The Oxford Handbook of Methodist Studies: Martin Wellings

The Oxford Handbook of Methodist Studies
James E. Kirby and William J. Abraham

Print publication date: Jan 2010 Print ISBN-13: 9780199696116 Published to Oxford Handbooks Online: Jan-10 Subject: Religion, Christianity DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199696116.001.0001
British Methodism and Evangelicalism

Martin Wellings
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199696116.013.0009
Abstract and Keywords

This article traces the relationship over time between British Methodism and evangelicalism. British Methodism was born in the evangelical revival, and it contributed significantly to the shaping and success of the phenomenon of evangelicalism. Although always occupying a particular place within the evangelical family as an Arminian holiness movement and an often self-sufficient denomination, Methodist history for more than two centuries marched in step with the interaction of a wider evangelicalism with developments in British thought, society, and sensibility. In the first half of the twentieth century many Methodists accompanied their fellow evangelicals into an accommodation with modern thought. The erosion of liberal evangelicalism from the 1960s cut liberal Methodists loose from their evangelical origins, while the conservative evangelical revival drew its chief inspiration from sources other than the Wesleyan/Methodist tradition.
evangelical history, Methodist movement, evangelical revival
No informed observer of contemporary culture could fail to be impressed by the resurgence and global expansion of evangelicalism in the second half of the twentieth century. Writing in 1994, the British Baptist scholar Derek Tidball discerned the ascendancy of evangelicalism in many parts of the World Church, from Korea to Brazil and from sub-Saharan Africa to the USA. Even in the United Kingdom, where processes of secularization were apparently eviscerating traditional patterns of church attendance and Christian adherence, evangelicals seemed to be bucking the trends,
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registering significant numerical growth, gaining new respect in the corridors of power, and attracting bemused, admiring, or apprehensive comments from the media (Tidball 1994: 1011). In his appreciative foreword to Tidball's study, Clive Calver, General Director of the UK Evangelical Alliance, quoted an unnamed secular commentator: Whatever one may think of them tomorrow belongs to the evangelicals (ibid. p. x). This late twentieth-century resurgence in evangelical numbers, confidence, and influence was accompanied by a renaissance in the study of evangelical history. In the hands of such scholars as W. R. Ward, David Bebbington, Mark Noll, and Bruce Hindmarsh a sophisticated analysis of the origins and development of evangelicalism emerged, respecting the complexity and diversity of a phenomenon that comprises overlapping movements and which therefore defies neat categorization. The great spate of historical enquiry identified by Ward generated a plethora of specialist studies, but also works designed for the general reader. It is a striking feature of this popular historiography that while the Wesleys' Methodism often occupies a central place in the early history of evangelicalism, Methodists progressively move to the margins of the picture as the story advances into the nineteenth century, and by the twentieth century they have all but disappeared (Ward 2006: 1; Bebbington 2005: jacket). The thesis argued in this chapter is that for much of its history British Methodism has been part of the family of evangelical movements, and that Methodist responses to the challenges and vicissitudes of British cultural and social developments from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries have been recognizably evangelical. Mapping the relationship over time between British Methodism and evangelicalism is no easy task, involving as it does the interpretation of two complex and evolving entities. An early twenty-first century perspective may serve to introduce and to illustrate some of the issues. The legal foundation of the British Methodist Church, the 1932 Deed of Union, incorporates a doctrinal clause to which Methodist ministers give annual assent as a matter of discipline and which operates as a benchmark for Methodist preaching and teaching. The clause expresses Methodism's continuing commitment to the evangelical faith, and it might therefore be assumed that Methodists may confidently be located within the broad constituency of evangelical Christians. The 2005 English Church Census, however, showed that only 32 per cent of Methodist churches chose to describe themselves as evangelical, while a recently published survey
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of more than 1,300 British Methodist ministers revealed a wide range of opinions on some key statements in the Creeds and on conservativeevangelical and charismatic emphases. Significantly, 77 per cent of the respondents thought that theological pluralism was a positive feature of the contemporary Methodist Church (Brierley 2007: table 5.14; Haley and Francis 2006: 105, 112, 118, 162). Given this situation it is not surprising that for more than half a century confessing conservative evangelicals have formed sectional associations for mutual support within the British Methodist Church (Wellings 2005: 367). The presence of self-selected evangelical groups within an officially evangelical denomination makes the point that definitions and identities are in some confusion, if not in dispute. The qualifying adjective conservative used by or about particular evangelical groups is also telling. The account that follows will seek to show how the Methodist movement grew within an evangelical framework, gradually developing into a denomination that could simultaneously cherish its evangelical heritage, tolerate an autonomous evangelical organization within its structures, and also prize theological pluralism. The origins and effects of the eighteenth-century evangelical revival continue to exercise historians. For Alister McGrath, the family history of evangelicalism begins with the sixteenth-century European Renaissance and especially with the Reformation. For W. R. Ward, the thought-world, intellectual debates, and Pietist movements of Central Europe are crucial. In his discussion of antecedents and stirrings Mark Noll synthesizes Puritanism, Pietism, and the High Church spirituality of the Church of England, while John Kent provocatively deflates the whole movement by referring to the myth of the so-called evangelical revival (McGrath 1993: 1118; Ward 2006; Noll 2004: 4363; Kent 2002: 1). Methodist hagiography has sometimes collapsed the entire phenomenon into John Wesley's autobiography, so there is a need to recognize the multifarious roots of the revival in the Reformation, in the different strands of European Pietism, and in the traditions of English and North American Puritanism, among others. It remains the case, however, that the Wesley brothers and the movement that developed in connexion with them was hugely significant within the wider context of the revival. Regardless of the debates about the nuances of evangelical origins, John and Charles Wesley were part of the nexus of leaders propagating the evangelical gospel of justification by grace through faith and the evangelical experience of conversion, by preaching, by example, by correspondence, and by publication. They were intimately involved in the network of relationships disseminating accounts of the work of God in personal letters and in journals and magazines. They expressed the
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evangelical experience in sermons and especially in hymns. They gave shape and structure to the movement through the growing network of societies, bound by a common rule and linked by the itinerancy of the Methodist preachers. Many attempts have been made to define the essence of evangelicalism. The most influential formulation, now widely accepted by historians, was crafted by David Bebbington. In his seminal study Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, Bebbington identified four special marks of evangelical religion: conversionism, the belief that lives need to be changed; activism, the expression of the gospel in effort; biblicism, a particular regard for the Bible; and crucicentrism, a stress on the sacrifice of Christ on the cross (Bebbington 1989: 34). Built on meticulous and wideranging research, the so-called Bebbington quadrilateral has proved persuasive because it not only accounts for the family resemblance that unites otherwise disparate evangelicals, but also allows for diversity and development. Evangelicals might agree in placing the cross at the centre of their theology, for example, without necessarily subscribing to identical theories of the atonement. The Wesleys' Methodism may be located firmly within the matrix of emphases identified by Bebbington and endorsed by other historians as definitive of evangelicalism. Charles Wesley's hymns were soaked in Scripture, and John Wesley famously described himself as a man of one book. Conversion was central to the experience and the message of the first Methodists, as evidenced by the biographies that John Wesley solicited, edited, and then published in his Arminian Magazine (Hindmarsh 2005: 2267). Although the Methodists did not dwell on the blood and wounds of Christ in the way the Moravians did, the sense of forgiveness through the atoning love of God was characteristic of the early movement. John Wesley's account of his Aldersgate Street experience makes the point: I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death. Methodist activism was legendary, and was expressed in the first of the Twelve Rules drawn up by John Wesley for his helpers in 1753: Be diligent. Never be unemployed. Never be triflingly employed. Never while away time (Ward and Heitzenrater 1988: 250; CPD 1988: 77). Early Methodism, however, while characteristically evangelical, was also distinctive in several significant ways. First, it put a premium on experience, emphasizing that saving faith was not barely a speculative, rational thing,
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a cold, lifeless assent, a train of ideas in the head; but also a disposition of the heart. In this the Wesleys stood with those evangelicals who were more concerned with preaching Christ and encouraging holy living than with the articulation of doctrine and the enforcement of orthodoxy. Although they were not indifferent to doctrine, their principal concerns were conversion and sanctification. John Wesley was impatient of those who got bogged down in disputes about what he called opinions, and advocated a catholic spirit and union in affection among all who love God (Wesley 1984: 120; 1985: 8195). This generous orthodoxy was not always consistently applied, because, second, the Wesleys' Methodism was passionately Arminian at a time when many fellow evangelicals tended towards moderate Calvinism. As early as 1740, John Wesley and George Whitefield clashed publicly over the question of free grace. Wesley preached on the issue in April 1739, subsequently publishing a sermon in which he called predestination a doctrine full of blasphemy (Wesley 1986: 554) and appending his brother's thirty-six-stanza hymn, Universal Redemption. Controversy broke out again in the 1770s, and the Arminian Magazine was launched in 1778 explicitly to counter what Wesley called the poison of Calvinism (Hindmarsh 2005: 22930; McGonigle 2001). Third, the Wesleys' emphasis on assurance and their teaching on holiness were not shared by other evangelicals. Both aspects clearly differentiated Wesleyans from evangelicals in the Reformed tradition, who taught election rather than assurance and who found John Wesley's doctrine of entire sanctification unbiblical and bizarre. For Wesley, however, the assurance of salvationthe work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness with the spirit of the believer that he or she was a child of Godwas the normal experience of Christian people, while the possibility of Christian perfection was the very raison dtre of the movement, the grand depositum lodged with the people called Methodists. Fourth, the Wesleys' Methodism was distinguished by the rhetoric and the reality of connexionalism. Other evangelicals, such as Whitefield and the countess of Huntingdon, used the language of connexion to describe the networks of groups and individuals over which they exercised influence and leadership, but the Wesleys perfected this method of organization and made of it a structure of discipline and accountability, as well as an instrument of mission. Individual Methodists were assigned to a class, one of the small groups into which every local society was divided, and were required to meet
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weekly under the direction of a leader. The societies were not autonomous: they belonged to the united societies which together formed the Wesleys' connexion, under the authority of the Annual Conference. Methodist discipline was embodied in the Rules of the Society (1743) and in the Minutes of the Conference, codified and published in successive editions of the Large Minutes from 1753 onwards. Methodist preachers, stationed annually by the Conference to supervise the societies in a given area, were those who laboured in connexion with Wesley; later, in the 1790s and early 1800s, reception into full connexion with the Conference became the Methodists' virtual ordination. As Methodism acquired property, it was placed on John Wesley's model trust of 1763, firmly linking it to the preachers appointed by Wesley and to the doctrines taught in his Sermons and Notes on the New Testament. The 1784 Deed of Declaration bequeathed Wesley's rights and powers in his connexion to the Conference, thereby ensuring institutional continuity and the maintenance of central control: Conference became the living Wesley (Lawson 1965; Baker 1965). Thus by a combination of pioneer evangelism, the successful absorption of the work of others, an attention to the detail of organization, a blend of charm and charisma and a streak of ruthless autocracy, the Wesleys created a tight-knit movement with an effective structure, a strong internal sense of discipline and a longevity beyond their own lives. Not only did the Wesleyan polity endure, but the eighteenth-century terminology took root in Methodism, shaping the movement's subsequent identity and sense of itself as a connexion of united societies, walking by rule. All this gave a particular identity to Methodist evangelicalism. The century after John Wesley's death in 1791 witnessed remarkable expansion in the evangelical movements in Great Britain. The denominations most affected by the eighteenth century revivalBaptists, Congregationalists, and Methodistsexperienced great numerical growth. An evangelical school of thought developed in the Church of England, and began to secure both a measure of recognition and a degree of representation among the bishops and senior clergy. As evangelical theology and spirituality became increasingly prevalent in the British churches, so evangelical influence was felt in public life and wider society. Evangelicals from different denominational and theological traditions banded together in a whole range of devotional, missionary, and philanthropic enterprises. Evangelicals who had learned to work together against the slave trade in the 1780s combined to produce and circulate Christian literature in the Religious Tract Society (1799) and the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804), to promote overseas missions in the Missionary Society (1795), to encourage Sunday schools
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through the Sunday School Society (1785) and the Sunday School Union (1803), and to campaign for social purity in the Society for the Suppression of Vice (1802). Evangelical philanthropy reached into the prisons, the factories, and the homes of the poor, working for humanitarian reform and the alleviation of need. It may be argued, moreover, that evangelical influences helped to mould the seriousness and high-mindedness which became characteristic of Victorian Britain (Bradley 1976; Prochaska 2006). Methodists played a full part in all these initiatives. John Wesley's last letter, written less than a fortnight before his death, was sent to encourage William Wilberforce in his Parliamentary campaign against the slave trade. Wesley looked forward to the destruction of the execrable villainy of slavery itself, and Methodists contributed substantially to the petitioning campaigns of 17912 and 18323. The growth of Wesleyan missions in the West Indies encouraged this involvement: the missionary W. J. Shrewsbury was forced to flee for his life from Barbados in 1824 because of his opposition to slavery, and Richard Watson called for emancipation at the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society annual meeting in 1830 (Wesley 1931: 265; Vickers 2000: 317; Hempton 1987: 2089; Brendlinger 2006: 165, 169). Adam Clarke, Methodism's outstanding biblical scholar, was deeply engaged with the work of the Bible Society and was explicitly (and unusually, given the general reluctance to allow a minister to leave pastoral work or to stay in one location longer than three years) designated by the Conference to this role (Stevenson 1884: 231). Jabez Bunting, the dominant force in Wesleyan Methodism in the first half of the nineteenth century, supported the Bible Society and the Anti-Slavery Society, and even took the chair at the meeting that established the pan-evangelical periodical the Eclectic Review in 1804 (Bunting and Rowe 1887: 20813). Over forty years later, Bunting also played a prominent part in the founding conference of the Evangelical Alliance. Between a fifth and a quarter of the 900 people who attended the conference, held in London in August 1846, were Methodists, and Methodists were well represented among the Alliance's officers and donors (Wellings 2005: 1819). Bunting's biographers told the story of his brief involvement with the Eclectic Review as a cautionary tale: sadly, the Review ceased to be catholic, when it impugned the principles of Evangelical Arminianism, and from this experience Bunting learned that denominational methods were generally to be preferred to non-specific initiatives: he dreaded lest what were intended as manifestations of union should prove occasions of discord; and he thought that the parts separately would accomplish more than could the whole
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combined (Bunting and Rowe 1887: 21113). While remaining recognizably evangelical in doctrine and ethos in this period, therefore, Methodists were inclined to devote their energies to their own denominational agencies, rather than to pan-evangelical endeavours. They were not unique in this: the non-denominational Missionary Society saw the Baptists and the evangelical Anglicans, as well as the Wesleyans, establish their own separate organizations between 1792 and 1818, and regretfully adopted the less grandiose title London Missionary Society in the latter year. The preference for denominational work was driven partly by a felt need to exercise greater control over burgeoning activities at a time of rapid expansion: in the 1820s, for example, the Wesleyan Conference took steps to bring previously free-standing Sunday schools under ministerial supervision and to associate the schools firmly with societies, circuits, and a formal Connexional structure. The imposition of discipline, which provoked many of the divisions in Methodism in the first half of the nineteenth century, also proved inimical to interdenominational collaboration and non-denominational enterprises. As Bunting recognized, moreover, pan-evangelical cooperation could founder in the face of real differences of doctrine and ecclesiology. The Arminian/Calvinist divide that turned Bunting against the Eclectic Review also made Dr Coke suspicious of the LMS (Martin 1983: 648). Later in the century Wesleyans were incensed by the sympathy and support shown by some Baptists and Congregationalists towards seceders from the old Connexion in the bitter conflicts of 18345 and 184957. Meanwhile Wesleyans in particular were uncomfortable with the open hostility shown by evangelicals in the older Nonconformist or Dissenting traditions towards the Church of England, but were also increasingly suspicious of a national church in which High Church influences seemed to be reviving with the Oxford Movement of the 1830s. Reluctant to join the Nonconformist campaign for the disestablishment of the Church of England, but fearful of the Romeward drift of the national church, Methodists practised their evangelicalism largely within their own Connexions. Again, it should be noted that the congregational polity of Old Dissent made Baptists and Congregationalists critical of Wesleyan connexionalism in the Wesleyan Reform agitation of the mid-nineteenth century, while evangelicals in the Church of England, keen to prove their respectability as loyal Churchmen, could be very dismissive or patronizing towards Methodists. In many respects Methodism simply reflected, in its own milieu, general evangelical responses to contemporary theology and culture. In others it gave evangelical concerns a distinctive Methodist twist, so that holiness
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teaching, for example, followed a trajectory emphasizing the traditional Wesleyan emphasis on full sanctification, rather than the rest of faith taught by the leaders of the Keswick school or the strenuous discipline of the Reformed tradition. Despite these nuances, Methodists in this period remained recognizably evangelical, examples of what Bebbington describes as the mid-nineteenth century dominance of evangelicalism (Bebbington 2000, 2005). From the 1880s, however, the theological and cultural assumptions of evangelicalism were challenged from several directions. New critical scholarship, defined as higher criticism, questioned or rejected traditional beliefs about the history and authorship, if not the inspiration and authority, of the Bible. Darwinian biology posed uncomfortable questions not only about the relationship between Genesis and geology but also about the entire biblical scheme of creation, fall, and redemption. A swelling chorus of voices challenged the cross-centred theology of traditional evangelicalism, repudiated substitutionary theories of the atonement, and rejected the doctrine of the eternal punishment of the impenitent. Evangelical taboos and ethics also came under scrutiny as the churches struggled to respond to a growing and now predominantly urban population and to the craze for sports and leisure among the young. The limits of orthodox belief and the boundaries of acceptable behaviour were tested in all the churches, and evangelical denominations, groups, and agencies faced a struggle for integrity and identity, and sometimes even for survival (Wellings 2005: 24 6). From the perspective of a resurgent late twentieth-century conservative evangelicalism, the years between 1880 and 1930 witnessed a cleavage between those evangelicals who stayed faithfully in the old paths and those who lost their footing and slid inexorably into theological liberalism or modernism. This case has been made repeatedly in histories of student Christianity, describing how a growing accommodation on the part of the Student Christian Movement to broader theologies and a wider range of ecclesial loyalties (including Anglo-Catholicism) provoked a secession by conservatives that eventually led to the formation of the rival Inter-Varsity Fellowship (Barclay and Horn 2002: 5978). Some contemporaries took a similar view of developments, famously summed up in the polemics against down-grade theology published in C. H. Spurgeon's The Sword and the Trowel from late 1889 and less famously in the splenetic Journal of the Wesley Bible Union in the 1910s and 1920s.
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It may be argued, however, that the stark division between liberals and conservatives proposed by this reading of evangelical history and the impression of a substantial section of the evangelical movement evaporating into modernist apostasy do not accord with reality. Evangelicalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was flexible and diverse enough to accommodate a range of responses to modern thought. If the spectrum began with hardline conservatives and shaded off into those who abandoned evangelical theology and spirituality for a species of modernism, it also included many varieties of central or liberal evangelicals. Typically, they remained loyal to the Bible, while accepting much mainstream biblical criticism. They emphasized the preaching of the cross, while reinterpreting the atonement in terms other than penal substitution. They advocated conversion, while also seeking a renewal of spiritual and sacramental life to overcome a perceived shallowness or staleness in conventional evangelical spirituality. They encouraged activism, but re-evaluated some traditional evangelical shibboleths, priorities, and prohibitions, endorsing churchsponsored leisure programmes, embracing culture, and engaging with the reforming politics of the Liberals and even the emerging Socialists. Evangelicalism remained a complex coalition of movements, a matrix of beliefs, emphases, and experiences within which groups and individuals evolved their own responses to the challenges and opportunities of the times (Wellings 2003a: 31821). Methodism in its various forms found a place within this world. Many of its developments reflected the broadening of evangelicalism. In controversies from the late 1870s to the early 1900s the Wesleyans maintained a consistently conservative position on eternal punishment: advocates of the larger hope were expelled from the ministry and even the cautious speculations of J. A. Beet attracted official censure. Higher criticism, however, was given mild endorsement by a London Wesleyan audience including such conservative grandees as J. H. Rigg as early as 1891, while the Primitive Methodists entrusted the theological education of their student ministers after 1892 to A. S. Peake, one of the most gifted of the younger generation of critical scholars and an influential exponent of the new theories in the denominational press. An attempt to block the appointment of another advocate of modern thought, George Jackson, to a chair at the Wesleyans' Didsbury College in 1913 ended in the humiliating rout of the ultra-conservatives. In systematic theology J. S. Lidgett developed an emphasis on the incarnation and on the fatherhood of God to complement traditional theologies of the atonement, while Russell Maltby challenged expiatory theories of the cross and advocated a view of Christ's saving work
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as an identification with fallen humanity. The creation of the Wesley Guild in 1896 marked a constructive engagement with the aspirations of young people by providing a blend of devotional, literary, and social activities. In the Fellowship of the Kingdom, founded in 1919, Maltby and Newton Flew offered ministers a new style of spirituality and intellectual adventure, and this was complemented by the Free Church Catholicism of Henry Lunn, J. E. Rattenbury, and A. E. Whitham. In its advocacy of a New Evangelicalism committed to social reform, the Wesleyan Methodist Union for Social Service brought together Rattenbury and Lidgett, W. B. Fitzgerald, founder of the Wesley Guild, the Christian Socialist Samuel Keeble, and Frank Ballard, bte noir equally of the fundamentalists and the secularists (Carter 1998; Wellings 2002; Bebbington 1989: 1415, 202; Keeble 1906). Methodism in this period, then, found its evangelicalism transposed into a broadly liberal evangelical key. Given the divisiveness of the issues surrounding modern thought in such evangelical bastions as the Baptist Union, the Church Missionary Society, and the SCM, it may be asked why Methodism largely escaped a fundamentalist controversy in the early twentieth century. Several answers may be given. The new scholarship quickly won the intellectual arguments with the rising generation of college tutors and ministerial students, and there was no effective or credible conservative response. New views were commended in cautious terms by scholars and leaders whose known orthodoxy and personal evangelical experience were trusted: Peake, for example, was both a biblical scholar of international renown and an earnest preacher of a Christ-centred gospel, who won and retained the respect and loyalty of those who disagreed with his views on higher criticism, while Jackson and Ballard were known for their work as evangelists and apologists (Wellings 2003b: 51214; A. Jackson 1949: 1525). It may be argued, further, that the ethos and structures of Methodism were conducive to this evolution. Methodist evangelicalism had always been activist and experiential, rather than intellectual. Writing in 1903 about the Methodist emphasis on the witness of the Spirit, George Jackson offered this insight into the theological awareness and priorities of contemporary Wesleyans: Our people are not, as a rule, quickly sensitive to differing shades of theological thought, and on some subjects it might be possible for a preacher to teach questionable doctrine without exciting any general alarm among his hearers; but a false note in the pulpit on this subject would be detected and resented at once (G. Jackson 1903: 43). Methodist suspicions were more likely to be aroused by a failure of experience than
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by a shift of doctrine. This experientialist ethos was complemented by a connexional polity which promoted unity, discouraged party groupings, and made congregational separatism very difficult. Candidates for the ministry were selected and trained connexionally; the stationing of ministers was a connexional responsibility; the three-year itinerancy kept ministers moving; and the circuit system acted against single-church pastorates and ensured that the deployment of preachers and the filling of pulpits was under the control of the circuit, not the local society. The rhetoric of connexionalism remained strong too: when the conservatives of the Wesley Bible Union attempted to use the disciplinary procedures of the Wesleyan connexion against Jackson, Ballard, and other liberal evangelicals in the 1910s they were subjected to a telling counter-charge of unbrotherly conduct (Wellings 2002: 166). Although liberal evangelicalism had a great deal going for it in the early twentieth century, it did not win universal approval in Methodism. First, there was a small but vocal backlash at connexional level against higher criticism and modernist theology, provoked by Jackson's appointment to Didsbury in 1913. The outraged conservatives whose campaign to reverse the appointment failed so spectacularly in the Wesleyan Conference drew together in the Wesley Bible Union, and spent the next decade and a half fomenting a series of minor fundamentalist controversies in Methodism. A combination of tactical ineptitude, weak argument, and sheer ill-temper ensured that the WBU's efforts served only to rally majority support for persecuted liberals, to discredit the conservative cause for at least a generation, and to induce the Conference to redefine the Connexion's doctrinal standards to prevent the use of John Wesley's Sermons and Notes as a weapon against biblical criticism. By the early 1920s the WBU was a laughing-stock and was drifting towards non-denominational evangelical groups such as the Protestant Truth Society. The further apparent dilution of Wesleyan doctrinal standards in the negotiations for Methodist union led the WBU finally to cut its connections with Methodism and to change its name to the British Bible Union in 1932. It seems unlikely that this departure caused much distress in the Connexion (ibid. 15768). Much more significant than the tiny band of ultra-conservatives in the WBU was the survival of what might be termed a constructive conservative position, occupying ground between the emerging liberal evangelical consensus and the militant fundamentalists. This outlook was illustrated by such ministers as Samuel Chadwick (18601932), Dinsdale Young (18611938), W. H. Heap (18691953), J. A. Broadbelt (18781962), and
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C. H. Hulbert (18781957). Chadwick, Heap, Broadbelt, and Hulbert were linked by ties of friendship. They shared ministerial experience in the great northern preaching centres of Methodism, and were variously involved in the evangelical networks emanating from Cliff College, the institution for the training of lay evangelists taken into connexional ownership in 1903: Chadwick and Broadbelt were the second and third principals of the college. Cliff was intertwined with the weekly newspaper Joyful News, edited by Chadwick and then by Heap, and a further contact came through the annual Southport Holiness Convention. Chadwick, Heap, Broadbelt, and Hulbert exemplified a traditional Wesleyan commitment to evangelism and scriptural holiness, and, while doctrinally conservative, they stood apart from the WBU and its polemics. Theirs, moreover, was a largely Methodist evangelicalism, in the sense that they were principally or exclusively active in Methodist networks (Vickers 2000: 44, 58, 169; Lazell 2005). In outlook and affiliation Dinsdale Young came closer to fundamentalism. An admirer of the Puritan divines, he was interested in the British-Israelite theory and supported conservative evangelical or quasi-fundamentalist initiatives such as the Advent Testimony Movement and the Bible Testimony Fellowship. Despite initial expressions of sympathy, however, he still escaped the clutches of the WBU and his death in 1938 drew forth a frank assessment from Scott Lidgett: The unsettlement of the age did not touch him. In so far as he conceived that current teachings were incompatible with the Gospel as he believed and preached it, he either passed them by or dismissed them with a hearty, yet genial, anathema (Murray 1938; Methodist Recorder 27 January 1938: 4). Not dissimilar was the outlook of the Primitive Methodist Thomas Jackson (18501932), pioneer of the Whitechapel Mission in the East End of London. Jackson, too, stuck to a simple gospel: Modernism does not trouble him, and he is not versed in the Higher Criticism. Far from disdaining these things, and while cherishing the friendliest feelings for their exponents, his time has been occupied with weightier matters (Potter 1929: 167). The absence of party loyalties in Methodism is emphasized when it is realized that Jackson's work was supported by the Primitive Methodist plutocrat Sir William Hartley, who also paid Peake's salary and enabled ministerial students to spend two years at the Manchester college. On the Wesleyan side, Heap and Hulbert were proteges of Chadwick's friend Samuel Collier, founder of the Manchester Mission, and Collier's friend and biographer was none other than George Jackson. Theological differences in Methodism existed within a closeknit family. The constructive conservatives in early twentieth-century Methodism emphasized evangelism and evangelical experience, and tended to avoid
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polemics. At a time when liberal evangelical influences were growing in the colleges, and among younger ministers, it may be seen that there was a real possibility that the conservative case might go by default and traditional Methodist evangelicalism wither. That this did not happen was due to three principal causes. First, the New Evangelicalism of the colleges and the denominational publications percolated only slowly into the local circuits and societies of Methodism. It should not be forgotten that the majority of services in British Methodist churches in the twentieth century (as in the nineteenth) were conducted by Local (lay) Preachers, and not by ministers. Although voluntary schemes of training for Local Preachers were introduced in the 1890s, connexional courses of biblical and theological study became compulsory only after Methodist Union in 1932 (Milburn and Batty 1995: 7682, 98103). Many Sunday services were therefore led by preachers effectively trained under an apprenticeship model and examined vivavoce in the circuit Local Preachers' meeting on their Christian experience and knowledge of Wesley's Sermons. While this in no way prevented the acquisition of considerable erudition by Local Preachers, it did mean that the systematic diffusion of the latest scholarship was very difficult. It was possible for circuits and societies to remain largely unaware of the debates of the early twentieth century and to be surprisedand dismayedwhen confronted by the assured results of modern scholarship. It should not be forgotten, moreover, that the staple ingredient of Methodist worship in this period was hymnody, and that successive British hymnals contained a substantial number of Charles Wesley's hymns (Pratt 2004: 4953). In this way, Methodist congregations were fed a steady diet of evangelical and experiential theology through exposure to the Wesley hymns. Second, this innate conservatism was nurtured, or made more explicit and articulate, by a range of conservative networks. Some were distinctively Methodist, like the readership of Joyful News, or the churches visited by students from Cliff College on their summer vacation evangelistic treks, or the individuals who supported the Southport Convention. Others were nondenominational, such as the beach missions organized in seaside resorts by the Children's Special Service Mission, the regional Bible conventions that drew on local evangelical churches for audiences, conservative evangelical newspapers, magazines, and periodicals, and pan-evangelical missionary societies. The latter influences might draw conservatively inclined evangelicals out of Methodism, or they might make an evangelical Methodist
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more definitely conservative. Thus Fred Mitchell, a Bradford chemist who became Home Director of the China Inland Mission in 1942, was converted as a teenager and became a Wesleyan Local Preacher at 17, and remained a Methodist until his death in an aeroplane accident in India in 1953. Mitchell's growing interest in China in the 1920s, however, took him into unusual circles for a Methodist: first, support for CIM, and then involvement with the Keswick movement (Thompson 1954: 17, 24, 423, 714, 8493, 114). Third, from the 1930s and especially after the Second World War, conservative evangelicalism in Britain moved beyond mere survival to experience a significant renaissance. The IVF, formed in 1927, was a key element, coordinating conservative groups in the universities. Fed by recruits from the CSSM and from increasingly effective work in the public schools, the small and somewhat beleaguered Evangelical Unions of the 1920s grew in numbers and influence, and nurtured a new generation of conservative evangelical scholars and church leaders. Youth for Christ developed programmes in British towns and cities during and after the war. British evangelists such as Tom Rees proved able to fill large venues for evangelistic rallies. The Billy Graham crusades of 19545 gave evangelism a new impetus, and conservative evangelicalism a new confidence and higher public profile. The National Evangelical Anglican Congress at Keele University in 1967 marked the recovery of the conservative strand within the evangelical school in the Church of England, and by this time charismatic renewal was beginning to influence the traditional denominations and to create new churches and alliances. These developments took place against a backdrop of liberal evangelical decline in the face of social change and the challenge of theological pluralism. By the last quarter of the twentieth century conservative evangelicalism had become a powerful force in British Christianity. It represented an increasingly diverse and sometimes fractious coalition of groups: older denominations and new churches; Free Church and Anglican; liturgical traditionalists, emerging churches, and fresh expressions; Reformed and Arminian; spiritually reflective and exuberantly charismatic. The sinews of the movement included festivals of worship and teaching, such as Spring Harvest, networks such as the Evangelical Alliance, CARE, and TEAR Fund, and the burgeoning print and electronic media. The theology of the movement remained conservative, but its style, language, and appeal were contemporary. Evangelicalism had always had global and transatlantic dimensions, but these influences increased in the late twentieth century as multi-ethnic Britain witnessed the growth of black-led churches and as the communications revolution brought North American trends to
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bear ever more powerfully on British evangelical life (Bebbington 1989: 249 70). These broader evangelical changes and developments were reflected in Methodism. Liberal evangelical theology, married to social concern and a commitment to evangelism, remained dominant through the 1930s and 1940s, and was represented by Colin Roberts's innovative Christian Commando Campaigns during the Second World War. The liberal evangelical hegemony, although challenged by more aggressively liberal and even radical voices, as well as by resurgent conservatism during the 1950s, held up through the era of the Graham crusades, hoping for a revival which always seemed to be just around the next corner. In the 1960s, however, this consensus came under pressure from all directions. A catastrophic decline in membership, the collapse of the Sunday schools, and a dramatic drop in candidates for the ministry brought home the structural weaknesses of the Connexion and, for many, dealt a death blow to confidence in traditional styles of evangelism. The old guard of college tutors and theologians seemed unable to cope with the new theology of Bultmann and Bonhoeffer, popularized by John Robinson in Honest to God (1963). The nadir was reached when the laborious process of the AnglicanMethodist Conversations issued in the rejection of Methodism by the Church of Englandtwicein 1969 and 1972 (Hastings 1991: 5489; Bebbington 2003: 2005). The post-war Methodist project of reconstruction, outreach, and ecumenism seemed to have failed at all points. The subsequent quests for new theologies, new models of church life, and new approaches to mission generated diversity, experimentation, and pluralism, in which liberal evangelicalism was eclipsed both by more radical and more conservative options. It has already been seen that traditionalism and a range of denominational and non-denominational networks kept conservative evangelicalism alive in Methodism after the departure of the WBU. It was not until after the Second World War, however, that the conservatively inclined felt confident enough to form an organization. The Revival Fellowship, constituted in 1952, grew from existing Methodist evangelicalism, but also drew on IVF contacts and benefited from the conservative and charismatic renaissance of the 1960s. The Fellowship, officially named the Methodist Revival Fellowship in 1955, weathered the storms of debate over the Conversations and charismatic renewal, survived several high-profile secessions, and entered the 1970s as an established dialogue partner in a pluralist church. In 1971 it proved possible to create another body, Conservative Evangelicals in
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Methodism, with a brief for theological study and reflection. The following year the magazine Dunamis was launched to cater for Methodists involved with charismatic renewal. In 1987 MRF and CEIM came together to form Headway, a movement of Methodists committed to prayer for revival and witness to the evangelical faith. Eight years later the Dunamis network dissolved into Headway, which by 2007, when it was rebranded Methodist Evangelicals Together, claimed a membership of 2,000, including 400 ministers. MRF, CEIM, and Headway leaders were linked to Cliff College and to the Southport Convention, but also to non-Methodist evangelical groups, such as the Evangelical Alliance, the Keswick Convention, Youth for Christ, and the faith missions. The weakening of denominational loyalties and the flourishing of new expressions of evangelicalism through the 1980s and 1990s meant that Methodist evangelicals were drawn to use worship and study resources, attend conferences and celebratory events, and support campaigning groups from across the whole evangelical spectrum. In some ways this enriched Methodism, but in others it diminished Methodist distinctiveness and promoted an evangelical homogeneity divorced from any explicitly Methodist/Wesleyan roots. Telling in this regard were the widespread replacement of traditional Methodist hymns with modern worship songs, looser denominational affiliations, and the development of a congregationalist rather than a connexional mindset (Wellings 2005: 367). British Methodism was born in the evangelical revival, and it contributed significantly to the shaping and success of the phenomenon of evangelicalism. Although always occupying a particular place within the evangelical family as an Arminian holiness movement and an often selfsufficient denomination, Methodist history for more than two centuries marched in step with the interaction of a wider evangelicalism with developments in British thought, society, and sensibility. In the first half of the twentieth century many Methodists accompanied their fellow evangelicals into an accommodation with modern thought. The erosion of liberal evangelicalism from the 1960s cut liberal Methodists loose from their evangelical origins, while the conservative evangelical revival drew its chief inspiration from sources other than the Wesleyan/Methodist tradition. Conservative evangelicals in Methodism have an assured place in a denomination that now prizes pluralism, but it remains to be seen whether they will retain, or regain, the ability to express and transmit their evangelicalism in a distinctive and recognizably Methodist idiom.
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British Methodism and Evangelicalism

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