Emerging Church: A Victorian Prequel

Emerging Church: a Victorian Prequel

by Dr Dominic Erdozain

Paper delivered at the ‘Ancient Wisdom, Anglican Futures’ Conference at Trinity School for Ministry, Pittsburgh, June 2009.

Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers www.wipfandstock.com
See the forthcoming volume The Great Tradition--A Great Labor: Studies in Ancient-Future Faith, Philip Harrold and D. H. Williams, eds. (Cascade: Eugene, Oregon, USA) for print edition.

The strangest thing about being a historian is that you gain a surer grasp of times and places you can never visit than your own. This can put you out of touch with the world around you, but it occasionally provides insights that are transformative. I will never forget sitting in the natural history library in Oxford, reading a book by Robert Young called Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture (1985). It was my first exposure to the new, cultural history of science and the revelations of Darwin’s debts to his cultural milieu were stunning. It shattered the comforting, binary oppositions on which my thoughts had rested, and I had a strange urge to stand up and inform the quietly industrious scientists present of the relativities of their craft. Darwin had been earthed in the chaotic authenticity of his times, and rather than using science to explain history, Young was using history to explain science. Learning, we are told, relies on judicious bursts of ‘cognitive dissonance’ and here was dissonance of an exhilarating kind. Everything, it seemed, was up for negotiation. Darwin was no visitation on his culture: he was part of it.

A more disturbing discovery came a few years later when I was studying the relationship between the evangelical revival and the Enlightenment. Brought up to think of Descartes’ ‘cogito ergo sum’ as a kind of second ‘Fall’ for western humanity, I was surprised to read that evangelicalism had anything to do with this surge of humanistic confidence. Having paced up and down wondering whether this is simply the nature of academia to posit theories that everyone knows to be untrue, it eventually clicked: the age of revival and mission would not have happened without a breaking of the communal ethic of pre-modern culture. This did not mean that evangelicals were individualists, but it did mean that they had to step away from the inherited structures of the faith before they could engage their culture. They were the pioneers of emerging church. The challenges that we are inclined to interpret under the rubric of ‘postmodernity’ – fragmentation and alienation, vertigo-inducing epistemologies – were eighteenth-centuryproblems, and it is ironic that while emergent theologies pull away from the systems and certainties of a mature evangelicalism they reprise the drama and impatience of the movement’s youth. Evangelicalism, with its formulae, pragmatism and set-piece moralism, may now represent ‘the problem’ for many who would recover the suppleness of New Testament mission: the shrewd candor of Paul on the Areopagus. But this is to forget the movement’s brave legacy of cultural synthesis – what David Hempton has termed a tradition of ‘inspired innovation based on biblical ideas’.[i] And if evangelicalism ultimately became too cozy with some of the habits of modernity, this is no danger to which emerging churches are immune: the snares of the modern were subtle, incidental and incremental rather than overt or intrinsic. If, as I will argue, evangelicalism was quietly disabled by a permanent itch for relevance, emerging churches might heed the warning.

Innovation, then, has a long history. We are told that, after seventeen centuries, the era of ‘Christendom’ is finally drawing to a close and ‘everything must change’.[ii] The truth is that ‘Christendom’, that ancient and contested alliance between Christ and Caesar, was an unworkable concept by the early eighteenth century. The ‘Godly Commonwealth’ of New England, and the British ‘confessional state’, were each, in their way, creaking under the pressures of dissent and divergence. Roger Williams, founder of Providence, Rhode Island, argued as much in his searing text, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience (1644), but it took a great deal more bloodshed before toleration became a reality. The eighteenth century saw the beginnings of religious liberty, but the state churches lived on, united in disdain for religious ‘enthusiasm’. Yoked to secular power and increasingly dry in theology, they were custodial rather than pastoral in tone. Christianity was a gatekeeper for a hierarchical and often oppressive society, and both intellectuals and common people started to drift away – psychologically if not physically.

There have been valiant attempts to relieve the eighteenth-century Church of England of its reputation for complacency, corruption and pastoral neglect but the strongest argument has been to say that, given the society in which it operated, sins of elitism and nepotism were to be expected. This is what is known as ‘going native’ with your subject matter. Historians have swooned over poetic accounts of life in the parishes, celebrating the way in which the Prayer Book was endeared to English hearts by its ‘melodic Cranmerian prose’. ‘People with no education at all knew large portions of it by heart simply by hearing it so often’, writes one historian.[iii] The picture is akin to Samuel Palmer’s celebrated Coming from Evening Church(1830) in which a vicar leads his flock into a gorgeous, moonlit landscape. It was a beautiful, and imagined, world.

Official ecclesiology remained Richard Hooker’s sixteenth-century notion that, ‘there is not any man of the Church of England, but the same man is also a member of the Commonwealth; nor any man a member of the Commonwealthwhich is not also of the Church of England’.[iv] The reality was otherwise, as those who revived this organic rhetoric knew well. John Walsh has written of ‘the sense of interior decay that afflicted much of Protestantism’ in the eighteenth century,[v]and one study of rural religion was so struck by the weakness of Christianity at the popular level, it called for a revolution of historical understanding: ‘the “Ptolemaic” theory of popular religion – with Christianity at its centre and paganism at the fringes – will need to undergo a “Copernican revolution”’. The influence of Christian ideas among the rural poor was, at best, superficial and, at worst, non-existent. ‘Paganism was dominant, and Christianity, recessive in popular religion’, it concluded.[vi] Defenders of the eighteenth-century Church have either ignored the question of popular piety, or fallen into the sociological error of regarding magic and religion as part of the same, pre-modern religiosity, and not enquiring into content. I agree with David Martin in seeing the religious boom that followed the spiritual depression as a process of ‘re-Christianization’ – a combative reaction to ‘the [secularizing] inroads made over the eighteenth century.’[vii] It would not have occurred without a revolution in Christian communication and organization. Charles Wesley’s hymns, combining the raptures of personal faith with the exuberance of English folk melodies, were the symbol of a movement that was almost parasitic in its debts to contemporary culture.

Paradoxically, the first major debt was philosophical. The contagious idea that salvation could be known and felt with almost physical exactitude owed much to John Locke. John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards used Locke’s ‘sensationalist epistemology’ to reconceive conversion with unprecedented clarity. The message they took from Locke was that ideas only register meaningfully when appropriated personally. Religious concepts, like any other, have to be sensed to be believed. Second hand authorities are suspect because they do the thinking for you and deprive you of the thrilling certainty on which true knowledge depends. Modernity, in a sense, starts here. Wesley’s, ‘I want that faith which none can have without knowing that he hath it’, was its Christian expression.[viii] We worry now about the danger of exaltingexperience, but in the eighteenth century, experiential certainty was a lifeline. Walsh referred to the ‘psychic strain’ felt by many believers in this period, schooled in the wearying disciplines of ‘holy living’. ‘There was a certain joylessness in the call to a regime of unrelenting worship, closet devotion, introspection, and asceticism’, he wrote. The Calvinist suspicion of ‘assurance’ was, in the words of a London Dissenter explaining his conversion to Methodism, ‘like a general’s commanding his soldiers to fight on towards taking ... a city and at the same time telling them they must never expect to take it.’[ix]There is little doubt that Enlightenment empiricism, with its startling confidence in personal experience, was one of the levers that burst the psychic dam. The forces may have been of the old Sea of Faith; the mechanisms that unleashed them were distinctly modern.

The clearest example is Jonathan Edwards, who did more than anyone to build intellectual structures for the revival on both sides of the Atlantic.[x] The Christianity of his youth had lurched emphatically towards the disciplinary and cognitive side of the faith. The result was a stern and precarious spirituality that seemed strangely out of step with the New Testament. Flashes of emotion were routinely repressed. Divine sovereignty was emphasized to the point of crushing human initiative. Piety was a journey mapped out in meticulous detail by the ‘giants’ of Puritan divinity. Church membership was confined to those who had completed each separate ‘step’ of regeneration. What John Wesley termed ‘High Church “Pelagianism”’ had a new world imitator.[xi] The turning point for Edwards was seeing ‘some hundreds of townspeople’ anxiously ‘seeking grace’ after a Sunday service. Yet ‘only thirteen’ met his father’s strict criteria and were allowed to join the church ‘in an estate of full communion.’ The young Edwards was mystified and privately ‘resolved never to leave searching till I have satisfyingly found out the very bottom and foundation, the real reason, why they used to be converted in those steps’. He determined (after an argument with his father) to increase his knowledge of Scripture – ‘the one authority that could trump Puritan divines.’ The result was a framework for nurturing, rather than suppressing, spiritual affections, which would serve ‘to redirect the thought of Christendom.’[xii]

The key text was the Treatise on Religious Affections(1746), which used Lockean psychology to establish the certainty of the conversion process. Edwards wrote of a ‘new sensation or perception in the mind’ wrought by God in conversion. ‘There is’, he wrote, ‘what some metaphysicians call a new simple idea.’[xiii] Spiritual sensation or ‘holy affections’ passed from suspicion to acceptance. Marsden talks about the redirection of Christendom, but Mark Noll suggests that the new emphasis on personal covenant was sufficient to destroy the corporate unities of New England Puritanism.[xiv] The sacred canopy fractured, and the life beneath flourished. Edwards, for his own part, could not resist organic imagery: 'Grace in many persons, through this ignorance of their state, and their looking on themselves still as the objects of God’s displeasure, has been like the trees in winter, or like seed in the spring suppressed under a hard clod of earth. … But when they have been better instructed, and so brought to allow of hope, this has awakened the gracious disposition of their hearts into life and vigour as the warm beams of the sun in spring have quickened the seeds and productions of the earth.'[xv]

The power of this image is the harmony between human initiative – ‘better instruct[ion]’ – and the release of divine energy – ‘the warm beams of the sun’. Grace is of God, but God is neither distant nor inscrutable. Locke did not ‘make’ Edwards, any more than Thomas Malthus ‘made’ Darwin, but there was a critical exchange, a seminal moment, and people who never got near the technicalities of Enlightenment philosophy shared the mood of release. Wesley, who hid his intellectual debts and cultivated the image of the ‘homo unius libri’ – a man of the one Book – exuded the spirit of confidence and clarity. ‘I design plain truth for plain people’, he wrote; and his hymnbook was subtitled, ‘a little body of practical and experimental divinity.’ Then there was George Whitefield, whose flamboyant, open-air preaching crystallized the sheer iconoclasm of the revival – what Noll has termed its ‘antitraditionalism’: Whitefield’s preaching broke traditional rules; it called for direct, immediate response; it encouraged the laity to perform Christian services that were the historical preserve of the clergy. Whitefield and his imitators did not read their sermons like most of the colonies’ settled ministers of the early eighteenth century but declaimed them extemporaneously in order to maximize their power. Whitefield’s speech drove home the lesson that it was not formal education or a prestigious role in the community that ultimately mattered but the choice of an individual for or against God. Whitefield was the colonies’ most visible symbol of changing conceptions of hierarchy; he represented a new confidence in the religious powers of the people and a sharp, if implicit, rebuke to the authority of tradition.[xvi]

Whitefield didn’t emulate the celebrity culture of his day so much as create it, and he demonstrates the wider point that Christianity was no mere passenger in the making of modernity. ‘“God’s dramatist,” who could make crowds either laugh or cry by the way he pronounced the word “Mesopotamia”’[xvii] was inevitably accused of gimmickry but one of his signature sermons of the 1740s, What think ye of Christ?, suggests the kind of shrewd Enlightenment chemistry that we find in Edwards: 'The Apostle prays that the Ephesians may abound in all knowledge and spiritual understanding, or as it might be rendered, spiritual sensation ... For there is a spiritual, as well as a corporeal feeling; and though this is not communicated to us in a sensible manner, as outward objects affect our senses, yet it is as real as any sensible or visible sensation, and may be as truly felt and discerned by the soul, as any impression from without can be felt by the body. All who are born again of God, know that I lie not.'[xviii]

It is in the second wave of the revival, however, the Second Great Awakening in America and the age of William Wilberforce and Thomas Chalmers in Britain, that witnessed more controversial ‘synergies’ with modern values and attitudes. Nathan Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity (1989) is a vivid account of the ‘incarnation’ of evangelicalism into popular culture during the early life of the Republic: a world of camp meetings, dramatic testimony and often raucous populism. Antitraditionalism was institutionalized. If Trotsky’s idea of the ‘permanent revolution’ had a Christian analogue, this was it. Here was a permanently emerging church in which people’s ‘right . . . to take charge of their own religious destiny’ was inalienable, and where roaming preachers such as ‘Crazy’ Lorenzo Dow were idolized. ‘Public opinion’ was exalted ‘as a primary religious authority’,[xix] as Hatch puts it, and a rude, rural culture was Christianised.

Britain did not produce such a heady synthesis of piety and muscle-flexing independence; Christendom was reinvented rather than destroyed; but it was reinvented on terms of competition and choice. Voluntarism replaced parochialism as accepted basis of Christian affiliation: you chose when and where you went to church. This was no ‘function’ of modernity, but an almost accidental byproduct of revival. Experimental religion demanded freedom of expression, and Wesley’s initially reluctant challenge to the parochial network – ‘I look upon the whole world as my parish’ – gained form and substance. The class meetings and Love Feasts of the Methodists, originally a supplement to parochial worship, became its substitutes. ‘The great invention of evangelicalism was the voluntary society’,[xx] writes Callum Brown, and by the mid-nineteenth century, even high churchmen accepted that legal conformity to a given local parish was an impossible ideal. No one quite coined the phrase, ‘we are all voluntarists now’, but T.J. Gaster, the founding vicar of All Saints, Camberwell – the church I now attend – came close: ‘we are as truly under the “the voluntary system” as the nonconformists are’, he wrote in 1896.[xxi] This was profanity to some, but liberation for others. ‘Conversionist evangelicalism’, writes Brown, ‘broke the mental chains of the ancien regime in Britain. If pre-industrial religiosity stressed individual faith within the context of obedience to church and state, modern evangelicalism laid stress on faith in the context of the individual as a “free moral agent”. Faith was disjoined from the state by reconceiving religion without the ecclesiastical monopoly of the established churches.’ ‘Conversion’, indeed, was often described ‘as “finding liberty” in a deliberate linguistic evocation of democracy.’ It was, Brown continues, ‘no longer something mediated by established churches within a framework of obedience to the state. It became … the emblem of freedom from the unspiritual state church [as well as] an emblem of renewal within that church. The conversion came to be the most powerful and widely understood symbol of individual freedom in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. In a society where equality in political democracy had still a century to run, the equality of the conversion was a powerful notion.’[xxii] Or as John Walsh has written, more simply: ‘The doctrine of justification by faith alone – free grace – had unexpected resonance among poor people. Its implications were clear: acceptance by God was not dependent, as the poor had often been taught, on the performance of moral duties, on an antecedent life of “good works” to which … they could seldom attain.’[xxiii]

Modernity is often characterized as an unfortunate accident; something that happens toChristianity. The relationship was frequently the other way round, as Christians established norms and values that were later taken up by society at large. Just as the early Church has been credited with no less than the ‘invention of the human’ in the brutal world of late antiquity,[xxiv] modern Christians led a revolution in sensibility that counted abolition, infant welfare and revolutionary notions of equality among its progeny. As John Coffey writes of the struggle to end slavery: ‘Christian social and political activism has made a major contribution to the culture of modernity.’[xxv] That the dignity of the human agent was later elevated into something we might now dismiss as ‘individualism’ does not challenge the achievement, or its place in the Great Tradition.

The recasting of Christianity as personal, self-authenticating decision was at once disturbing and electrifying. As Paul Langford wrote of the episcopal hostility to the revivalists, which resulted in Methodism’s formal separation in the 1790s: ‘The Church, it was increasingly obvious, was ready to amputate an offending limb over which it had no control.’[xxvi] Even loyal Anglican Evangelicals, however, struggled to marry their piety to their conformity. Wilberforce had no intention of undermining the Church of England but his Practical View (1797), the manifesto of early nineteenth-century evangelicalism, drew a dramatic contrast between ‘real Christianity’ and what he termed ‘hereditary religion’: the oak-aged product of the establishment. The gentle rhythms of Christendom, he suggested, produced a complacency that was unequal to the challenges of the day. As he gently parodied the religion of the typical Englishman: ‘He was born in a Christian country; of course he is a Christian: his
father was a member of the Church of England; so is he. When such is the religion handed down among us by hereditary succession, it cannot surprise us to observe young men of sense and spirit beginning to doubt altogether of the truth of the system in which they have been brought up, and ready to abandon a station which they are unable to defend.’[xxvii] Faith hadto be personal. It also had to be contemporary.

This is why Wilberforce refused to distance himself from those lay, inter-denominational missionary agencies that many felt to be subverting the Church. The 1820s saw an extended controversy over the Bible Society, condemned by one high churchman for ‘parcelling out the country into new departments, and erecting a lay eldership in each, to supersede the ministrations of the regular Clergy’. Yet it was the laity who effectively evangelized the cities. Following the example of Thomas Chalmers in Glasgow, house-to-house visitation by teams of lay people became the model of urban mission. Women had a vital role, because many people would allow a woman rather than a man into their home, and larger numbers of women volunteered than men. If this was pragmatism, who could fault it?

Some of the monuments of evangelical activism, such as the YMCA, emerged as mere whispers of lay enterprise. The YMCA started as a lunchtime prayer group in a London drapery house in 1844. It was said that when the founder, George Williams, entered the business of Hitchcock and Rogers, in the City of London, ‘it was difficult for any of the hundred and forty assistants to be Christians, within three years ... it was difficult to be anything else’. Williams was a master of man-to-man evangelism and his advice to fellow missionaries – ‘don’t argue with him, invite him to supper’ – is strangely contemporary. The YMCA moved from bedroom, to coffee-house, to hotel, to rented premises on Aldersgate Street. Soon there were branches in every major town or city, and by the 1850s, it was an international movement. Designed as a mid-wife between converts and churches, the YMCA generated powerful loyalties of its own. YMCA members did the work that ‘the bishops cannot do’, boasted one – commending Christ ‘in the sphere of their daily calling’. By 1894 George Williams had received a knighthood and few questioned the status of the lay missionary.[xxviii]

If the coffee-shop and lecture-hall ministry of the YMCA was typical of London, the foraging, Monday-to-Sunday activism of Methodism came to dominate the new industrial areas, many of which were beyond Anglican provision altogether. Here, too, there was a sense of symbiosis between the demands of commercial life and the challenges of the gospel: the perils of temptation, the rewards of industry, the comforts of fellowship. A study of one industrial town found that a disproportionate number of entrepreneurs came from evangelical nonconformist backgrounds, where thrift and independence were the values of the nursery. Evangelical Nonconformity was as central to the new industrial order as Anglicanism was to the so-called ancien regime. As W.F. Hook famously observed as newly appointed Vicar of Leeds in 1837: ‘the de facto established religion is Methodism.’ And as Hempton has written: ‘the Methodist quarterly [membership] ticket was as much a symbol of the demise of the English confessional state as the Toleration Act of 1812 or the constitutional revolution of 1828-32.’[xxix] A marginal, interstitial movement had become ‘the church of first resort’ – to steal a phrase Rowan Williams has applied to the Church of England. The bad lands of industrialism had been colonized. The ‘religion of barns’ had moved into the square, redbrick chapels that dotted the industrial landscape. Unprepossessing and often ugly, they were, as the Congregationalist, R.W. Dale later put it: ‘the visible symbols of a faith which was unconscious of things seen and temporal’.[xxx]

The Church’s initial response was simply to build more churches, but they rarely filled up, and almost never with the poor. As a character in one of Charles Kingsley’s novels reflected: ‘After all the expense, when they’ve built the church, it’s the tradesmen and the gentry and the old folk that fill it, and the working men never come near it from one year’s end to another’.[xxxi] The Church was still handicapped by a sense of entitlement to the affections of the people. It was seemingly oblivious of the effects of its association with ‘the old order’: or what radicals termed ‘the old corruption’. The centrality of the Church of England to a political and judicial system that had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into reform in the 1830s was enduringly damaging. It took broad churchmen of socialist sympathies such as Kingsley and F.D. Maurice to grasp what evangelical Nonconformists sensed intuitively: the Church needed to be less elitist, less rigidly formal, even less church-like in order to reach the people. The message hit home after the traumas of the parliamentary Reform Bill crisis, when the bishops’ opposition in the House of Lords brought the country ‘within an ace of a revolution’.[xxxii] Suddenly, clerics like Kingsley were on the streets, circulating their ideas through fiction rather than sermons, and claiming museums and galleries among the agents of Christian grace. Evangelical Anglicans caught the mood and started to mingle sacred and secular as never before. Anglican places of worship listed in the 1851 census returns for my own parish of Camberwell included Peckham police station, Dulwich College and a Licensed Victuallers Asylum. Out of 12 places of worship, only five were what you would call ‘churches’. This was in addition to several Nonconformist gatherings. Religious provision was ‘fluid and slightly chaotic’ but very effective. The methods of the revival were permeating the establishment.

If hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue, respectability was the inevitable byproduct of popularity. The pride of aristocratic privilege had been punctured, but who was to say that the more populist successor would be immune to the vices of ease and acculturation? The 1850s and ‘60s were the start of what one historian of Methodism has termed ‘our mahogany age’ – the age of respect and respectability: ‘we got our mahogany pulpits and the preachers found their way to the mahogany tables of wealthy laymen.’[xxxiii] Female and open-air preaching had been banned in 1803 but it was not until much later that a sense of denominational stasis settled on the movement as a whole. Yet, again, we witness the centrifugal power of evangelical zeal. Just when the Victorian ideology of ‘separate spheres’ was fixing the boundaries of female conduct with unyielding precision, preachers such as Ann Swailes broke them. Swailes was a Primitive Methodist whose ‘sorrow’ for the ‘thousands of souls perishing’ led her unexpectedly but inexorably into preaching. Her position hardened in the thickening air of reproach: ‘Tell me it is wrong for a woman to preach and I will say it is right’, she protested, ‘God has told me hundreds of times. If a man was drowning and a female threw the rope, would he not seize it to save his life because it was female?’[xxxiv] If evangelicalism was marked by ‘an aversion to systems and metaphysics, a preference for clarity and simplicity’,[xxxv] this was purest evangelicalism. Catherine Booth and the Salvation Army later built upon the same principle.

A final example is Charles Spurgeon, the boy wonder who gathered his first congregation aged 19, and raised eyebrows in 1856 by moving it to the largest and most notorious music hall in London, while his new church was being built. Evangelicals had been fighting a turf war against the theatres, music halls and a range of popular sports for decades, so it was a matter of consternation when this irreverent, almost uncouth, young preacher decided to conduct services in the Surrey Gardens Music Hall. Spurgeon saw no contradiction in bringing the gospel to the very sites of irreligion and, in 1857, he accepted an invitation to preach at the Crystal Palace, the enormous glass exhibition centre in south London, which had been at the centre of a bitter struggle over Sunday opening. Regarded by some as a ‘Temple of Belial’, a den of ‘rampant pleasure’, Spurgeon’s decision was controversial. But as liberal commentators wryly observed, his presence alone cast doubt on the notion that God automatically punishes Sabbath breakers. His elegant sermon on the verse, ‘Behold the Lamb of God’, was heard by 24,000 people. A taboo had been shattered. A similar event was organized at Epsom Racecourse, another nerve-centre of indignation, where he spoke from the grandstand. ‘So run that ye may obtain’, was his text.[xxxvi] Dismissed as a showman and celebrity, it is fair to say that the world embraced Spurgeon before the religious world did. In 1870, Vanity Fairfeatured him as one of their ‘Men of the Day’, a smiter of Philistines and a defier of convention. ‘No one has succeeded like him in sketching the comic side of repentance and regeneration’, gushed the editor. Again: a radical ministry that, by the 1880s, had become a model of orthodoxy. Humour in the pulpit was virtually Spurgeon’s invention, and his informal style, which included non-clerical dressing and a preference for ‘Mr.’ rather than ‘reverend’, sparked a host of imitators. It is strange to see him, popping up on the blogs, as a timeless rebuke to contemporary culture gazing. When the emerging church is condemned for allowing Christians to continue ‘drinking, smoking, [and] indulging in the culture that (leads them away from God’,[xxxvii] I am reminded of Spurgeon’s response when he was challenged for smoking a pipe: he smoked it, he said, ‘to the glory of God’. And, far from condemning alcohol, he actually regarded teetotalism, with its confidence in the powers of the human will, as the greater enemy of the gospel. Asked to preach on teetotalism in the 1850s, he said he would rather ‘lay the axe at the root of the tree’ than speak in favour of it.[xxxviii] He later changed his mind about drink, but this was no hidebound Puritan.

How, then, did matters unravel? Where did the permanent ecclesiological revolution come unstuck? The short answer is that the cultural environment was elevated from the context of Christian mission to the primary text. The city and its supposedly unique challenges gained the casting vote in matters of mission and ecclesiology. The evangelical virtues of attentiveness and flexibility became liabilities. There was no sudden crisis: rather, a gradual mutation of the Christian mission into a thousand sub-ministries which, in the twentieth century, could be performed as well – if not better – by secular specialists. The 1880s and 1890s were the crucial decades, dominated by figures such as the Methodist, Hugh Price Hughes and the Congregationalist, Charles Sylvester Horne. Claiming a robust if unangular orthodoxy, their habit was to set Christian practice against the hollowness of mere belief. We are as orthodox as our fathers, they would say, but we have no time for the finer points of doctrine: there is a world to be healed! And the world had moved on. Innovation went from a natural response to new conditions to a self-conscious preoccupation. The ingenuous spontaneity of former years gave way to statistics, tables and an almost managerial activism.[xxxix]

Few of the new generation denied the need for personal salvation, but they de-emphasized it in favor of a broader notion of redemption, encompassing the body as well as the soul, and society as well as the individual. Revivalism was disdained. Otherworldliness was out. Charles Sylvester Horne impressed audiences by praying with his eyes wide open; Hugh Price Hughes made a point of quoting from risqué magazines, such as Punch. But this was about more than just style: Hughes launched a ‘Forward Movement’ in 1885, the whole tenor of which was a rebuke to evangelical narrowness. In an address to a packed YMCA meeting at the Albert Hall in 1893, Hughes derided the limitations of ‘their fathers, who were other-worldly, and more concerned about their own souls.’ ‘This was an age of practical Christianity’, he asserted, and it was time for Christians to ‘prove their loyalty to Jesus Christ by helping to stamp out the evils of our day.’ There was ‘Gambling… the cause of purity in India … [and] The question of war, too, should be dealt with … these were the kind of subjects [Christian organizations] must deal with, if [they] hoped to flourish in the 20^th Century.’ Hughes was heckled as he urged the YMCA to support the campaign for prohibition. ‘It’s not political’, insisted the heckler. Hughes responded by saying that ‘if the YMCA was not political in that sense, then it did not represent Jesus Christ’. Hughes was no liberal. He experienced a classic conversion as a teenager and was not someone haunted by hermeneutics of suspicion. Yet he increasingly allowed his political and ethical preoccupations to define orthodoxy. ‘The times’ and their unique challenges set the Christian agenda.

The pressure of Christian obligation gradually shifted until faith and creed were eclipsed by campaign and action. The creedal contents seemed to drop out without anyone noticing. Far from a holistic, integrated theology balancing the atonement with the incarnation, the emerging model was specialist, divisive and effectively inverted evangelical soteriology. Rather than seeing sin as spiritual and needing a supernatural ‘cure’, the hands-on mentality had the effect of ‘physicalizing’ it as a set of tangible urban problems, mostly revolving around drink. Holiness was redefined as a form of manly self-possession, fuelled by sociological analysis that suggested the irrelevance of intellectual approaches. It was recognized that alienation from the churches was rarely caused by atheism, so, the argument went, people needed to be drawn back socially, with a minimum of complicating doctrine. Whereas Spurgeon had colonized the sites of popular leisure, interrupting their logic even as he borrowed their idiom, the new idea was to sail more boldly with the cultural wind. Dynamic encounter evolved into naïve appropriation. All that was exciting, popular or manly was to be emulated. The flagship was the so-called ‘Pleasant Sunday Afternoon’ or PSA movement that launched in the 1880s to capture the elusive working-class male. PSAs were exciting, informal services, organized under the slogan: ‘brief, bright and brotherly.’ Horne called it a ‘New Protestantism’. ‘The words “PSA”’, writes one historian, ‘symbolized all that was original and fresh in [late-Victorian Christianity].’[xl] Perhaps so, but trivialization and a vagueness of Christian purpose haunted the PSA from the start. In 1891 the Free Methodist published the following ‘Hearty Invitation’ to a PSA in West Hartlepool: 'Tonight Mr. Fred Hunter, the noted tenor, of Hartlepool, Miss Kirkup (soprano) and Miss Miller (contralto) will sing. Mr. Wheatley will play a violin solo. A good choir will render a couple of grand choruses from Handel or other great composer; and Rev. J. Longden will say two or three plain things about “Rogues, thieves, and vagabonds.” Just an hour – from seven to eight o’clock. You can sit where you like, go in where you like, and come out where you like. There’s no collection, and a sheet of hymns for everybody.'[xli] Another PSA enthusiast invited his congregation to spit on the floor if it was their custom. The openness and generosity cannot be faulted, but the step from recognizing the dangers of too much theology to forgetting it yourself was short and easily taken. Many sources of this period evoke the sense that theology was yesterday’s luxury. ‘I act, therefore I am’ was the unofficial motto of the late-Victorian churches. The suggestion that Christ may have been uneasy about the new practicality caused one Christian teetotaler to respond that, ‘Christ … did not live in Shoreditch in the nineteenth century.’ In 1892, a high-profile Christian journalist explained his refusal to speak on the subject of Melchizedek and the priestly order: ‘You have round you drunkenness, lust, oppression; Melchizedek may wait till you have got rid of these!’ Circumstances were no longer respected: they were obeyed.

Like a business carving up a target market, Victorian Christians divided and subdivided the religious problem by age, gender, class, and occupation until there were niche ministries for almost everyone. Texts such as Tempted London (1888), out of the same stable as W.T. Stead’s If Christ Came to Chicago (1894), mapped the spiritual problem with street-by-street precision. Mission was defined by a mixture of social theology, statistics and the ‘new journalism’ of scandal and exposure, of which Stead was the master. Suddenly we find YMCAs measuring their success not in converts but in the numbers of people who had used their facilities and the victory over ‘vice’ that this apparently represented. Debates centered on the minutiae of opening hours and the proximity of branches to music halls. The statistics of drinking, gambling and prostitution were the reference point. People wrote to thank the YMCA for ‘saving’ them from the urban morass, employing the vocabulary of evangelical conviction with only passing reference to faith or God. Salvation was being secularized as health, manliness – virtue.

Meanwhile, churches reorganized under the ‘institutional principle’. Institutional churches provided an umbrella for a medley of clubs, agencies and services, aiming to unite them under a common Christian ethos. But it never quite worked. The damning statistic was that, in the 1880s and 90s, para-church agencies were rapidly outstripping church membership. The Wesleyan Methodists discovered in 1888 that while their agencies were set to double within twenty years, full church membership would take a hundred years. More and more people were passing through their doors but fewer of them were engaging with the worshipping centre of the churches. An official report blamed the ‘ecclesiastical machinery’ that now dominated their institutions: ‘church’ now meant too many different things. Congregationalists similarly complained that weekday activities and meetings had become competitors to prayer meetings. Gymnasiums, men’s clubs and the cult of clean living did not prove to be a gateway to spirituality: too often they provided a way outof serious commitment. Even when this was not the case, William Gladstone’s critique of evangelical ecclesiology rang true. Evangelicals, the statesman and high churchman argued, tended to evince ‘more Churchmanship, more inward sense of the personal obligations entailed by belonging to a given religious society’ than in the Church as such. The result was often clusters of like-minded believers working on specific causes, and little of that involuntary unity that true discipleship requires. ‘Individualism in religion’, he wrote, was ‘their besetting weakness’.[xlii]

Specialism and activism were therefore increasingly under attack. ‘We seem likely to place every one of the Ten Commandments under the protection of a separate Committee, with its Treasurer, Secretary, and deputations, and to organise a League for the promotion of every separate grace’, complained R.W. Dale in 1880. A census of London’s mission halls in 1888 highlighted the issues. As the editor of the leading evangelical newspaper, the British Weeklyreflected: ‘We frankly confess to being surprised, disappointed, and perplexed by the results’. ‘The whole question of new methods in religion is most seriously raised by this census’. The disappointment was not merely with the small numbers reached by these agencies but the fact that many who attended them already church-goers. PSAs were simply drawing people from other congregations. One writer complained that ministers were being ‘bustled out of their spirituality’ by the new ecclesiology. Others argued that, even when successful, the model of tailored, targeted ministries was unbiblical. Churches seemed to be endorsing the status quo even as they grappled with it.

William Cuff, a Baptist whose preaching attracted London’s third largest congregation, the Shoreditch Tabernacle, used the census to attack the ‘caste’ mentality embodied in ‘the mad-brained passion for mission halls’. He resented the suggestion that only the Salvation Army, with its aggressive populism, could really engage the poor. His church flourished with a strict membership policy and none of the aped merriment of the music halls. Archibald Brown, another box-office Baptist from the East End, produced a pamphlet in 1889 entitled The Devil’s Mission of Amusement. He suggested that the spirit of 1 Corinthians 9: 22 – ‘I am made all things to all men…’ had been abused,. ‘Modern methods’ were dissolving the gospel more profoundly than ‘Modern thought’. ‘Success’ in Christian work was being defined as keeping people out of the music halls: a lean victory if you turn church into a music hall. A culture of accessibility and openness had now entered ‘into competition’ with the gospel. The ‘sanctuary’ had to be restored.[xliii]

Meanwhile, the Congregationalists, who had been at the cutting edge of the new ecclesiology, suddenly recoiled from its implications. As the Congregational Union chairman reflected in 1891: ‘The [modern] idea is that the Church needs supplementing in its own domain by a host of collateral little states. Our polity means a Church, it does not mean a cluster of institutions. Many of our Churches are very busy at the present time in the formation of societies to supersede themselves. We must not let the Church idea be crowded out by the multiplicity of our organizations…’ Contemporary wisdom held that any Christian gathering is as sacred as another, that the fellowship of the cricket club was as sacred as that of the church proper, but this speaker urged: ‘As you exalt the one, is it not – if we may not say inevitable – at any rate highly probable that you depress the other?’ The same was true of doctrine: ‘The insistence upon the introduction of the secular element into our church life ... has this effect – that actually, though perhaps not logically, it remits theology, including doctrinal teaching, to a subordinate place, and often to entire extinction.’ Lines had to be drawn. Christianity is not a matter of rules and fences, argued one, but fences have their place.

The British Weekly argued similarly in a major, stock-taking article entitled, ‘Why Orthodox Men Do Not Preach The Gospel’. The current tendency was to hold back ‘what is astonishing in Christianity’, to major on the ethical at the expense of the spiritual, and to keep the old language of conversion for emergencies. This was secularization by occlusion not denial, and it presages aspects of what Brueggemann and Walker have termed gospel ‘amnesia’.[xliv] P.T. Forsyth, the great Congregationalist theologian, observed it first hand. He argued that evangelical Nonconformity had, by the first decade of the twentieth century, drifted into a culture of ‘sympathy’. And, as he thundered: ‘Sympathy is not adequate to redeem.’ Theology had descended into ‘a branch of journalism’ and the resulting ecclesiology was an attempt to reform society ‘by every benevolent means except the evangelical’. ‘The agencies have become of more interest than the Communion’, he lamented, and they ‘represent[ed] an itch of activity rather than [true] Christian energy.’ They would not last. Forsyth was not above exaggeration, but he grasped the ambiguity of a culture-saturating revival that had started to go native: 'Culture, aesthetic or even religious [he wrote in 1896] is now the most deadly and subtle enemy of spiritual freedom. It is the growth of culture in the decay of Gospel that the soul’s freedom has increasingly to dread. It is there that our Nonconformity is in most danger of being untrue to itself and its mission. We aresuffering. But it is less from grievance now than from success. We share a prosperity which is passing through variety of interest, refinement of taste, aesthetic emotion, tender pity, kindly careless catholicity, and over-sweet reasonableness, to leanness of soul. It is more at home in literature than in Scripture, and in journals more than either. And it tends to substitute charity and its sympathies for grace and its faith. These are tendencies of the time which we have not escaped. … Humanism must indeed find a home in grace which it has never occupied yet. But it is another thing when it becomes a church’s note.'[xlv]

Such warnings may have been too late for a British tradition that avoided the polarities of the liberal-fundamentalist divide by occupying a middle ground of ethical toil. There were, however, those who heeded the call to a sharpened ecclesiology, and were even willing to take lessons from the Catholics. Peace broke out in some of the leading journals – the British Weeklyoffering the startling observation that the ‘High Church’ was not ‘popular for satisfying a low craving for sensuous worship’, as per standard evangelical prejudice, but ‘for insisting on the great elementary facts of Christianity.’ Dogma and liturgy had their place. Alexander MacLaren used his chairman’s address to the Baptist Union in 1901 to appeal for ‘Evangelical Mysticism’. ‘Martha has it all her own way now’, was his evocative analysis: it was time to re-learn the harder discipline of ‘sitting at Jesus’ feet in blessed receptivity’. ‘Life is the root of work’, he urged, and ‘is more important than work.’ ‘The Christian activities of this day specially need the deepening consecration of the Mystical side of [the Christian faith]’. A generation reared on a tail-chasing activism needed to hear three simple words: ‘Abide in Me’. A more famous example is the hunger for sacrament evoked by soldiers in the First World War. Army chaplains started the war handing out cigarettes and bonhomie; they ended it distributing the Eucharist. It took war to demonstrate just how humanistic and earthbound even ‘orthodoxy’ had become: there was a new yearning for mystery, transcendence and spiritual solace.

Finally, among the exhausted testimonies recorded in Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London (1902) was the account of a ministry transformed by renouncing the cult of comprehensiveness and relearning the habits of prayer, catechism and discipline. The report came from an unnamed Anglican mission, where the minister had become exasperated with the leisure-based methods with which he had started. Local residents constantly assured him that they were members of the mission when, in fact, they went there to play billiards or drink tea. As he explained, the evangelistic gateway had become its own barrier to the gospel: 'When I came to the mission, I had the very strongest hopes with regard to a kind of social work, reaching the people through all sorts of channels – one would not trouble much about anything else if only the people were “reached.” Experience brings a stern schooling, but a very convincing one ... Three main principles gradually came out clear – (i) Anything that was merely popular in order to attract masses of people, without the mark of sacrifice on it, to be sternly repressed. (ii) To build on a clear and definite religious basis, made intelligible to the people by constant teaching. (iii) To loyally carry out every part of the Prayer Book in the daily life of the people.'

Having abandoned the earlier strategy, he was ‘more and more convinced that the truest way to help those we long to reach, is by having the standard a high one, and not a low one’. It was ‘a mistake to “come down to their level”’. Initially there might be a thinning of numbers, ‘but it is only for the moment while the seed is being sown. Very soon the intensity of the work tells’. ‘There must be intensity before extension’, was the new principle: ‘Instead of lowering the standard by popular attractions, throw your whole available time into unsparing training of your small body of people, and [only then seek] the multitude.’ ‘Sooner or later [people] would be reached ... their respect for Religion would have grown as they saw its seriousness, its sacrifice, its true and definite mark of the Cross, instead of mere popular attractiveness.’ The ‘men’s club’ had been reconstituted so that it was now ‘assumed, as a natural thing, that those who belong to the club shall come to church.’ Several other agencies ‘which seemed to be isolated from the church’ had been integrated by a stricter membership policy and a system of ‘catechizing’. The Book of Common Prayer had become, once again, ‘commonprayer.’ He felt ‘bound to bear testimony to its unique power and hold among the very poorest.’[xlvi] Like a venerable musician rediscovering the tunes that had made her famous, such ministries went back to basics, recovering a distinction between the sources of Christian faith and mere modes of expression. Context, it seemed, was not everything. There was a dogmatic core that needed to be rescued from layers of contemporary packaging.

Religious traditions, no less than nations, are ‘imagined communities’.[xlvii] How they perceive history is real factor in their life and progress. In the twentieth century, many Christians were paralyzed by the ‘secularization thesis’ and its promise of inevitable decline. Dwindling churches were occasionally closed down because, in someone’s mind, ‘the trends’ were ‘irreversible’. A danger now is that Christians are mesmerized by ‘postmodernity’, and share a fashionable, ahistorical scorn for ‘the Enlightenment project’ and its progeny. ‘Historical reflection’, Sydney Ahlstrom wrote in a volume of essays on Continuity and Discontinuity in Church History,‘may lead us to valuable resources within a tradition’. But, as he intimates, in order to do so, it must be real: open to complexity and paradox, and not forced into boxes for convenient access.[xlviii] Historians are, in the words of another giant of the profession, ‘the guardians of awkward facts, the skeletons in the cupboard of the social memory’.[xlix] There are good reasons to question the ethos of modernity and its exaltation of human choice, but the awkward fact is that, without it, Christianity may never have broken out of a hierarchical and desiccated Christendom of the early-modern era. The evangelical movement was indeed ‘a child of the Enlightenment’,[l] and if it took on some of the vices of the parent it also inherited virtues. The faith in formulae, techniques and statistics may now repel but such things were no more the essence of the modern than David’s sin of ‘numbering Israel’[li] was a function of pre-exilic Israel. Evangelical innovations were not wanton dalliances with a thinly disguised paganism: doomed from the outset. John Milbank’s dismissal of Chalmers’

synthesis of theology and political economy as ‘a mean little heresy’[lii] displays the arrogance that can flow from a sense of having grown out of the adolescent infatuations of the modern. What are ourheresies? People like Chalmers may have been too quick to associate the ‘invisible hand’ with God, but they used the drama of the economy, just as Edwards used the kindling of Enlightenment philosophy, to reignite the Christian imagination. If individualism was a heresy, ‘it is,’ as William Temple once wrote, ‘worthwhile to notice how absolute was Christ’s respect for the freedom of personal choice. He would neither bribe nor coerce men to become his followers.’[liii] Evangelicals reminded Christendom of this irreducible fact, and if they contributed to the dismantling of Christendom in