Serving the Present Age: Revivalism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada (Volume 8)

by Phyllis D. Airhart

Essential to Methodist revivalism was the personal conversion experience, which constituted the basis of salvation and church membership. Revivalism, maintains Airhart, was a distinctive form of piety and socialization that was critical in helping Methodists define who they were, colouring their understanding of how religion was to be experienced, practised, articulated, and cultivated. This revivalist piety, even more than doctrine or policy, was the identifying mark of Methodism in the nineteenth century. But, during the late Victorian era, the Methodist presentation of the religious life underwent a transformation. By 1925, when the Methodist Church was incorporated into the United Church of Canada, its most prominent leaders were espousing an approach to piety that was essentially, and sometimes explicitly, non-revivalist. The Methodist approach to personal religion changed during this transition and, significantly, Methodists increasingly became identified with social Christianity -- although experience remained a key aspect of their theology. There was also a growing tendency to associate revivalism with fundamentalism, a new religious development that used the Methodist language of conversion but was unappealing to Canadian Methodists. Airhart portrays the tensions between tradition and innovation through stories of the men and women who struggled to revitalize religion in an age when conventional social assumptions and institutions were being challenged by the ideals of the progressive movement. Serving the Present Age is an account of Canadian Methodist participation in a realignment of North American Protestantism which supporters believed would better enable them, in the words of a well-known Wesley hymn, "to serve the present age."

232 pages, Hardcover

First published February 26, 1992

Reviews

[Doug Adamson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a sympathetic yet critical account of the changing views of Methodism in Canada from the late 1800s to the creation of the United Church of Canada in 1925. As such, it is a good preparatory read for Airhart's later work, again sympathetic yet critical, account of the history and development of the United Church of Canada during its first half century (A Church with the Soul of a Nation). The current work, Serving the Present Age, is somewhat more academic in tone than the later work, though neither work is unresearched or undocumented. This volume seemed, to me, to be more of an intellectual history than a social history. Others may disagree. It would be nice if the author were to complete the story with a third volume that treats the United Church of Canada from the early 1970s to the present.