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For some critics, the term "holiness movement" has conjured images of navel-gazing holy rollers too interested in getting a spiritual thrill or (at most) saving souls to care about alleviating social distress. This caricature is simply not accurate. The movement's most enduring legacy is a nationwide network of missions to the socially and economically disadvantaged—primarily in inner-city neighborhoods.

Holiness leaders, like their eighteenth-century Methodist forebears, taught that sanctification does not stop in the individual heart, but must overflow into "social holiness." Just as cleansing from all sin could occur in this life (against the traditional view that it occurred after the soul left the body, to prepare the believer to stand before a holy God), the ideal of the perfect community was also for today—not to be pushed off into the hereafter.

To its critics, the reform-minded Christian perfectionism that emanated from such places as Oberlin College and the Free Will Baptist churches of the Northeastern states threatened the social fabric. For example, in Western New York, radicalized churches not only circulated anti-slavery petitions, but even hired African-American pastors and, in a few extreme cases, women.

For some, this holiness activism had its limits. Phoebe Palmer, for example, was closely associated with the anti-abolitionist faction of New York City Methodists. In spite of her friendship with Oberlin College president Charles G. Finney, she refused to permit the expression of abolitionist sentiments during her weekly holiness meetings.

But in other respects, Palmer followed through on the social implications of holiness. For example, she was greatly moved by the poverty she encountered in New York. Believing that with wealth came social responsibility, Palmer dedicated a portion of her considerable family fortune to relief work. In the early 1840s, she began visiting and distributing tracts among the city's poor and ministering to the prisoners at the notorious jail known as the Tombs. From 1847 to 1858, Palmer served as corresponding secretary of the New York Female Assistance Society for the Relief and Instruction of the Sick Poor.

Palmer's crowning social achievement was the key role she played in the transformation of an old brewery located in one of the city's most notorious areas into the Five Points Mission (p. 20). No isolated initiative, the Five Points work became the model for later Protestant institutional missions in American cities. Complete with a chapel, parsonage, classrooms, baths, and 20 apartments, the new facility opened in 1850. Next door was the Five Points House of Industry, which provided employment, food, clothing, and temporary housing for as many as 500 poor women and their children.

During the last half of the 19th century, holiness bodies operating in nearly all urban areas in North America, Northern Europe, and even Australia established hundreds of urban missions with the intention of providing such emergency services as food, housing, and job training. While other religious bodies established similar missions, few seriously rivaled holiness missions in size or pervasiveness. As late as 1924 a study of the "homeless man problem" in San Francisco found that nearly all emergency food and housing services were being provided by holiness-inspired urban ministries, such as the Peniel Mission, the Volunteers of America, and the Salvation Army.

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