan Methodists, as was Adrian College. However, the WMs did not succeed with the financial aspects of those schools and so they were sold to other groups.

Another issue of some controversy had to do with membership in secret societies. This was a big deal in the mid-1800s. Such organizations had a strong cult-like flavor to them and expected a person's primary loyalty. It looked very fishy and seemed to conflict with the church being a person's primary allegiance. One of the founders of the WMC would leave (Sunderland) over this issue. I believe he eventually left the faith.

2.1 Methodist Ideology in the Early 1800s

This is a series titled, "A History of Wesleyan Ideology." The goal is to look at the ideological and cultural forces that have converged to shape The Wesleyan Church as we know it today. The picture to the side is that of circuit rider Francis Asbury.

The previous posts have been:

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

With this post, we begin our journey through the founding and early years of The Wesleyan Methodist Church, which was founded in 1843.

1. It would be easy for Wesleyans to ignore the years from Wesley's death in 1791 to the founding of The Wesleyan Methodist Connection in 1843. But these years were when the Americanization of Wesley began. In these years, American culture began to shape Wesley's founding ideas. How can we fully know what the Wesleyan Methodist Church (WM) was in its beginnings if we do not know what it was reacting to and what it continued from what was before?

When we think of the WM founding, our minds immediately go to the issue of slavery, and that was the biggest factor. But it wasn't the only one. Wesleyan Methodists were just one of several groups that also had problems with the way the Methodist Episcopal Church was led -- including its failure to include non-ministers in its decision-making at that time.

Still, in the end, the Wesleyan Methodists withdrew (and to some extent were pushed out) over the refusal of the broader Methodist Church to take a "Wesley-an" stand against slavery. Instead, the hierarchy tried to smooth over tensions between northern and southern Methodism. Like some efforts on a national level during that period to hold the nation together, Methodism made concessions to slavery in the early decades of the 1800s to try to hold the church together.

It didn't work anyway. Southern Methodism would split from northern Methodism in 1844, the year after the WM Connection was formed. At the 1844 General Conference, a bishop from Georgia was asked to step down for being a slave owner. The result was the biggest split in the Methodist church yet. The ME Church South would remain separate until 1939, when north and south reconnected to form the Methodist Church.

2. The Methodist Episcopal Church was effectively founded in 1784 at the famed "Christmas Conference." John Wesley, who had never intended to form a church, finally recognized that the political separation between Britain and the Americas might require a distinct church in America. He ordained Thomas Coke a "superintendent" in England. Then Coke came to America and ordained Francis Asbury in Baltimore. Both were British. 

Wesley had opposed the Revolutionary War for several reasons. He did not believe Methodists should participate in it. However, Wesley was a realist. What was done was done.

Similarly, Wesley thought it was a mistake for Asbury to take the title of bishop. He preferred for the leadership to be "superintendents." But Asbury preferred bishop, and the Christmas Conference voted him such. 

From where Wesleyans sit today, this was a mistake. The power of the bishopric in the Methodist church has arguably been a constant problem throughout its history. Indeed, the recent separation of the Global Methodist Church has given ample examples of crafty bishops using their power to manipulate congregations and to circumvent the Methodist Discipline.

Bishops in the Methodist Church are elected for life. At the time when the WM Church was founded, there was no lay voice in who was chosen. Bishops had little to no accountability. The WM Church was not the first split that took place in those early decades of Methodism. In 1790, the Republican Methodist Church was founded in part because of a lack of lay representation in church leadership.

In 1830, the Methodist Protestant Church withdrew from the Methodist Episcopal Church over the issue of governance and the failure of several attempts to include lay representation in church governance. When the WM Church was finally founded, its leaders would be superintendents, not bishops, and there would be an emphasis on parity. The concept of parity is that there be equal numbers of ministerial and lay delegates to its conferences on a district and general level.

The Methodist Protestant Church would also be part of the merger in 1939 when north and south came back together.

3. When we think about cultural trends, clearly democracy and individual liberty were key cultural elements in the American culture of the late 1700s and early 1800s. Americans didn't like monarchs. Francis Asbury in the end was British. He was more comfortable with the idea of a king.

So, it is no coincidence that there would be a push within American Methodism for non-ministerial representation and for what we might call a "presbyterian" form of church governance. In this regard, the "congregational" form of governance such as in the Baptist church is consummately American in that regard, where each local church runs its own show. "Freedom of conscience" in the Methodist Protestant Church and "soul freedom" in the Baptist church resonated strongly with American culture.

Nevertheless, the presbyterian form -- where representatives are chosen to conference and leaders are elected to serve for a fixed amount of time -- seems to combine the advantages of other forms of governance while mitigating their weaknesses. This is of course why western representational democracies have been so successful. They build in a balance of power.

The US has a single executive. This has some of the efficiency of a monarch but his or her tenure in office is not permanent. Every four years the leader is reviewed by the people. In much of the history of The Wesleyan Church, it has had multiple General Superintendents. This especially made sense in the age when travel and communication was not so easy. 

The WM church did have a single General Superintendent for many years in Roy Nicholson, but it ground him to a pulp and he strongly advised against it. When the WC recently went to a single General Superintendent in JoAnne Lyon, Lee Haines stood up and advised against it, mentioning Nicholson. Nevertheless, it has worked under Lyon and Schmidt, not least because of a delegation of authority. (I suspect Nicholson was more of a funnel.) These also have been two selfless individuals whose hearts are in the right place.

I personally remain uncertain whether it is ideal to have only one General Superintendent. What would happen if a less godly individual was chosen, someone who was crafty in their wielding of power? We like to think that those the church chooses will always be saintly and wise, but looking back through history, I'm not sure we can always depend on it.

The counterbalance of a strong General Board is thereby important. At present, the collective power of the district superintendents of the church seems rather strong as well as a counterbalance. 

In the end, it's about informed representation as well as proper checks and balances. These are consummately Western cultural values, yes. But they have been proven effective thus far. They are not foolproof but, as Winston Churchill famously said, "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others."

In the end, the form of leadership the church takes will likely have a lot to do with the culture in which it is situated. The early church retained some Jewish structures (like groups of elders), but it also had free-ranging charismatic leaders like Paul. These leadership structures fit the first century. It is no surprise that the forms of leadership under different cultures will be different. It fits the incarnational principle. It would be foolish to try to model a form that fit well in the first century but would be self-defeating today.

4. Another feature of some of the early pullouts was the naive hermeneutic that thinks "We're just following the Bible." The early 1800s saw the Cane Ridge revivals and the Stone-Campbell movements that were sick of all the divisions in Christianity and all the different groups that were emerging at the time. Their solution was to go back to the Bible -- "No creed but Christ; no book but the Bible."

This sounds good and is certainly well-intentioned. The problem is that the polyvalence of the Bible stands at the very heart of matter. The fact that the Bible can be interpreted differently by different individuals is the core reason for the endless multiplication of denominations in America. The Stone-Campbell movement is a case in point. It is almost comical how this movement gave birth to so many different denominations that weren't supposed to be denominations but were just following the Bible -- the Christian Church, Churches of Christ (instrumental and non-instrumental), Disciples of Christ, etc. The rate of multiplication for this "no book but the Bible" tradition is a consummate example of the fact that there is always more involved than the Bible. If you don't realize this dynamic, it runs wild and unchecked.

American individualism also played a role. Not only was it each group deciding what they thought the Bible meant. In America, it was every individual deciding what the Bible means. The 1800s are a case study in charismatic individuals going off and starting their own church. Most of these would stay roughly within the lines. But then you would also have Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and many others.

5. James Madison called slavery America's original sin. The slave trade started in Europe and was pernicious, but it seemed the hardest to get rid of in America, no doubt because the southern economy was built on top of it.

The founders of the Wesleyan Methodist connection preached against it and lobbied strongly against it in the Methodist Episcopal Church. In this, they were continuing the position that Wesley had taken in England before his death. The leadership of the ME church found them counterproductive, zealots. Just as America had its "gradualists," who wanted to phase out slavery, so many northern Methodists fell into this camp. 

Were the founders of Wesleyan Methodism zealots? I suspect they were. I suspect they would be strongly resisted by most Wesleyans today. More on that in the next post.

There's also an important distinction between being opposed to slavery and looking down on "Africans" as inferior. There were plenty of people against slavery who were racists of a "softer" sort. (Think for example of the American Colonization Society that wanted to free the slaves and send them back to Africa) The founding of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1816 and the African Methodist Episcopal Church Zion in 1821 largely resulted from the marginalization of black worshippers in Philadelphia and New York City respectively.

I had a conversation with some of my children recently in which I wondered if there were shades of racism -- blatant, soft, and benevolent. We all get the concept of someone who flat-out hates people of another race. But then there are those who have biases that are more subtle. Maybe someone automatically locks their doors when someone of a different color approaches. I call this "soft racism." Then there are those who try to "help those poor people," in effect demeaning another race by assuming they need help. I've heard this called "benevolent racism." One of my children said, "Nope, it's all just racism." :-)

It's clear that the ME leaders of Philadelphia wanted the black worshippers to be in their place. They didn't want them sitting in good seats in church. They didn't want them owning their own church property or serving as elders. Although he resisted it for a long time, eventually, Richard Allen formed the AME church so that blacks in Philadelphia could worship freely and spread the gospel freely. The AME church would grow much faster than the white congregations in Pennsylvania. 

6. The "trust clause" was also a part of early American Methodism, going back to Wesley himself. This is the idea that the district holds the property deeds to local churches. This has been extremely controversial in the split of the United Methodist Church because congregations that wanted to leave in effect had to get permission from the UM church. There was a window when there was a process for exit, but it was (in the minds of some) abruptly closed at the last General Conference, leaving congregations who were more hesitant to leave at first in an uncomfortable situation.

The Wesleyan Church has inherited this practice. It emphasizes the unity and connection of local churches as one body. It makes it hard for schism to happen, where a charismatic figure leads a local church away from the denomination. It gives a tool for the broader church to stem off heresy in a local body. At the moment, the UM debacle has left many Wesleyans afraid of what would happen if the general church became the heretic.

I have mixed feelings about the trust clause. It made sense in Wesley's day because he helped fund the churches. It made sense in the 1800s when the church was largely uneducated and "go start a cult" was in the water. I think it has been a positive feature of Wesleyan colleges. None of the Wesleyan colleges can split off from the church and go its own way. Balance of power and checks and balances are always the name of the game.

At the same time, we should be aware of the cultural impact of hyper-individualism on us and the cult of freedom that is part of America's culture. For Paul, our freedom is from sin, which entails a slavery to righteousness. In Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8-10, Paul emphasizes that my individual freedom is never an excuse to harm or put a stumblingblock in front of others. The New Testament models a corporate interconnectedness and accountability.

The American impulse is for me (or my local church or my denomination) to do it my way. But that is not the biblical way. Beware the gravitational pull of culture on this one