Baptistic Theologies, 2009

was normal. Wesley’s preachers were usually laymen, though over time they turned into ministers. Nevertheless laypeople continued to conduct the great majority of Methodist services. Meanwhile class leaders led the small groups whose purpose was to foster conversions. When revivals arose, the chief role was commonly played by these layfolk. Partly because ministers did not keep a tight grip, there was less imposition of order and decorum. People expressed their emotions, as in the American Great Awakening, with tears, shouting and outlandish behaviour. At a Primitive Methodist revival in County Durham, England, in 1824, for 1 Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 6 Baptistic Theologies example, we are told that ‘a pentecostal shower came down while singing... They began to fall over on all sides, crying, “Glory! - Glory! - Glory!”...To some it appeared nothing but confusion; as some were praying with mourners, others rejoicing with believers, and others were singing.’ The theology of the Methodist revivals was not Calvinist but Arminian. Wesley’s followers adopted his teaching that all could be saved if they trusted in Christ. They also maintained his belief about the defectibility of faith, denying the principle that those who were saved were always saved. It was expected that converts would fall away and then return to faith in a subsequent revival. In addition Methodists upheld the doctrine of entire sanctification. Wesley contended that believers can be made entirely holy so that sin is extinguished in their lives while they are still on earth. It followed that in revivals there were not just conversions, for they were also times at which Christians experienced the crisis of becoming wholly sanctified. Conversion itself was normally expected to be sudden rather than gradual. A person might be in quest of salvation for a long time, but eventually a turning point would be reached that was specific, with a known time. That was because Wesley taught that true faith necessarily includes assurance, the ‘witness of the Spirit’. Only when that experience dawned at a particular moment did a person become a Christian. Revivals, furthermore, were often associated amongst Methodists with ‘protracted meetings’. Services might continue for a long time, perhaps from early evening to four or five in the morning, so as to allow people to wrestle through to salvation. Camp meetings were invented around 1800 on the American frontier to permit such extended meetings to be repeated on successive days. When, in 1807, they were imitated by earnest souls in England, the Methodist authorities condemned them: ‘even supposing such meetings to be allowable in America, they are highly improper in England’. 14 The Primitive Methodists, rejecting this ruling, separated from the main Wesleyan Methodist body in order to keep u