No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
‘Women may preach but men must govern’: Gender Roles in the Growth and Development of the Bible Christian Denomination
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
When the Cornish lay evangelist, William O’Bryan, founded the first Bible Christian societies in the late autumn of 1815 he was responding, in the main, to female initiatives. This is not altogether surprising. For several decades before 1815 women had been playing a much larger role in English evangelical Christianity than they had done in the early years of the Evangelical Revival. The informal groupings which came into existence in its second phase, c. 1790-c. 1830, gave women opportunities to initiate, organize, and exhort on a much more extensive scale. As cottages and farmsteads became centres of worship, women were well placed to play a more important role as initiators and organizers, especially in those areas barely affected by John Wesley, George Whitefield, and their travelling preachers. The more articulate went even further and followed the example of some eighteenth-century Quaker women by speaking in their own localities and further afield. Before the eighteenth century came to an end a number had acquired the reputation of being gifted preachers and ‘holy women’, ‘owned by God’, and called to instruct others, both men and women, in the Christian faith. For a short while women were poised in Wesleyan, and later, Primitive Methodism to play a major role in evangelism and church-planting; but it was only amongst the Bible Christians that they, for a time, played perhaps an even more significant role as evangelists than their male colleagues. As such they were in no way inferior to men; but when the denomination acquired a governmental structure copied from Wesleyan Methodism the patriarchal ordering of contemporary society set limits to their Bible-based notions of sexual equality.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1998
References
1 Valenze, Deborah, Prophetic Sons and Daughters: Female Preaching and Popular Religion in Industrial England (Princeton, NJ, 1985), pp. 26, 35, 52.Google Scholar
2 Taft, Z., Biographical Sketches of the Lives and Public Ministry of Various Holy Women, 2 vols (London, 1825-8; Peterborough, 1992)Google Scholar, passim.
3 Graham, E. Dorothy, ‘Chosen by God: the female travelling preachers of early Primitive Methodism’, Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society, 49 (1993), pp. 77–95.Google Scholar
4 Rack, Henry D., How Primitive was Primitive Methodism?, 6th Chapel Aid Lecture (Englesea Brook, 1996), p. 22.Google Scholar
5 Manchester, John Rylands University Library, Methodist Church Archive, Hatton Rattenbury (fnr) Diary, MAW, MS 92. 21, Rules of Society Applicable to All Our Members who Profess to Follow Christ According to the Bible (Stoke Damarel, nd), p. 7; Arminian Magazine [hereafter AM], 2 (1823), pp. 151–56, 267; Thorne, James et al., A Jubilee Memorial of Incidents in the Rise and Progress of the Bible Christian Connexion (Shebbear and London, 1865), pp. 19–20 Google Scholar; Townsend, W. J., Workman, H. B., and Eayrs, George, eds, A New History of Methodism, 2 vols (London, 1909), r, p. 508 Google Scholar; Shaw, T., Methodism in the Camelford and Wadebridge Circuits, 1743–1963 (Camelford, 1963), p. 197 Google Scholar; Devon in the Religious Census of 1851, ed. M. J. L. Wickes (Appledore, 1990), pp. 29, 108, 131, 139.
6 AM, 2 (1823), p. 149; AM, 3 (1824), pp. 9, 368–73; Shaw, Methodism, p. 197.
7 AM, 2, pp. 258–9; James, John Thorne, Thorne of Shebbear: A Memoir (London, 1873), pp. 8–11.Google Scholar
8 Bourne, F. W., The Centenary Life of James Thome (London, 1895), pp. 178–9.Google Scholar
9 AM, 2, p. 327.
10 Charles Drelincourt (1595-1669), the French Protestant writer, published Les Consolations … in 1651; it became a popular work in translation in early eighteenth-century England. More than eighteen editions were published, including one in Exeter in the early nineteenth century under the title The Christian’s Defence against the Fears of Death with Seasonable Directions how to Prepare Ourselves to Die Well (nd, but a copy exists endorsed ‘1817’ by its first owner).
11 AM, 3, pp. 7–12; Brooks, Johanna, The Handmaid of the Lord (London, 1868), pp. 10–25, 30–5, 44–5, 68, 82, 85Google Scholar.
12 AM, 3, p. 47.
13 Primitive Methodist Magazine, 2 (18 21), pp. 190–2.
14 AM, 3, p. 77.
15 Ibid., pp. 77, 263, 290.
16 Elizabeth Dart (1792-1857) joined the Wesleyan society at Poundstock in 1812, began to exhort in 1814, joined the Bible Christians in 1816, and exercised a public ministry as an itinerant from 1817 until her marriage to J. H. Eynon in 1832. She frequently suffered from ill-health and for a time in 1817 retired from preaching to keep a school. On her marriage she went with her husband to Ontario where it was said of her ‘she was the best missionary we ever sent to Canada’. Taft, Holy Women, 2, pp. 201–9; Thorne, James Thome, p. 3 5 and n.; AM, 3, p. 48.
17 Ibid., pp. 42, 77–9.
18 Ibid., pp. 180, 194.
19 Ibid., p. 290.
20 Ibid., pp. 331–3.
21 Freeman, Ann, A Memoir of the Life and Ministry of Ann Freeman (London, 1828), p. xvii.Google Scholar
22 PRO, RG 4/334.
23 BL Add. MS 9427, Lysons Papers, fo. 246.
24 AM, 7 (1828), pp. 112–13.
25 AM, 2, p. 423.
26 Ibid., pp. 281–6.
27 Bible Christian Magazine, 3rd set., 18 (1853), p. 265.
28 Pyke, Richard, The Golden Chain (London, 1915), p. 46.Google Scholar
29 Thorne, James Thome, pp. 271–2.
30 Ibid., p. 74.
31 AM, 2, pp. 405–25.
32 Freeman, A Memoir, p. 25.
33 Shaw, T., The Bible Christians (London, 1965), pp. 110–11.Google Scholar
34 Manchester, John Rylands University Library, Methodist Church Archive, Bible Christian Journal (1824-52), p. 17.
35 Ibid., p. 49.
36 Rack, How Primitive was Primitive Methodism?, pp. 25–6; Graham, ‘Chosen by God’, p. 89.
37 Parkes, William, ‘The Arminian Methodists, 1832–1837 (the “Derby Faith”); a case study in Wesleyan deviation’ (University of Keele M Phil, thesis, May 1994)Google Scholar; Parkes, William, The Arminian Methodists: the Derby Faith, a Wesleyan Aberration in Pursuit of Revivalism and Holiness, Merlin Methodist monographs, 3 (Cannock, 1995), pp. 23–4, 49Google Scholar.
38 Freeman, Henry, False Prophets Described, and Thoughts on the Call, Appointment and Support of Ministers, also on Worship and a Vindication of the Ministry of Women (Dublin, 1824), p. 27.Google Scholar
39 Truro, Cornwall Record Office, X241/4.
40 Thorne, James Thome, pp. 165–6.
41 Ibid., pp. 203–4.
42 In the thousands of entries in the twenty-seven Bible Christian baptism registers deposited with the Registrar-General in 1837 and now in the PRO (RG4/100-8, 110–11, 113, 332, 334, 338–40, 873, 880, 1187, 1419, 1694, 2184, 2299, 2428, 2619, 2801, 4162) there is not a single entry by a female itinerant. I have written fairly fully about the non-parochial registers in my PRO Guide, Protestant Nonconformity and Roman Catholicism (London, 1996), pp. 30–50.
43 Truro, Cornwall Record Office, X241/8.
44 Truro, Courtney Library, Mary Thome (née O’Bryan) Diaries.
45 Oliver A Beckerlegge, ‘Women itinerant preachers’, Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society, 30 (1956), pp. 182–4.