Wesleyan-Holiness Churches in Australia: Hallelujah Under The

Wesleyan-Holiness Churches in Australia This colourful history of the development of the Holiness movement in Australia deserves to be written by someone with a love for all of its variety and even its quirkiness but also by a scholar who is thorough and critically objective. As a “reflexive insider,” Glen O’Brien is uniquely qualified to do so and has delivered. —Kimberly Ervin Alexander, Regent University, USA Dr. Glen O’Brien has provided a careful precise analysis of the national and international contexts of the Wesleyan-Holiness Churches of Australia, giving attention to their origins, theologies, cultures and development. The volume is an important contribution to the study of World Christianity with implications for the study and analysis of churches around the word. It is a veritable scholarly “tour de force.” —David Bundy, Manchester Wesley Research Centre, UK, and New York Theological Seminary, USA This is an important book in Australian Church History studies. It critically examines and evaluates the establishment and development of the Wesleyan-Holiness churches in Australia, particularly in the post-war years. O’Brien has captured the challenges they faced and how they have continued to serve the communities where they are located. The lessons to be learned here have an application far beyond the Australian context. —David B. McEwan, Nazarene Theological College, Brisbane, Australia Most Wesleyan-Holiness churches started in the United States, developing out of the Methodist roots of the nineteenth-century Holiness Movement. The American origins of the Holiness Movement have been charted in some depth, but there is currently little detail on how it developed outside of the United States. This book seeks to redress this imbalance by giving a history of North American Wesleyan-Holiness churches in Australia, from their establishment in the years following the Second World War, as well as of The Salvation Army, which has nineteenth-century British origins. It traces the way some of these churches moved from marginalised sects to established denominations, while others remained small and isolated. Looking at The Church of God (Anderson), The Church of God (Cleveland), The Church of the Nazarene, The Salvation Army, and The Wesleyan Methodist Church in Australia, the book argues two main points. Firstly, it shows that rather than being American imperialism at work, these religious expressions were a creative partnership between like-minded evangelical Christians from two modern nations sharing a general cultural similarity and set of religious convictions. Secondly, it demonstrates that it was those churches that showed the most willingness to be theologically flexible, even dialling down some of their Wesleyan distinctiveness, that had the most success. This is the first book to chart the fascinating development of Holiness churches in Australia. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of Wesleyans and Methodists, as well as religious history and the sociology of religion more generally. Glen O’Brien is Research Coordinator at Eva Burrows College, within the University of Divinity and a Member of the University of Divinity’s Centre for Research in Religion and Social Policy. He is a Research Fellow of the Australasian Centre for Wesleyan Research and an Honorary Fellow of the Manchester Wesley Research Centre, UK. He has published widely on Wesleyan and Methodist themes and engaged in post-doctoral research at Duke University, Asbury Theological Seminary, Oxford Brookes University, and Nazarene Theological College, Manchester. He co-edited, with Hilary M. Carey, and contributed several chapters, to Methodism in Australia: A History (2015). Routledge Methodist Studies Methodism remains one of the largest denominations in the USA and is growing in South America, Africa and Asia (especially in Korea and China). This series spans Methodist history and theology, exploring its success as a movement historically and in its global expansion. Books in the series will look particularly at features within Methodism which attract wide interest, including: the unique position of the Wesleys; the prominent role of women and minorities in Methodism; the interaction between Methodism and politics; the ‘Methodist conscience’ and its motivation for temperance and pacifist movements; the wide range of Pentecostal, holiness and evangelical movements; and the interaction of Methodism with different cultures. Series Editor: William Gibson, Director of the Oxford Centre for Method- ism and Church History, Oxford Brookes University, UK Editorial Board: Ted A. Campbell, Professor of Church History, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, USA David N. Hempton, Dean, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, USA Priscilla Pope-Levison, Associate Dean, Perkins School of Theology, South- ern Methodist University, USA Martin Wellings, Superintendent Minister of Oxford Methodist Circuit and Past President of the World Methodist Historical Society, UK. Karen B. Westerfield Tucker, Professor of Worship, Boston University, USA John Wesley, Practical Divinity and the Defence of Literature Emma Salgård Cunha Wesleyan-Holiness Churches in Australia Hallelujah under the Southern Cross Glen O’Brien For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ religion/series/AMETHOD Rev E.E. Zachary with koala c. 1946. Photo: Nazarene Archives, Kansas City, Missouri Wesleyan-Holiness Churches in Australia Hallelujah under the Southern Cross Glen O’Brien First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Glen O’Brien The right of Glen O’Brien to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: O’Brien, Glen, 1959– author. Title: Wesleyan-holiness churches in Australia : hallelujah under the southern cross / Glen O’Brien. Description: New York : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Routledge Methodist studies series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018000378 | ISBN 9780815393207 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781351189231 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Wesleyan Church—History. | Holiness churches— History. | Australia. Classification: LCC BX9995.W435 A85 2018 | DDC 287.0994—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018000378 ISBN: 978-0-8153-9320-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-18923-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC For John Hirst One of Australia’s great historians, John Hirst (1942–2016) forced Australians to go back and reconsider their colonial beginnings in two seminal works Convict Society and its Enemies (1983) and The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy (1988). But he didn’t stop there, giving us a powerful revisionist history of Federation in The Sentimental Nation (2001), a brilliant series of essays collected in Sense and Nonsense in Australian History (2006), and the list goes on. He was a master of writing style who knew his audience, the power of a well-turned phrase and an attention-getting opening sentence. Who can forget ‘God wanted Australia to be a nation,’ the opening sentence of The Sentimental Nation? Once called ‘John Howard’s favourite historian’ because of his basic conservatism and disparaging of liberal elites, he was nonetheless a firm Republican who believed in the Australian experiment and cared deeply about civics education in schools. For several years running he gave freely of his time to address my American exchange students on Australian history. The ‘gadfly of Australian history’, self-confessed ‘lapsed Methodist’ and former local preacher, he was an agnostic who loved to sing Wesley’s hymns. He told me one day I would join the Uniting Church (which he playfully described as ‘The Greens at Prayer’). I laughed at the idea but he turned out to be right. My hours in John’s office over eight years of part-time doctoral study were something I always looked forward to. I wanted help with my thesis; he always wanted to talk religion. He was a gracious and kind man (even if he did not suffer fools gladly). I was honoured that he launched Methodism in Australia: A History (Routledge, 2015) in Melbourne. Instead of giving a scholarly critique of the book which he was fully qualified to do, he chose instead to speak on what it meant for him to grow up Methodist. ‘Everyone had to have their heart strangely warmed,’ he said. ‘I never had that, so, in the end, I thought I didn’t belong.’ Goodbye John; you will be missed but my hope is that the faith of those Wesley hymns you loved so much will in the end have moved you from agnosticism to faith, and I hope to meet you again. Contents List of tables xi List of figures xii Acknowledgments

Load more