The Holiness Movement Explained

1. What Is the Holiness Movement?

The Holiness movement is the family of churches, camp meetings, publishing houses, missions and colleges that carried John Wesley's teaching on Christian perfection through the nineteenth century and into the present day. Its central claim is that God gives a second definite work of grace after conversion, called entire sanctification, which purifies the heart of the settled inward disposition to sin and establishes love of God and neighbour as the governing motive of a believer's life. Holiness churches teach that this work is received by faith, that it can be received now rather than at death, and that the believer can know it has happened.

The movement began inside Methodism as an effort to keep alive a doctrine that Wesley described as the grand depositum God had lodged with the people called Methodists. Over the second half of the nineteenth century it grew into an interdenominational revival, and then, when Methodist leadership grew impatient with it, into a distinct set of denominations. The Free Methodist Church, The Salvation Army, the Church of God at Anderson, the Church of the Nazarene, The Wesleyan Church and the Brethren in Christ are all part of it, along with a large number of smaller associations, camp meeting grounds and independent congregations.

The Vocabulary You Will Meet

Holiness writing uses a compact set of terms, and the terms are worth learning before the history makes sense.

• Justification: the first work of grace, in which sins are forgiven and the believer is accepted by God through faith in Christ.
• Regeneration or the new birth: the change of nature accompanying justification, in which the believer is made spiritually alive.
• Inbred sin, the carnal mind, or original sin remaining: the corruption of nature that holiness teachers say persists in the justified believer and produces inward conflict.
• Entire sanctification: the second work of grace, in which that remaining corruption is cleansed and the heart is filled with love.
• Christian perfection or perfect love: Wesley's preferred names for the state that follows, meaning purity of intention rather than freedom from error.
• The baptism of the Holy Spirit: a term used by John Fletcher and later by most of the movement as another name for entire sanctification. The same phrase later became the flashpoint with Pentecostalism.
• Testimony: the public account a believer gives of having received the second work, an expected practice in holiness congregations.

2. Wesley and Christian Perfection

John Wesley (1703 to 1791) was an Anglican priest who spent his life arguing that God's grace reaches past pardon and makes a Christian actually holy in this life. He put the doctrine forward from the late 1720s, defended it for sixty years, and gathered his statements into A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, whose full edition appeared in 1766. The doctrine sits at the centre of everything the Holiness movement later became, and the movement's disputes are largely disputes about how to read that book.

Where Wesley Got the Idea

Wesley traced his conviction to three sources he named repeatedly. The first was Scripture, above all the command to love God with the whole heart in Deuteronomy 6:5 and Matthew 22:37, the promise of a circumcised heart in Deuteronomy 30:6, the prayer that God would sanctify believers wholly in 1 Thessalonians 5:23, and the warning that without holiness no one will see the Lord in Hebrews 12:14. The second was the early Church, particularly the Greek and Syriac ascetical writers he read at Oxford, whose language of the heart being healed of its disorder shaped his instincts. The third was a run of devotional books he read in his twenties: Jeremy Taylor on holy living and dying, Thomas à Kempis on the imitation of Christ, and William Law's Christian Perfection of 1726 and A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life of 1729.

Two of those three sources are Catholic property. Thomas à Kempis wrote as a canon regular in the Low Countries, and when Wesley later assembled his fifty-volume Christian Library for his preachers he abridged the lives of the French Catholic layman Gaston de Renty and of Gregory Lopez, the Spanish-born hermit who lived in Mexico. Wesley polemicised against Rome on authority and the sacraments while quietly feeding his societies on Catholic spiritual writers. The Holiness movement inherited the resulting hunger for interior transformation without always knowing where the recipe came from.

Aldersgate and the Two Works

On 24 May 1738, at a meeting in Aldersgate Street in London, Wesley felt his heart, in his own famous phrase, strangely warmed, and received an assurance that Christ had taken away his sins. He treated that experience as justification and the new birth. The question that occupied the rest of his ministry was what God does afterwards, and his answer was that there is a further work, ordinarily received some time after conversion, in which the root of sin is destroyed and love reigns without a rival. Wesley called it entire sanctification, Christian perfection, and perfect love, and he used the three names interchangeably.

Wesley held the two works together with a doctrine of gradual growth. Sanctification begins the moment a person is justified and continues afterwards, and the second work is a point within that process rather than a substitute for it. He compared it to death: there is a gradual dying and then an instant when life ends. A believer grows in grace, comes to see the remaining corruption of the heart, seeks its cleansing, receives it in a moment by faith, and then grows in grace again, now without the inward resistance.

Fletcher and the Pentecostal Language

John Fletcher (1729 to 1785), vicar of Madeley and the man Wesley wanted as his successor, gave the doctrine the vocabulary that later dominated the movement. In his Checks to Antinomianism, published through the 1770s, Fletcher described entire sanctification as a baptism of the Holy Spirit, mapping it onto Pentecost in Acts 2. Wesley used that language sparingly. Fletcher's usage won, and by the middle of the nineteenth century American holiness preachers spoke routinely of seeking their Pentecost. That vocabulary would prove combustible when a different account of Spirit baptism arrived in 1901.

For Wesley's own movement, its structure of societies and classes, and its later divisions, see the guide to Methodism and Wesleyan theology. This page follows the doctrine of perfection outward into the churches it created.

3. What Wesley Excluded from Perfection

Wesley spent as much energy limiting the doctrine as advancing it, because the word perfection invited a reading he rejected. His restrictions are the most misunderstood part of holiness teaching, and they are stated plainly in A Plain Account.

The Explicit Exclusions

Wesley denied that Christian perfection frees anyone from ignorance, from mistakes in judgement, from bodily weakness and its effects on the mind, or from temptation. A perfected Christian, he wrote, may still misread a passage of Scripture, misjudge a friend's character, forget a duty through illness, and face fierce assault from the enemy. He also denied that the state is permanent or self-sustaining: it is preserved moment by moment by grace, and it can be lost. He denied that it exempts anyone from growth, insisting that those who receive it grow faster afterwards rather than stopping.

Above all Wesley denied that perfection removes the need for the atonement. He wrote that the holiest Christian alive needs the merits of Christ every hour, that involuntary transgressions of a law they do not know still require the blood of the covenant, and that anyone claiming to stand before God on their own attainment has abandoned the Gospel. The whole doctrine is a claim about what grace can accomplish, and Wesley kept the credit where he thought it belonged.

The Definition That Caused the Trouble

Wesley defined sin, for the purposes of this doctrine, as a voluntary transgression of a known law of God. Everything falling outside that definition, involuntary failures, honest mistakes, defects flowing from a fallen nature, he described as needing atonement while declining to call it sin properly so called. That narrowing made perfection intelligible: a Christian can plausibly be free from deliberate rebellion against a commandment they understand.

The narrowing also drew the standard objection, raised in Wesley's lifetime and repeated ever since. Critics from the Reformed side, and Catholic critics too, answer that Scripture treats sin as a condition of the whole person rather than a tally of conscious choices, and that 1 John 1:8 warns anyone claiming to have no sin. Wesley replied that the same letter says whoever is born of God does not continue in sin, and that a doctrine of grace which expects nothing from grace makes the promises empty. The exchange has never been settled, and both sides use the same verses.

4. Camp Meetings and Phoebe Palmer

American Methodism carried Wesley's doctrine across the frontier, and the camp meeting became the setting where it was preached hardest. Camp meetings began in Kentucky and Tennessee around the turn of the nineteenth century, most famously at Cane Ridge in 1801, and they combined days of preaching, singing, testimony and public seeking at a mourners' bench. Methodists adopted the format and made it their own, and by the 1830s a settled expectation had formed in many congregations that a believer would seek and profess entire sanctification at a camp meeting altar.

Phoebe Palmer and the Shorter Way

Phoebe Worrall Palmer (1807 to 1874) shaped how the doctrine was taught and sought in the generation between Wesley and the modern holiness denominations. A Methodist laywoman in New York City, she took over the Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of Holiness that her sister Sarah Lankford had begun in their shared home in the mid-1830s, and she led it for nearly four decades. The meeting drew Methodist ministers, bishops, and eventually Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers and Congregationalists, and it seeded similar gatherings across the country and in Britain.

Palmer's contribution was a method. Wesley had described entire sanctification as something a believer waits and prays for, sometimes over years. Palmer taught a shorter way in three steps: entire consecration, laying every part of life on the altar; faith, believing that God accepts what is laid there; and testimony, publicly confessing the work. Her scriptural warrant was Exodus 29:37 and Matthew 23:19, where the altar sanctifies the gift placed upon it. Christ is the altar, she argued, so anything genuinely placed on him is genuinely made holy, and the believer should stop waiting for a feeling and take God at his word.

She published The Way of Holiness in 1843, defended the public ministry of women in The Promise of the Father in 1859, and with her husband Walter purchased the periodical Guide to Holiness in 1864. The Guide had been founded in 1839 by Timothy Merritt as the Guide to Christian Perfection, and under Palmer's editorship it became the movement's national voice.

The Criticism of the Altar Method

Palmer's shorter way was attacked from within Methodism almost immediately, and the criticism deserves a fair hearing. Opponents said that resting the assurance of sanctification on a syllogism, the altar sanctifies the gift and I have placed the gift, produced professions unsupported by any change of life. Some argued that Palmer had detached the doctrine from the witness of the Spirit that Wesley made essential. Defenders answered that Wesley himself taught that the blessing is received by faith and not by works or waiting, and that Palmer had simply removed an artificial delay. The argument runs through holiness literature for the next century.

Oberlin Perfectionism

A parallel and partly independent perfectionism developed at Oberlin College in Ohio in the late 1830s under the revivalist Charles Grandison Finney and the college president Asa Mahan. Mahan published Scripture Doctrine of Christian Perfection in 1839. Oberlin's version came out of a Reformed rather than a Wesleyan matrix and emphasised the entire consecration of the will to God's law, and it fed the same revival current. Finney and Mahan also tied holiness directly to abolitionism and social reform, a linkage that marked the movement permanently.

5. Vineland, 1867: The Movement Organises

The Holiness movement acquired an institutional spine in July 1867, when a group of Methodist ministers convened a camp meeting at Vineland, New Jersey, dedicated wholly to the promotion of Christian holiness. They organised themselves as the National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Christian Holiness, with John S. Inskip as president. The association was interdenominational in intent, Methodist in composition, and enormously effective: it ran camp meetings across the country year after year, and it turned a diffuse enthusiasm into a movement with leaders, a calendar and a press.

The timing mattered. The Civil War had ended two years earlier, the country was exhausted and morally unsettled, and a message of personal cleansing and decisive consecration met a real hunger. Through the 1870s and 1880s holiness camp meetings, associations and periodicals multiplied. State and regional holiness associations formed. Independent holiness bands travelled and preached. Rescue missions, orphanages and homes for unmarried mothers opened under holiness auspices in American cities.

The Movement's Own Institutions

Colleges and Bible schools followed the camp meetings, and several remain significant. Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky, dates from 1890, and Asbury Theological Seminary was founded on the same ground in 1923 by the holiness evangelist Henry Clay Morrison. God's Bible School in Cincinnati was founded in 1900 by Martin Wells Knapp. Taylor University, Houghton, Greenville, Seattle Pacific, Point Loma and the Nazarene and Wesleyan colleges each grew from this soil. The Holiness movement built an educational network of its own, which is a large part of why it survived its own fragmentation.

The National Camp Meeting Association was renamed the National Holiness Association, and in 1971 the Christian Holiness Association. It continued as an umbrella body for holiness denominations and associations through the twentieth century, later under the name Christian Holiness Partnership.

6. Why New Denominations Formed

The Holiness movement produced dozens of separate churches for reasons that were partly doctrinal and largely institutional. The holiness people did not set out to leave Methodism. They came to believe that Methodism had left the doctrine, and the resulting quarrel ran for thirty years before it hardened into separation.

The Grievances

Four complaints recur in holiness literature from the 1860s onward. Methodist congregations in growing cities were building expensive churches and renting pews, which the holiness people read as a betrayal of Wesley's poor. Sermons on entire sanctification were disappearing from Methodist pulpits, and candidates for ministry were being examined less searchingly on the doctrine. Educated ministers trained in German critical scholarship were regarded with suspicion. And bishops and presiding elders increasingly resented independent camp meetings and evangelists operating outside conference control.

The friction turned formal. In 1894 the bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, issued a pastoral address criticising the independent holiness associations for setting up a movement within the Church and for treating entire sanctification as the possession of a party. Holiness leaders read the address as a repudiation of Wesley. Over the following decade Methodist conferences disciplined holiness evangelists, refused appointments, and closed pulpits.

Come-Outism and Stay-Inism

The movement divided over what to do about it. The come-outers argued that a church which had abandoned the doctrine should be left, and that holiness people were obliged to form congregations where the second blessing would be preached without apology. Daniel Sidney Warner and the Church of God at Anderson took a stronger line still, holding that denominational organisation itself was the problem and that the true Church is the company of the sanctified.

The stay-inners argued that leaving would abandon millions of Methodists to a diluted Gospel and would reduce the holiness cause to a set of sects. Many holiness people did remain within Methodism, and the doctrine kept a foothold in Methodist bodies long after the separations. The come-outers, though, built the institutions, and by 1910 the Holiness movement was substantially a family of independent denominations.

The Slavery Question Came First

Two of the earliest holiness bodies separated over slavery before the doctrinal quarrel matured. The Wesleyan Methodist Connection of America formed at Utica, New York, in 1843, when Orange Scott, Luther Lee and other abolitionist ministers left the Methodist Episcopal Church over its accommodation of slaveholding and over the power of bishops. The Free Methodist Church formed in 1860 in western New York under Benjamin Titus Roberts, who had been expelled from the Genesee Conference in 1858; its name pointed to free pews, freedom for the enslaved, and freedom in worship. Both bodies wrote entire sanctification into their doctrinal standards, and both belong to the holiness family from their origin.

7. The Holiness Denominations

The bodies below share a Wesleyan doctrine of entire sanctification and a common ancestry in the nineteenth-century camp meetings. Each should be described in its own terms, because they differ in polity, in worship, and in how strictly they hold the classic language.

The Wesleyan Church

The Wesleyan Church was formed in 1968 by the merger of the Wesleyan Methodist Church of America, the abolitionist body of 1843, with the Pilgrim Holiness Church. The Pilgrim Holiness side began in 1897 as the International Holiness Union and Prayer League, founded in Cincinnati by Martin Wells Knapp and Seth Cook Rees, and took the Pilgrim name in the 1920s. The merged church holds entire sanctification as a work subsequent to regeneration, ordains women, and operates a network of colleges and a substantial world mission programme.

The Church of the Nazarene

The Church of the Nazarene is among the largest of the classical Wesleyan-Holiness denominations. Phineas F. Bresee, a Methodist minister, founded a congregation under the name in Los Angeles in 1895, deliberately choosing Nazareth, the unfashionable town, as its emblem of ministry to the poor. A series of unions followed, and the church regards its general assembly at Pilot Point, Texas, in October 1908 as the moment of its formation, when the Bresee group joined with the Holiness Church of Christ from the American South. Entire sanctification stands in its articles of faith as a second definite work of grace. It removed the word Pentecostal from its official name in 1919 for reasons taken up in section 9.

The Free Methodist Church

The Free Methodist Church, formed in 1860, kept the plainness and social conscience of its origins. Its early discipline banned pew rents, secret societies, alcohol and ostentatious dress, and it took an uncompromising abolitionist position. It ordains women and maintains colleges including Seattle Pacific, Greenville and Spring Arbor.

The Salvation Army

The Salvation Army began in 1865 as the Christian Mission, William and Catherine Booth's work among the poor of London's East End, and adopted its military name and structure in 1878. Its doctrinal articles are Wesleyan and include entire sanctification, and its founders' distinctive judgement was that preaching holiness obliges practical relief: shelters, food, employment bureaus, rescue work. Catherine Booth's tract Female Ministry of 1859 made the case for women preaching, and the Army commissioned women officers from its earliest years. The Salvation Army does not celebrate baptism or the Lord's Supper as ordinances, a position that distinguishes it sharply from every other body on this list and from Catholic sacramental theology. Its history and beliefs are set out in the guide to The Salvation Army.

The Church of God (Anderson, Indiana)

The Church of God at Anderson was formed in 1881 when Daniel Sidney Warner and a group of associates separated from a holiness body over the question of denominational organisation. Warner taught that sectarian division is itself a work of the flesh and that the true Church is composed of all the saved and sanctified, so the movement kept no formal membership rolls for many years and described itself as a reformation rather than a denomination. It holds entire sanctification, practises believer's baptism by immersion and foot washing, and publishes through Warner Press.

Others in the Family

• Brethren in Christ Church: an Anabaptist body of Pennsylvania German origin that absorbed Wesleyan holiness teaching in the nineteenth century, combining a peace witness with a doctrine of heart cleansing.
• Churches of Christ in Christian Union: an Ohio-centred holiness body formed in the early twentieth century.
• Church of God (Holiness): a Kansas and Missouri come-outer body with an insistence on the visible unity of the sanctified.
• Christian and Missionary Alliance: founded by A. B. Simpson in 1887, an intense missionary movement built on the fourfold Gospel of Christ as Saviour, Sanctifier, Healer and Coming King. Its sanctification teaching leans Keswick rather than strictly Wesleyan.
• The Missionary Church, the Evangelical Methodist Church, the Bible Methodist Connection, the Allegheny Wesleyan Methodist Connection and numerous conservative holiness fellowships formed in the mid-twentieth century when stricter groups separated from the larger bodies over dress, television and worldliness.

Founding dates above follow the denominations' own published histories and doctrinal manuals. No membership or attendance figures are given here, because the reported totals differ substantially between the denominations' own reporting and independent surveys, and neither can be checked from this page.

8. Keswick and the Higher Life

Keswick teaching is the second great nineteenth-century holiness stream, and it reached a different conclusion from the Wesleyan one about what happens to indwelling sin. The Keswick Convention began in 1875 in the Lake District town of Keswick in Cumbria, hosted by T. D. Harford-Battersby, vicar of St John's, under the motto All One in Christ Jesus. It grew out of a series of English conventions in 1874 and 1875 addressed by the American holiness teachers Robert Pearsall Smith and Hannah Whitall Smith, whose book The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life appeared in 1875 and circulated very widely in English-speaking evangelicalism for the next century.

What Keswick Teaches

Keswick speakers hold that the sinful nature remains in the believer throughout this life and is never eradicated. Victory over it comes by a moment-by-moment reliance on the indwelling Christ, in which the flesh is counteracted by the Spirit rather than removed. The believer's part is surrender, sometimes summarised in the phrase let go and let God, and consecration is renewed daily. Keswick therefore preaches a crisis of surrender that opens onto a life of dependence, and it avoids the Wesleyan language of cleansing from inbred sin.

The distinction is real and holiness writers on both sides took it seriously. Wesleyan theologians argued that Keswick left the root of the disease in place and settled for management. Keswick teachers replied that the Wesleyan claim of cleansing produced either despair or self-deception, since honest believers keep discovering corruption in themselves.

Keswick's Long Reach

Keswick reached a wide slice of English-speaking evangelicalism, because it was compatible with Reformed theology and travelled easily. Its influence runs through Andrew Murray, F. B. Meyer, the missionary societies of the late nineteenth century, the American Bible institute movement, and the devotional habits of a great deal of twentieth-century evangelical piety. When modern evangelicals speak of surrendering all and of the victorious Christian life, they are speaking Keswick.

9. The Pentecostal Divergence, 1901 to 1906

The Holiness movement split between 1901 and 1906 over a single question: what evidence proves that the baptism of the Holy Spirit has been received. Holiness teaching had used Pentecost language for entire sanctification since Fletcher, and holiness believers were already accustomed to seeking a personal Pentecost. A new answer to the evidence question turned that shared vocabulary into a permanent division.

Topeka and Azusa Street

Charles Fox Parham, a holiness preacher, opened a short-lived Bible school at Topeka, Kansas, in 1900. On 1 January 1901 a student named Agnes Ozman spoke in an unknown tongue after Parham prayed with her, and Parham concluded that speaking in tongues is the Bible evidence of Spirit baptism. He taught the doctrine in Kansas, Missouri and Texas over the following years. In Houston in 1905 and 1906 one of his hearers was William J. Seymour, an African American holiness preacher, who was made to listen to Parham's lectures from outside the classroom because of segregation.

Seymour went to Los Angeles and from April 1906 led the revival at 312 Azusa Street that ran for several years and drew visitors from across the holiness network and from overseas. Those visitors carried the tongues doctrine home with them, and holiness congregations, camp meetings and associations everywhere had to decide about it.

How the Movement Divided

Several holiness bodies accepted the new teaching and became Pentecostal denominations, keeping the Wesleyan structure and adding a third stage. In those churches a believer is justified, then entirely sanctified, then baptised in the Holy Spirit with the evidence of tongues. The Church of God in Christ under Charles Harrison Mason, the Church of God with headquarters at Cleveland, Tennessee, and the Pentecostal Holiness Church all followed this pattern and are called Wesleyan-Pentecostal for that reason.

The larger part of the Wesleyan-Holiness world rejected the doctrine. Its leaders answered that the New Testament evidence of the Spirit's fullness is love, purity and moral power, that 1 Corinthians 12:30 asks whether all speak with tongues and expects the answer no, and that the movement had always taught that the baptism of the Spirit is the cleansing of the heart. Alma White's Pillar of Fire and most of the older holiness associations refused it outright. The Church of the Nazarene, which had carried the word Pentecostal in its official name since 1907, voted to drop it in 1919 precisely to stop being confused with the tongues movement.

The consequence was a family separation that both sides still feel. Pentecostalism grew out of the holiness world, took its camp meetings, its altar calls, its testimony practice, its songs and much of its language, and then vastly outgrew it. The Wesleyan-Holiness stream kept the doctrine of heart cleansing and the older institutions. For Pentecostal history, doctrine and the charismatic movement that followed, see the guide to Pentecostalism; this page stays with the churches that did not take that road.

10. Holiness Practice and Standards

Holiness doctrine produced a recognisable way of life, and the practices matter as much as the theology for understanding what these churches are like from the inside.

The Altar and the Testimony

A holiness service is built toward an invitation. At the close of the sermon seekers come forward to a mourners' bench or altar rail at the front of the church, where they pray with others until they have what they came for. Believers who receive the second work are expected to testify to it publicly, and testimony periods in which members stand and recount what God has done are a standing feature of holiness worship. Palmer's third step, confession, became a congregational institution.

The Standards

Holiness denominations wrote codes of conduct into their disciplines, and the codes were strict. Total abstinence from alcohol was universal, and holiness people supplied a great deal of the energy behind American prohibition. Tobacco was forbidden. Dancing, theatre attendance, card playing and later cinema were commonly banned. Many bodies required plain dress and forbade jewellery, including in some cases wedding rings. Sunday was to be kept free of commerce and amusement. Secret societies were prohibited on the grounds that a Christian owes no oath outside the Church.

The theory behind the standards was that outward simplicity guards inward love and protects the poor from being shamed in church. The recurring criticism, made vigorously by holiness people themselves in later generations, is that a list of prohibitions can become the measure of holiness and displace the thing it was meant to protect. Conservative holiness fellowships that separated in the mid-twentieth century did so largely because they believed the larger bodies had relaxed the standards, and the larger bodies believed the separatists had confused the standards with the substance.

Women in Ministry

The Holiness movement licensed and ordained women far earlier and far more freely than most of Protestantism. Phoebe Palmer argued in The Promise of the Father in 1859 that the outpouring of the Spirit on sons and daughters in Joel 2:28 and Acts 2:17 authorises women to preach. Catherine Booth made the same case in the same year, and The Salvation Army commissioned women officers from the beginning. The Church of the Nazarene, The Wesleyan Church and the Free Methodist Church have ordained women since their founding. The reasoning was consistent: if the Spirit sanctifies and calls, no human authority may silence the call.

Work Among the Poor

Holiness churches took the social obligations of the doctrine seriously and built institutions to discharge them: rescue missions, homes for women leaving prostitution, orphanages, soup kitchens, prison work and settlement houses. Bresee planted the Nazarene work in Los Angeles among the poor by deliberate choice. The Salvation Army made relief work its public face. This inheritance connects the movement to concerns treated in the guide to Catholic social teaching and social justice, and it is one of the clearest points of sympathy between holiness Christians and Catholics.

11. The Holiness Movement Today

The Holiness movement in the twenty-first century is larger outside the English-speaking world than inside it, and it is theologically less uniform than it was a century ago. Its major denominations are international, and their strongest growth is in Africa, Latin America, South Asia and the Pacific, while their North American congregations have generally been flat or shrinking.

No membership totals are reproduced here. Each of these denominations publishes its own annual statistics, the counting rules differ between them, and the totals cannot be checked from this page.

What Has Changed

Three shifts are visible across the family. The behavioural standards have loosened in the larger denominations, so that prohibitions on cinema, dress and jewellery have largely lapsed while abstinence from alcohol remains widespread. The explicit language of a second definite work is preached less frequently than it was, and holiness theologians have written openly, in their own denominational journals and seminaries, about members who can no longer state their church's doctrine of entire sanctification. And worship has converged with broader evangelical practice, with contemporary praise music displacing the older holiness hymnody in most congregations.

Against that, a serious theological renewal has run through the movement's seminaries since the 1970s. Scholars in the Wesleyan Theological Society have re-read Wesley in his own context, reconnected the doctrine with patristic teaching on the healing of the soul, and argued that entire sanctification is better preached as the fullness of love than as a transaction at an altar rail. That work has drawn Wesleyan theologians into serious conversation with Catholic and Orthodox traditions of spiritual growth.

The Conservative Holiness Wing

A distinct conservative holiness movement persists, made up of smaller denominations, independent congregations, camp meeting associations and Bible colleges that maintain the older standards on dress, entertainment and separation from the world. Its members regard the mainstream holiness denominations as compromised. Its institutions are small, closely networked, and self-consciously continuous with the nineteenth-century movement.

Where the Doctrine Went

Holiness teaching has also had an afterlife well beyond its own churches. The vocabulary of surrender, victory and the Spirit-filled life passed into general evangelicalism through Keswick. The revivalist machinery of the camp meeting passed into Pentecostalism and from there into global charismatic Christianity. Some of the movement's emphases were carried into forms it would not recognise, including the health and wealth teaching examined in the guide to the prosperity gospel, where the expectation of a decisive act of faith was transferred from holiness of heart to material benefit.

12. Catholic Teaching on the Call to Holiness

The Catholic Church teaches that every baptised person, without exception of state or occupation, is called to the fullness of Christian life and to the perfection of charity. The Second Vatican Council gave a whole chapter of Lumen Gentium to this, chapter five, on the universal call to holiness, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church at 2013 quotes the Council directly. A Catholic reading the Holiness movement therefore begins with agreement on the point holiness preachers cared about most: holiness is commanded of everyone, and God supplies what he commands.

What Catholics and Holiness Christians Hold in Common

The overlap is substantial and worth stating before the differences. Both hold that grace really changes the person, which places both against a purely forensic account of justification. Both hold that charity is the measure of Christian maturity. Both hold that a Christian can and should make progress, and that spiritual stagnation is a failure rather than a normal condition. Both hold that the call is addressed to laypeople in ordinary work as fully as to clergy, a point St Josemaría Escrivá pressed in the twentieth century and St Francis de Sales pressed in 1609 in the Introduction to the Devout Life. Both expect self-examination, definite acts of consecration, and a life ordered around the pursuit of God.

Wesley's own reading list reinforces the overlap. He fed his preachers on Thomas à Kempis, on Gaston de Renty, on Gregory Lopez, on Scupoli. The Holiness movement's spiritual instincts, its concern for purity of intention, its insistence that love is the goal, its practice of consecration, have Catholic ancestry that Wesley half acknowledged and his heirs largely forgot.

Where Catholic Teaching Differs

Three differences are load-bearing.

The mechanism. Catholic teaching holds that sanctifying grace is given and increased chiefly through the sacraments and is exercised through the ordinary duties of life. Growth in charity comes through Baptism, the Eucharist received frequently, sacramental Confession, prayer, mortification and the works of mercy, sustained over a lifetime. The Holiness movement located the decisive moment at an altar rail and located the means in an act of faith. Wesley himself would have resisted the drift: he was an Anglican priest who preached The Duty of Constant Communion and urged his people to receive as often as they could. Later holiness practice moved away from that emphasis, and in the case of The Salvation Army abandoned the sacraments altogether.

Concupiscence. Catholic teaching holds that Baptism takes away original sin and all personal sin, while an inclination to sin, called concupiscence, remains in the baptised and is left as a field of struggle (Catechism 1264, 1426). Concupiscence is not itself sin, and it is not removed in this life by any second experience. The Wesleyan claim that the disposition to sin is cleansed away in an instantaneous work is the point where the two accounts genuinely part.

Sinlessness. The Council of Trent addressed the question directly in its decree on justification in January 1547. Canon 23 condemns the claim that a justified person can avoid all sins, including venial sins, throughout an entire life apart from a special privilege of God such as the Church holds concerning the Blessed Virgin Mary. Trent equally rejects the opposite error: the same decree teaches that God does not command the impossible, and that grace enables the justified to keep the commandments. Catholic teaching therefore holds a middle position, that mortal sin can be avoided with grace and that no one avoids every venial fault for a lifetime.

The Catholic Answer to the Same Longing

Catholic spiritual theology answers the holiness question with a long tradition of its own. It describes progress in the purgative, illuminative and unitive ways. It names the transforming union described by St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Ávila as the goal of the interior life. It offers the little way of St Thérèse of Lisieux, who taught that the smallest actions done with great love carry a soul further than heroic feats, and whose confidence in God's mercy is closer to the holiness temper than most holiness preachers realise. The Catechism at 2015 notes that the way of perfection passes by way of the Cross, which is the honest correction to any account that promises a shortcut.

What Catholic teaching declines to supply is a datable moment after which the struggle is over. Sanctity, on the Catholic account, is a lifetime of cooperation with grace, punctuated by real conversions and definite decisions, and completed by the purification described in the guide to purgatory for those who die in friendship with God still needing it. For the wider Catholic and Protestant disagreement about how grace and human action fit together, see the guide to faith and works.

13. Reading the Holiness Movement Well

The Holiness movement asks a question that most Christians avoid, and that is the first thing a Catholic should take from it. Wesley refused to accept that a believer must remain permanently divided against himself, and he built a whole system around the conviction that God intends to heal the will itself. Whatever one concludes about entire sanctification, the refusal to settle for mediocrity is a Christian instinct, and Catholic tradition endorses it in every canonised life.

Three Things to Admire

The movement's seriousness about interior transformation kept a live doctrine of sanctification in Protestantism at a time when much of Protestant theology had reduced the Christian life to forgiveness. Its social record is remarkable: abolitionism before it was safe, work among the poor as a standing obligation, and the ordination of women a century before most of Christendom considered it. And its instinct that holiness must be visible, that a changed heart shows in what a person does with money, drink, time and neighbours, is sound, whatever one makes of the particular rules.

Three Things to Question

The narrowed definition of sin as voluntary transgression of a known law does real damage, because Scripture and experience both treat sin as a disorder of the whole person that reaches beyond conscious choices. The instantaneous model can produce two opposite pathologies: the believer who professes a cleansing that has not occurred, and the believer who despairs because the promised experience never arrives. And a movement built around a crisis at an altar rail tends to underweight the ordinary means, the sacraments, the daily office, the discipline of confession, that carry a soul through the decades when no crisis is available.

The Question It Leaves With You

Wesley's challenge stands even after the corrections. Most Christians settle. Most of us treat a low-grade attachment to sin as the permanent condition of the baptised, ask nothing further of grace, and organise our spiritual lives around damage control. Scripture speaks in another register: be holy, for I am holy (Leviticus 11:44, quoted in 1 Peter 1:15 to 16), and strive for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord (Hebrews 12:14). The Holiness movement heard those verses as instructions. That hearing is worth recovering, whatever mechanism one believes God uses.

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