Viewed from the perspective traced in previous chapters, the Holiness Revival was indeed a charismatic movement. It emphasized grace, the Holy Spirit, and Christian fellowship, and felt keenly the tension between new life and old forms. 2 At least two characteristics of the Holiness Movement were not charismatic, yet prepared the way for modern Pentecostalism. Ironically, both characteristics represented a departure from the breadth and genius of John Wesley.

     1. The first characteristic was a lessened consciousness of Christian community and of the need for structures for community. We have seen how the class meeting was woven into Wesley’s understanding of Christian life and sanctification. It was not for nothing that Wesleyans continued to be called Methodists!

     By and large, however, the Holiness Movement failed to perpetuate the intimate, consistent, intense experience of Christian community in the form of the class meeting that was so typical of earlier Methodism. It is true that the Holiness Movement was initially sparked in part by the decline of spirituality and of the class meeting in Methodism, and that small group meetings were one of the keys to the renewal. Wesleyan scholar Melvin Dieter notes,

     The successful use of the small holiness meeting represented one positive effort, all unconscious as it may have been, to find a substitute to fill the spiritual and social void which was being created in the changing Methodist religious community by the declining significance of the class meeting. . . . The Tuesday Meetings and similar holiness meetings, therefore, fulfilled many of the functions of Wesley’s “special societies 

     However, in the later movement, gathered together in a home as frequently as in a church, and a step removed from official pastoral care, . . . they tended to become centers of separate interests rather than instruments for strengthening the church itself. All that was needed was to take the holiness meeting to the masses, and that is essentially what the revived camp meeting movement, which became the leading edge of the tide of postwar holiness revival, was to do. 3

     This is not to say that class meetings died out abruptly or that this was a wholesale shift. We are speaking rather of what seems to have been a gradual but steady trend. Methodist class meetings continued in some places well into the twentieth century, and the Holiness Movement used various forms of small groups, such as Phoebe Palmer’s “Tuesday Meetings.” But it is clear that during the last half of the nineteenth century the class meeting was in decline while the camp meeting was in ascendancy. 4

     Charles W. Ferguson identifies this as a broad trend in Methodism in Organizing to Beat the Devil: Methodists and the Making of America:

     At first the Methodists [in the U.S.] struck a balance between the camp meetings and the class meetings. In this combination the mini and the mass joined. But when camp assemblies became a sustaining feature in Methodist practice, group meetings subsided and fell gradually into disuse. Many undetermined factors may have entered into the change, but the fact is that the growth of mass efforts during the years before 1805 and 1844 coincided with a shrinking of group activities.

     Methodism moved toward the mass rather than the group as the primary form in society. 5

     2. A second development in the Holiness Movement was a narrowing of John Wesley’s conception of Christian perfection. A careful reading of Wesley’s sermons will show that the fundamental strain in Wesley’s doctrine of sanctification is that of process: growing up into the fullness of Christ; attaining the mind of Christ and the image of God; loving God with one’s soul, strength, and mind. To this Wesley added, on the basis of experience and seemingly by analogy with his understanding of the New Birth, his doctrine of a second crisis experience in which the believer is entirely sanctified, cleansed, and empowered to love God and others fully, as God intends, without hindrance from an impure “heart.”

     The Holiness Movement in the nineteenth century stressed the second crisis and deemphasized sanctification as a process of growth that begins with conversion and continues through life. Moreover, the broader context and structure of Wesley’s overall theology was largely lost from sight. Holiness came to be seen primarily as a state of being. Thus Seth Cook Rees could write in 1897, “Holiness is a state; entire sanctification is an experience; the Holy Ghost is a person. We come into the state of holiness through the experience of entire sanctification, wrought by the omnipotent energies of the Holy Ghost.” 6 Admittedly this “state” was a state of growth, but the accent had shifted.

     With this shift in emphasis came, as several scholars have shown, a shift toward pneumatological language and an increased emphasis on the baptism of the Holy Spirit. These two developments—no doubt influenced by other trends in U.S. society in the late nineteenth century—tended to produce an un-Wesleyan pessimism toward the expected norms for personal and corporate Christian experience. The Holiness Movement tended to stress a series of peak experiences which were seen as carrying the believer through the low points in between. The absence of consistent structures designed to help people grow in sanctification (such as the class meeting) reinforced this psychology.

     On these two points, at least, the Holiness Movement was less biblically charismatic than was early Methodism and yet was moving toward modern Pentecostalism. In Wesley’s view, the earnest Christian is always growing in sanctification. The second crisis is important, but more as a means than as a goal. By contrast, the Holiness Movement increasingly tended to see the second crisis as the goal of Christian experience, the end to which all prior growth in grace tends. 7 For example, Melvin Dieter notes that Phoebe Palmer’s doctrine of entire sanctification, compared with Wesley’s, “greatly enhanced the distinctiveness of the second blessing from that of the initial experience of regeneration.” The result of such tendencies, says Dieter, “was that the American holiness revival came to emphasize crisis stages of salvation at the expense of an emphasis on growth in grace.” 8

     From this perspective, Holiness theology in the late nineteenth century logically leads either to Pentecostalism or to some disillusionment with the second crisis experience. By its very nature, a spiritual peak experience cannot be permanently satisfying. If that occasion is a genuine experience of the Holy Spirit in His fullness (which we do not question), we would expect that the daily presence of the Spirit in the believer’s life would be fully satisfying—and that was the expectation. But without normative structures for nurturing the life of holiness, and with the increasing stress on subjective crises typified by the growing use of Pentecostal crisis language, 9 many Holiness people no doubt felt an inner lack in their lives, a sense that there must be something deeper, something more, in Christian experience. So then, after the turn of the century the question logically became, could this “something more” be the new phenomenon of speaking in tongues? Many concluded that it was. Other groups staunchly resisted this new Pentecostalism, and on that issue the Holiness Movement divided. 10

     These developments in the late-nineteenth-century Holiness Movement lead us to two conclusions:

     1. The fully Wesleyan understanding of Christian perfection, combining both process and crisis, must be recovered. This is the biblical view. In fact, the main question before us is not whether Spirit-baptism language is appropriate. The more basic question is this: How do we in fact teach, encourage, and make structural provision for the life of “all inward and outward holiness”? There is a biblical and practical breadth to the Wesleyan understanding of Christian experience that must be recovered in our day. In this area the Holiness Movement would be more dynamic if it were more Wesleyan.

     2. In this light, modern Pentecostalism may be viewed in both positive and negative ways. Positively, Pentecostalism in both its classical and newer Charismatic forms has recovered and extended much of the spiritual dynamism of the older Holiness Movement. It has been responsible, under God, for millions of people on all continents coming to know Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. Whether Wesleyans like it or not, in some sense the mantle of the Holiness Movement as a spiritual revitalizing force has passed to the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements, which have had a much greater impact than our own tradition in our day.

     Furthermore, the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements have raised the question of the charismata and the question of the charismatic nature of Christianity in a way that has forced the church at large to reexamine what the Scriptures say on this subject. The growing consciousness throughout the church of the practical dimensions of the charismata is directly traceable to modern Pentecostalism (and indirectly to Wesleyanism).

     Negatively, Pentecostalism and to some degree the Charismatic Movement have not yet recovered the ethical, spiritual, and social depth and breadth of early Methodism. In some sectors the sanctifying emphasis has not been sufficiently retained. Stress on the more dramatic gifts has not always been accompanied by a sufficiently balanced emphasis on the fruit of the Spirit and the social impact of the gospel. More balance in this area now seems evident in some branches of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements, and especially in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal.

     In any case, the Holiness reaction to Pentecostalism and Neo-Pentecostalism has been too harsh. Vinson Synan notes,

     The most negative assessments of the Imodern Charismatic] renewal came from the older Holiness and fundamentalist churches that had encountered and rejected Pentecostalism earlier in the century. . . . Nazarenes rejected the renewal out of hand, not on scriptural or theological grounds, but because Pentecostalism did not accord with their doctrines and traditions) 11

     Given the historical circumstances, it is understandable that many in the Holiness Movement resisted the outbreak of Pentecostalism, denouncing the gift of tongues with the same vehemence of Pentecostals who promoted it. The more tongues became the focal point of Pentecostalism, the more it became the lightning rod of Holiness opposition. This is a familiar pattern at the outbreak of new movements. The unfortunate result is that often in such a circumstance, the old movement is left without the dynamic of the new and the new is left without the stability and balance of the old.

     But now we are in a new period. The Pentecostal and Charismatic movements are here to stay. Indeed, in some sectors these movements are showing signs of institutionalism and accommodation. Conversely, Holiness bodies are gradually softening their opposition to Pentecostal and Charismatic themes and are beginning to take a second look. It is time to build bridges of understanding and to ask how the Holy Spirit might be pleased to build in this day a church that is charismatic and holy in a truly biblical way.

     In doing so we would fulfill the vision of that great Methodist missionary to America, Francis Asbury, who wrote in his journal in 1786: “I feel the worth of souls, and the weight of the pastoral charge, and that the conscientious discharge of its important duties requires something more than human learning, unwieldy salaries, or clerical titles of D.D., or even bishop. The eyes of all—both preachers and people, will be opened in time.” 12

1. What do Charismatic churches today have to learn from churches of the Holiness tradition?
2. What can churches of the Holiness tradition learn from the Charismatic renewal?
3. Moses felt the weight of leadership so greatly that he sighed, “Oh that all God’s people could be filled with the Holy Spirit.” Francis Asbury must have felt the same way when he wrote the journal entry quoted at the end of this chapter. Yet Asbury lived seventeen hundred years after Pentecost. The Holy Spirit had already been given to the church centuries before. What accounts for the relative absence of the gifts of grace in the life of the church down through history?
4. Does your church have any structures resembling the old Methodist class meeting? What can be done in your church today to restore or deepen the sense of community and accountability of the class meeting?