The Rise of the Laity in Evangelical Protestantism
Latest Publications

TOTAL DOCUMENTS

114
(FIVE YEARS 0)

H-INDEX

0
(FIVE YEARS 0)

Published By Taylor & Francis

9780203281666, 9780203166505
Latest Documents Most Cited Documents Contributed Authors Related Sources Related Keywords

not establish missions, even though they sometimes desired to do so. The first necessity was a body of people with the degree of commitment needed to live on someone else’s terms, together with the mental equipment for coping with the implications. Such commitment was in turn most likely to arise in the wake of powerful religious influences. Times of religious renewal were nec-essary for the recruitment of a sizeable company of such people, and the maintenance of a succession of them. A tradition of mental training, how-ever, was also needed; charismatic inspiration alone would not suffice, and indeed the plodder might succeed better with a new language and a new soci-ety than the inspired preacher. The second need was for a form of organization which could mobilize committed people, maintain and supply them, and forge a link between them and their work and the wider church. Since in the nature of things both their work and the conditions in which they carried it out were exceptional, the necessary structures could not readily emerge in very rigid regimes, whether political or ecclesiastical. They needed tolerance of the exceptional, and flex-ibility. The third factor necessary to overseas missions was sustained access to overseas locations, with the capacity to maintain communication over long periods. This implies what might be called maritime consciousness, with mar-itime capability and logistical support. All three factors were present in the first, Catholic, phase of the missionary movement. The Catholic Reformation released the spiritual forces to produce the committed worker, the religious orders offered possibilities of extension and adaptation which produced the structures for deploying them, and the Portuguese enclaves and trading depots provided the communication net-works and transoceanic bases. When in the course of the eighteenth century the Catholic phase of missions began to stutter, it was partly because the three factors were no longer fully in place. The Protestant movement developed as the Catholic movement weakened. It began, not at the end of the eighteenth century (that is a purely British per-spective) but at the end of the seventeenth; not in England, but in Germany and Central Europe. Its main motors were in Halle and Herrnhut, though, just as German Pietism drew on the English puritan tradition, it had a puri-tan prologue. William Carey’s Enquiry did not initiate it; the object of that

2003 ◽  
pp. 186-187
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Mental Training ◽  
Religious Orders ◽  
Catholic Reformation ◽  
The Third ◽  
Religious Influences ◽  
Missionary Movement ◽  
Do So

person’s use of the Bible as the most important religious authority was implicitly to devalue the elaborate edifices protecting scriptural interpretation that prevailed in all the historic European churches, Protestant as well as Catholic. The institutions compromised by such logic included established churches defined as authoritative communicators of divine grace through word and sacrament, institutions of higher learning monopolized by the establishment in order to protect intellectual activity from religious as well as rational error, and the monarchy as the primary fount of godly social stabil-ity. British Protestant Dissent moved somewhat more cautiously in this direction. But even after the rise of Methodism and the reinvigoration of the older Dissenting traditions, the strength of evangelicalism among British establishmentarians never permitted the kind of thoroughly voluntaristic ecclesiology that prevailed in the United States. On questions of establishment, post-Revolutionary American evangeli-calism marked a distinct development from the colonial period when the most important evangelical leaders had spoken with opposing voices. Some, like Charles Wesley, whose hymns were being used in America from the 1740s, remained fervent defenders of the status quo. Some, like George Whitefield, gave up establishment in practice but without ever addressing the social implications of such a move and without being troubled by occa-sional relapses into establishmentarian behaviour. Some, like the Baptists in America from the 1750s, renounced establishment with a vengeance and became ardent proponents of disestablishment across the board. Some, like the American Presbyterian Gilbert Tennent, eagerly threw establishment away in the enthusiasm of revival, only later to attempt a partial recovery after enthusiasm cooled. Some, like John Wesley, gave up establishment instincts reluctantly, even while promoting religious practices that others regarded as intensely hostile to establishment. Some, like Francis Asbury, the leader of American Methodists, gave it up without apparent trauma. Many, like Jonathan Edwards and the leading evangelical laymen of the Revolutionary era – John Witherspoon, Patrick Henry and John Jay – never gave up the principle of establishment, even though they came to feel more spiritual kinship with evangelicals who attacked established churches (including their own) than they did with many of their fellow establishmen-tarian Protestant colleagues who did not embrace evangelicalism. By the late 1780s, except in New England, this mixed attitude towards formal church and state ties had been transformed into a nearly unanimous embrace of disestablishment. Even in Connecticut and Massachusetts, where evangelical support of the Congregational establishments could still be found, the tide was running strongly away from mere toleration towards full religious liberty. Methodism was an especially interesting variety of evangelicalism since its connectional system retained characteristics of an establishment (especially the human authority of Wesley, or the bishops who succeeded Wesley). But

2003 ◽  
pp. 160-161
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The United States ◽  
Partial Recovery ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
Scriptural Interpretation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Institutions Of Higher Learning ◽  
The Status ◽  
George Whitefield

but at the same time the self-identity of evangelicals contrasted sharply with the secular individualist self which has often been taken as the normative development of the Enlightenment. It remains to make a few observations linking this distinctive evangelical self-understanding to the appearance within evangelicalism of an active and vocal laity. The narrative identity of evangelicals expressed through stories of conversion was embraced by a wide spectrum of society, including women as well as men, laity as well as clergy, and all orders from the lowest to the highest in social rank. If we take into view contexts such as Sierra Leone at the end of the century, we can add that this narrative identity included people of different races as well. Conversion was a central emphasis within evangelicalism and the genre of conversion narrative is correspondingly and surprisingly broad in its sociological reach. One of the implications is that the concept of the laity within evangelicalism, under the impetus of conver-sionism, became something more like the apostle Paul’s use of the term laos to refer to the whole people of God, comprehending both clergy and non-clergy. In the eighteenth century this came into focus in certain debates about call to the ministry, ordination and what constituted a legitimate min-istry. As Jerald Brauer writes, ‘The moment one argues for the illegitimacy of a minister because he has not had a genuine conversion experience, one opens the possibility of ministry to any who have had such a conversion experience.’ Thus, the narrative identity of evangelicals, expressed through

2003 ◽  
pp. 96-98
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Identity ◽  
Wide Spectrum ◽  
Social Rank ◽  
Conversion Narrative ◽  
People Of God ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Normative Development ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Conversion Experience ◽  
The Moment
Load More ...
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document