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Renewing Methodist Evangelicalism: the Origins and Development of the Methodist Revival Fellowship
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
When the Wesleyan, Primitive and United Methodist Connexions combined in 1932 to form the Methodist Church of Great Britain, much was made of their shared evangelical heritage. The doctrinal clause of the founding Deed of Union affirmed that the Connexion ‘ever remembers that in the Providence of God Methodism was raised up to spread Scriptural Holiness through the land by the proclamation of the Evangelical Faith and declares its unfaltering resolve to be true to its Divinely appointed mission.’
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Studies in Church History , Volume 44: Revival and Resurgence in Christian History , 2008 , pp. 286 - 296
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2008
References
1 Minutes of the Uniting Conference (London, 1932), 302.
2 Wellings, Martin, Evangelicals in Methodism: Mainstream, Marginalised or Misunderstood? (Ilkeston, 2005), 23–31 Google Scholar.
3 For Young, , see Methodist Recorder (London), 27 January 1938, 4 Google Scholar; Wellings, Martin, ‘The Wesley Bible Union’, Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society 53 (2002), 157–68 Google Scholar; British Bible Union (BBU) committee minutes, 14 June 1951, in the BBU archive, now held by the Prophetic Witness Movement International, Leyland, Lanes.; J. H. J. Barker letter, 20 July 1975 (lent by the Revd Robert J. Kitching). For wider context, see D. W. Bebbington, ‘Martyrs for the Truth: Fundamentalists in Britain’, in Diana Wood, ed., Martyrs and Martyrologies, SCH 30 (Oxford, 1993), 417–51.
4 Methodist Recorder, 7 july 1955, 6.
5 There is one published history of the MRF: Wood, A. Skevington, The Kindled Flame (Ilkeston, 1987)Google Scholar. The Fellowship is also discussed in Kitching, Robert J., ‘The Conservative-Evangelical Influence in Methodism, 1900–76’, unpublished MA thesis, University of Birmingham, 1976 Google Scholar, chs 3 and 4.1 am grateful to the Revd Bob Kitching for the loan of this dissertation and of letters upon which his research was based.
6 From 1919 Victoria Park shared tutorial staff with the Primitive Methodists’ Hartley College, where A. S. Peake (1865–1929) was the most eminent tutor. Peake was an enthusiastic advocate of ‘higher criticism’; no record survives of J. H.J. Barker’s opinion of Peake as a tutor.
7 Minutes of Conference 1958 [hereafter: Minutes], 184–5; BBU committee minutes, 16 October 1951. Methodist involvement with Keswick was not unprecedented, but it was unusual: Price, Charles and Randall, Ian, Transforming Keswick (Carlisle, 2000), 44 Google Scholar.
8 Wood, Kindled Flame, 6–8; Sound of Revival, September 1976, 2, 3, 10. Several later accounts ‘remembered’ the Caterham gathering as taking place in 1947; the extant correspondence makes it clear that it was 1948.
9 Methodist terminology for retired ministers.
10 Atkinson: Minutes 1964, 201–2; Stringer: Minutes 1978, 94; Belben: Minutes 2000, 25–6. Photograph of participants and some names supplied by the Revd David Lawrence in letter to author, 20 February 2006.
11 Material lent by Barker, Peter; Johnson, Douglas, Contending for the Faith (Leicester, 1979), 359 Google Scholar.
12 Programme of Caterham conference, lent by Peter Barker.
13 Sound of Revival, September 1976, 10. The ‘four alls’ were a summary of Methodist doctrine, published by W. B. Fitzgerald in The Roots of Methodism (London, 1903), 173.
14 David Lawrence, letter to author, 20 February 2006.
15 Circular letter, undated (probably spring 1952), and Quarterly Newsletter, December 1952, lent by Ron Taylor.
16 See n. 6 above on Henry Barker. Wellings, ‘Wesley Bible Union’, 166, places the Wesley Bible Union in the context of a broader Protestant/Fundamentalist movement. The MRF Quarterly Newsletter in the 1950s was printed by the Protestant Truth Society’s Wickliffe Press.
17 Quarterly Newsletter, December 1952, 3, 10, 11.
18 ‘Authority and Belief, Methodist Recorder, 30 October 1952, 13; Revd F. Ockenden to editor, Methodist Recorder, 13 November 1952, 11.
19 Undated circular, probably spring/summer 1952.
20 Methodist Recorder, 27 May 1948, 3.
21 Methodist Recorder, 24 April 1952, 8.
22 ‘Motives in Evangelism’, Methodist Recorder, 3 April 1952, 4 (emphasis in original). Compare Sangster, W. E., Let Me Commend (London, 1949), 41–4 Google Scholar.
23 Quarterly Newsletter, December 1952, 2.
24 See, for example, Barker’s paper ‘Where are the Intercessors?’, published in the Quarterly Newsletter in April 1957 and reprinted as a pamphlet, in several editions.
25 See Macquiban, Timothy S. A., ‘Dialogue with the Wesleys’, in Marsh, Clive, Beck, Brian, Shier-Jones, Angela, and Wareing, Helen, eds, Unmasking Methodist Theology (London, 2004), 17–28 Google Scholar.
26 The Message and Mission of Methodism (London, 1946), 82.
27 Methodist Recorder, 22 April 1948, 5.
28 Ibid., 21 February 1952, 6; Revd G. Lewis to editor, 28 February 1952, 10; 19 June 1952,3 (Pawson); 17 July 1952,3–4 (Roberts’ presidential address to Conference).
29 Thompson, David M., ‘The Older Free Churches’, in Davies, Rupert, ed., The Testing of the Churches, 1932–1 a&2 (London, 1982), 87–115, at 93 Google Scholar.
30 Randall, Ian M., ‘Conservative Constructionist: the Early Influence of Billy Graham in Britain’, Evangelical Quarterly (Carlisle) 67 (1995), 309–33 Google Scholar; Rees, Jean A., His Name was Tom: the Biography of Tom Rees (London, 1971), 86–92 Google Scholar.
31 Bruce, F. F., ‘The Bible and Evangelism’, Methodist Recorder, 31 March 1955, 11 Google Scholar.
32 Donald Soper to editor, Methodist Recorder, 14 October 1954, 11; J. H.J. Barker to editor, Methodist Recorder, 21 October 19S4, 13.
33 David Lawrence to author, 20 February 2006; Mellor, G. Howard, Cliff: More than a College (Calver, 2005), 554–5 Google Scholar; Minutes 1964, 201; Roland Lamb was given permission to serve the IVF from 1952 to 1955, as indicated in successive editions of Minutes; Bebbington, D. W., Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: a History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London, 1989), 260 Google Scholar; Hoare, Brian, ‘Profile: Donald English’, Epworth Review (Peterborough), 25 (1998), 28–9 Google Scholar; Barker, J. H. J. to editor, Methodist Recorder, 21 October 1954, 13 Google Scholar, and ‘Fifty Years a Conservative Evangelical’, Conservative Evangelicals in Methodism Newsletter, Summer 1973, 8–12.
34 Quarterly Newsletter, December 1952, 6–9 (listing members); March 1956, 8; January 1962, 2. Compare the statistics for Methodist members and ministers in Minutes 1952, 193.
35 These developments are treated briefly in Wood, Kindled Flame, 21–3 and 29.