Two Holiness Churches, and the Road to 1968

The Wesleyan Church carries a double inheritance from two separate nineteenth-century American Holiness denominations that eventually recognized how much they had in common. The older of the two, the Wesleyan Methodist Church, was founded in 1843 by Orange Scott and fellow abolitionist Methodist ministers who could no longer remain in a Methodist Episcopal Church that tolerated slaveholding among its members and bishops; they organized a new church that also rejected the episcopacy in favor of elected leadership and lay representation in its governing conferences.

The younger body, the Pilgrim Holiness Church, formed in 1897 out of the merger of several smaller independent Holiness associations, under leaders including the evangelist and hymn writer Martin Wells Knapp, and it grew rapidly through the camp-meeting revivalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Holiness movement. Though the two churches had separate histories and separate general conferences for more than a century, both taught the Wesleyan Holiness doctrine of entire sanctification and shared much of the same theological and cultural world, and by the mid-twentieth century their leaders had begun serious talks toward union.