Variants: Methodist and Holiness Movements
The Wesleyan movement began as a reform within the Church of England, and in many places, it remains as such. In some places, especially in America, the movement separated itself from its "mother church" and became known as the Methodist Episcopal Church. Many divisions occurred within the Methodist Episcopal Church in the nineteenth century, mostly over first the slavery question and later the inclusion of African-Americans. Some of these schisms healed in the early twentieth century, and many of the splinter Methodist groups came together to form The Methodist Church by 1939. In 1968, the Methodist Church joined with the Pietist Evangelical United Brethren Church to form The United Methodist Church, the largest Methodist church in America. Other groups include the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, the Congregational Methodist Church, the Evangelical Church of North America, the Evangelical Congregational Church, the Evangelical Methodist Church, the Free Methodist Church of North America, and the Southern Methodist Church.
In the nineteenth century a dissension arose over the nature of sanctification. Those who saw sanctification as a never completed progressive task, remained within the Methodist churches; others, however, believed in instantaneous sanctification that could be perfected. Those who followed this line of thought began the various holiness churches, including the Church of God (Holiness), the Church of God (Anderson), the Churches of Christ in Christian Union, and the Wesleyan Methodist Church, which later merged with the Pilgrim Holiness Church to form the Wesleyan Church, which are present today. In the nineteenth century, there were many other holiness groups; many of these groups became the foundation for the Pentecostal movement. Other holiness groups that rejected the Pentecostal movement merged to form the Church of the Nazarene.
The Salvation Army is another group which traces its roots to early Methodism. The Salvation Army's founders Catherine and William Booth left after having tried to reform the Methodist church especially in the areas of evangelism and social action.
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Famous quotes containing the words methodist, holiness and/or movements:
“Kipling, the grandson of a Methodist preacher, reveals the tin-pot evangelist with increasing clarity as youth and its ribaldries pass away and he falls back upon his fundamentals.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“A State, in idea, is the opposite of a Church. A State regards classes, and not individuals; and it estimates classes, not by internal merit, but external accidents, as property, birth, etc. But a church does the reverse of this, and disregards all external accidents, and looks at men as individual persons, allowing no gradations of ranks, but such as greater or less wisdom, learning, and holiness ought to confer. A Church is, therefore, in idea, the only pure democracy.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“In a universe that is all gradations of matter, from gross to fine to finer, so that we end up with everything we are composed of in a lattice, a grid, a mesh, a mist, where particles or movements so small we cannot observe them are held in a strict and accurate web, that is nevertheless nonexistent to the eyes we use for ordinary living—in this system of fine and finer, where then is the substance of a thought?”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)