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No, the Methodists of the mid-nineteenth century's "new middle class" kept alive the stories of their parents and grandparents. They knew that Wesley and the early American Methodists had really experienced God's "incomparably great power for us who believe" (Ephesians 1:19). They knew it was this electric, motivating spiritual power that had propelled those earlier Methodists to preach the Gospel everywhere and to live holy lives. Now, felt many Victorian Methodists, it was time to go before God in prayer and recover that power for a new generation.

Out of this Methodist impulse to recapture the "old-time religion" emerged the single most influential American religious movement of the nineteenth and possibly the twentieth century: the "holiness movement."

At this new movement's helm sat (or rather, to mix metaphors but more nearly capture her personality, marched) a person who today is virtually unknown. In 1840, a middle-class Methodist matron named Phoebe Palmer (1807-1874) began leading "Tuesday Meetings for the Promotion of Holiness" in the parlor of her New York City home. A woman of extraordinary gifts, within a decade she became the leading voice in a growing chorus of American Christian voices discontented with church-as-usual. Tireless in her religious activism, she managed over the years that followed to launch a transatlantic revival, lay the theological framework for the denominations that would emerge from it (for example, the Church of God [Anderson, IN)] and the Church of the Nazarene), and create a new model for Christian social ministry in America.

This last fact may surprise us. We may have a hazy image of holiness folk as "holy-rollers": a bunch of experience-seekers content to revel in the presence and power of their Lord. The truth is far different. The holiness believers' pursuit of a "higher Christian life" led them onward into a dynamic practice of social holiness. As the late Dr. Timothy Smith argued some 50 years ago in his book Revivalism and Social Reform (indeed, argued so persuasively that he is not seriously doubted even today), the holiness movement was in fact the seedbed of the "social gospel" in America.

Out of the fervor of camp meetings and mid-week prayer meetings where they heard personal testimonies and experienced God's power in direct, personal, even physical ways, people from Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and many other churches emerged to act on their newfound convictions. They preached, certainly—and thousands were converted. But more than this, they established urban missions—and inner-city churches—to provide for the physical and spiritual needs of America's most destitute and depraved.

Palmer also pioneered in another sphere—encouraging the churches to recognize and encourage the gifting of women for ministry. Though few in the religious mainstream listened to her, Palmer's teachings on this matter were formative for holiness denominations. It was Palmer's closely argued Biblical case for women in ministry that inspired England's Catherine Booth to co-found with her husband William England's first Wesleyan holiness denomination, the Salvation Army—today the only major Western denomination in which more than half of ordained ministers are women. And by the end of the 1800s, when several holiness denominations had emerged from the movement in America, these groups, too, were ordaining women—long before mainline Methodism and most other mainline churches.

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