A Movement That Fed the Movement That Followed It

By the 1880s, the Methodist Episcopal Church's official leadership had grown wary of the Holiness movement's insistence that entire sanctification was a normative experience every believer should actively seek, worried that the movement's camp meeting fervor and its independent Holiness associations were pulling authority away from settled church structures. Rather than moderate their teaching, many Holiness advocates left to form denominations built around the doctrine from the ground up, a wave of organization that produced the Church of the Nazarene, formed by merger in 1908, the Wesleyan Methodist Church and Free Methodist Church, and numerous smaller bodies across the following decades.

The movement's theological emphasis did not stay contained within these new denominations. William Seymour, the Black preacher who led the 1906 Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles, the event most often credited with launching modern Pentecostalism, had trained at a Holiness Bible school and carried its expectation of a definite, identifiable post-conversion spiritual experience directly into what became the Pentecostal movement, adding the further expectation that this experience would be marked by speaking in tongues. The historical line from Wesley's doctrine of Christian perfection through Palmer's altar theology and the Holiness denominations to Pentecostalism's baptism in the Holy Spirit is one continuous American religious history rather than three unrelated developments, even though each stage produced institutions its predecessors would not fully have recognized as their own.