Inter-Varsity Press

Contents

1. Landscapes and personalities
2. Revivals and revivalism, 1790–1820
3. ‘New measures’ revivals, 1820–50
4. Spirituality and worship
5. Women, men and the family
6. Transforming society
7. Politics: freeing slaves, saving nations
8. Diversity and unity in the expansion of evangelicalism

Extracts from Chapter 1

LANDSCAPES AND PERSONALITIES

During years of rapid growth between the 1790s and the 1840s English-speaking evangelicalism was a turbulent sea pulled by powerful tides of spiritual impulse and social change, generating many lesser currents and eddies. These flows were transforming religious life in the evangelical heartland of the British Isles and North America, and were beginning to touch the shores of every other continent. Evangelical conviction moulded the lives of countless individuals in enormously diverse situations, from the very rich to the very poor; men, women and children; black and white, slaves and free. It had profound implications for gender roles and family life, for the fabric of society and for political endeavour. Before turning to systematic analysis, it is helpful to begin this book with a few specific initial illustrations of the variety and scope of the movement. These will also introduce the four individuals named in the title of this book, along with others, both famous and obscure, who all contributed to the expansion of evangelicalism.

Personalities

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the village of Clapham in Surrey, now long since swallowed up by metropolitan London, still enjoyed a sense of distance from the bustle of the city. On the western side of Clapham Common was a large house, Battersea Rise, the home of the wealthy banker Henry Thornton (1760–1815), with a handsome library and extensive secluded gardens which were the main meeting place for the group of evangelicals that was in later years to be known as the Clapham Sect. ...

... Evangelicalism, however, also took root in much harsher social and geographical landscapes than that peaceful Surrey garden, and saw much more rough-edged expressions of Christian conviction than the comfortable urbanity of the upper-middle-class Clapham Sect. In the bleak industrial valleys of northern England, in the mining and fishing villages of Cornwall and on the expanding American frontier, the very years of the Clapham Sect’s heyday were a time of considerable hardship and uncertainty for working people. Such environments saw intense revivalism leading to the rapid expansion of Methodism and other forms of popular evangelicalism. It shaped a spirituality that emphasized the transience of this world and the reality of the Christian’s true security in heaven. ...

... For others a sense of spiritual journey translated into physical travel to the furthest parts of the globe. The Clapham circle was linked to the Eclectic Society, a gathering of London clergy around John Newton (1725–1807), the patriarch of Anglican Evangelicalism. When in 1786 the British government decided to establish a convict colony in New South Wales, the Eclectics lobbied through Wilberforce to secure the appointment as chaplain of one of their number, the Yorkshire-born Richard Johnson (1755–1827). On 3 February 1788 Johnson celebrated the first Anglican service in Australia in the place that was to become Sydney. ...

... Johnson continued to find it hard to get the seed of the gospel to take any root in Australian soil. He soldiered on until 1800, when he returned to England in order to recover his health. In the meantime, in 1794, Samuel Marsden (1765–1838) had arrived in New South Wales as assistant chaplain, and became senior chaplain after Johnson’s resignation. Marsden was another Yorkshireman, also associated with the Eclectic Society and a close friend of Charles Simeon ...

... For every such famous traveller, though, there were many hundreds of obscure evangelical ministers and committed lay people, who moved westward as well as eastward across the Atlantic and beyond, driven both by a longing to make Christ known and by the practical necessity of securing a livelihood. ...

... These introductory cameos immediately reveal evangelicalism as an enormously diverse movement, developing in widely spread geographical locations, among all social classes and a range of Protestant denominations. Alongside the expectation of revival and substantial actual numerical growth were specific pastoral situations in which the predominant experience was of continual conflict and very limited success. In tension with a sense of common evangelical identity was a recurrent internal divisiveness, apparent both at the level of individual churches and at the wider denominational and political level. Evangelicals showed a deep and often moving spirituality, particularly in their sense of the presence of Jesus and their ability to see personal stresses and tragedies in the perspective of eternity, but they could sometimes appear insensitive and hypocritical in their dealings with fellow human beings. Women were seen as possessing real spiritual worth and some, such as Hannah More, exercised an important influence, but they were liable to be constrained or even exploited by a predominant patriarchalism. Some communities were transformed by evangelicalism, whereas in others its impact was marginal.