Baptistic Theologies, 2009

p the revivalist momentum. This style of revival - lay-led, excitable, Arminian, looking for instant conversions and holding long meetings - was an effective formula for church growth. By the mid-nineteenth century, the British Methodists enjoyed the support of 19% of the worshippers in their nation and the American Methodists claimed as many as 34% of theirs. 15 The movement spread across the world, the most expansive Christian body of the 13 Primitive Methodist Magazine (London), August 1825, p. 271. 14 Minutes of the Methodist Conference, 1807, quoted in Rupert Davies et al. (eds ), A History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain, Vol. 4 (London: Epworth Press, 1988), p. 320. 15 D. M. Thompson, Nonconformity in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 153. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America: Winners and Losers in our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), p. 55. Revivals, Revivalism and the Baptists 7 nineteenth century. The prestige of success made the Methodists the examples for other denominations to imitate. Baptists in particular moved in a Methodist direction during the century. They gave more scope to lay leadership and permitted more displays of emotion. Their theology became more Arminian, they expected conversion to be sudden and they sometimes held long services. Baptists increasingly found it easy to join in Methodist awakenings. Thus at Moonta Mines in South Australia in 1875, when revival broke out among the miners, mostly Methodists who had come originally from Cornwall, the local Baptist church gladly joined in the efforts. 16 The Baptist approach to revival had in many places become little different from that of the Methodists. The Baptist adoption of elements of the Methodist style was part of a larger process of synthesis. The traditions of revival interpenetrated, especially on the American frontier. Thus in 1801 at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, there was a Presbyterian communion season attended by Methodists and Baptists who participated fully. Its promoter. Barton W. Stone, moved to an undenominational position in 1804, founding a group to be called ‘Christians Only’ who evolved into the Disciples of Christ. Likewise in upper New York state, Charles Finney developed intensive revival methods in the 1820s. Although he was himself a Presbyterian, he used Methodist techniques. Finney encouraged physical prostrations, women speaking, protracted meetings and, from 1830, the use of the ‘anxious seat’, an isolated bench at the front of a meeting where a penitent would sit in full view of all to be the target for the whole congregation’s prayers. These ‘new measures’ were codified in Finney’s enormously popular Lectures on Revivals (1835). What was the nature of this model of revival that we can call synthetic? In the first place it was planned. Instead of urging prayer for God to bestow an awakening,