3
‘Not a doctrine but an experience’:
Pentecostal Preaching in the 1920s as public culture ‘bellwether’.
Mark Hutchinson
The Scots College, Sydney, and The University of Western Sydney.
When one hears of a Samuel Marsden or a John Chapman, there is a reasonable chance that the audience will have a context in which to place the subject. This alone makes Pentecostal preaching in the 1920s quite unlike many of the papers you will already have heard at this conference. That itself provides you with a starting context. The movement which today includes what has been described ‘as one of Australia’s few global brands, … one of the most powerful Australian youth brands… [and] the fastest growing church in a country where religion is in decline’,[1] was in its origins not a ‘public religion’. It likewise remains largely unknown to ‘public scholars’, who therefore have the tendency to say some silly things about it. In the short period I have today I have, therefore, a great deal of territory to traverse in quite a short time, and you will forgive me if I use shorthand and summative techniques such as flow diagrams. It does lead us, however, to the observation that the function of Pentecostal preaching, while it shared many of the rhetoric and ecclesial functions of the broader practice, lives in quite a different place. I am going to suggest that the transition from Australia’s most insignificant to its most listened-to preaching[2] says much about the way that the construction of what is ‘public’ has shifted between 1920 and 2013.
Pentecostalism in Australia has its roots in two religious syntheses which emerged as responses to the church crises of the nineteenth century: the experiential revivalism of Methodism and the eschatological splintering of the Catholic Apostolic and Brethren movements. If you imagine those two elements in the same compound – revivalist sectarianism, energetic withdrawal from the world – you get much of the flavor of Good News Hall (1909), Elim Pentecostal Assembly in Adelaide (1910), or the West End Mission (early 1920s) in Brisbane. In forerunners such as J. A. Dowie,[3] the highly theatrical public eschatological witness of the Catholic Apostolic Church in Alfred Wilkinson[4] met the intimate encounters sought out by desperate, marginalized people in rural Victoria and Salvation Army Halls from healing protagonists such as James William Wood[5] and James Moore Hickson. Not coincidentally, after considerable resistance from both secular press and public church, all three of these practitioners relocated their practices into the international healing networks, and two of them (Dowie and Hickson) became acknowledged as foundational influences for the emerging charismatic movements of the 1950s. These flowed back into Australia from later in that decade, with the, first, Americanisation, and then the globalization, of Australian culture. That, however, is a later story which, though important for understanding how the non-public margins of Australian preaching became its most public core, cannot be dealt with in detail here. Let me just say that if you are looking for a starting point, the links were the lingering influence of Hickson in Agnes Sanford, the marginalized Anglo-Catholic presence in the diocese of Sydney, and the unexpected results of the Evangelical movement’s commitment to foreign mission.[6]
A quick way to understand these flows as they affected Australian Pentecostals is through a diagram (fig. 1, below):
As will be noted, the context for the emergence of Pentecostalism is from the long church crisis of the 18th and 19th centuries, more particularly institutionalisation of Methodism. This institutionalisation throws off, from the 1840s, first Salvationism, and, with the similar institutionalisation of the Salvation Army from the 1920s, Pentecostalism as a church form. The many hundreds of people leaving liberalising Methodist and Salvation Army churches in the 1920s found an energetic and a self-contained world in the healing and urban evangelistic missions which emerged just prior to and during World War I. Good News Hall and the Southern Evangelical Mission in Melbourne, and the Peoples’ Evangelistic Mission in Fortitude Valley, were examples of this sort of emergence. While the edges of the Salvation Army had been highly active in healing movements through the 1870s and 1880s, many of those who followed the divisions within the Booth family which replicated themselves in a proliferation of Salvationist forms (in Australia, for instance, Herbert Booth’s Christian Covenant Confederacy) preferred to follow the street preaching tradition of the movement’s origins rather than its increasing emphasis on social work. Such a person was Peter John Lovelock, who transitioned from the Army’s most prominent NSW evangelist in the 1880s, to the opaque world of Salvationist schism, healing and evangelism through the 1910s, and reemerges as a founder of one of Brisbane’s earliest Pentecostal churches in the mid-1920s. Such a person was Alfred Langley Simmons, who emerges from gentlemanly botany and Theosophy into respectable Methodism and imperial patriotism during the War, to passionate adherence to the Pentecostal revivalism of F B Van Eyk in the mid-1920s. By 1929, he is preaching in the Apostolic Faith Mission Gospel Tent on Military Road, Mosman, and shortly thereafter establishes a key church in Rockdale, and later the Elim Foursquare Church in Manly. The War, then, is critical to understanding the emergence of Pentecostalism out of its marginal existence as healing missions, providing both the eschatological impetus and the flow of members disillusioned by other traditions and by the unfulfilled moral promises of the War itself, which see the movement take on church forms through the 1920s. These are the origins and contexts which provide the source and audience of most Pentecostal preaching through the period. They were outside the mainstream, a faithful remnant who learned their preaching on the streets, casting the net to bring in the lost before the immediately-expected return of Christ. The Healing Mission form lingered longest in the oldest of the churches, Good New Hall, while formalization of the continuing-revival-as-church moved fastest in those settings which had access to international movements. In influence of evangelists such as Smith Wigglesworth, Aimee Semple McPherson, A C Valdez, Donald Gee and others, was to take these incipient churches and put them on the road to becoming organized movements, with all the institutional, role, gender and educational changes so implied. Likewise, the core model of what form ministry should take shifted under the pressure of audience, institutionalization and contextual events. The Healer-Evangelist of the 1910s (such as Lancaster, or Wigglesworth) became the Teacher Evangelist of the early 1920s (Lancaster herself adapted in this direction, McPherson was careful to adopt it in public preaching in 1921, and Donald Gee would, in the 1930s, wield significant influence in this role), merging with the pastor-evangelist as settled churches emerged in the mid-1920s. The preaching of the Decade reflects all of these shifts.
Here, Barry Chant has done us all a great favour and tabulated the content of one Pentecostal magazine of the period, Good News. Recoding and normalizing the categories he presents in his 1999 thesis, we come up with a thematic distribution of magazine articles as follows:
The dominance, indeed interaction, between the Second Coming and Christian life, as witnesses to the last things, and between Christian life, Divine Healing and Baptism in the Holy Spirit, as power for witness, is apparent. As an early, healing as eschatological sign church, Good News Hall concentrates much more strongly on the Second Coming and the related power for living issues than, say, the other main Pentecostal church in Melbourne at the time, C. L. Greenwood’s Richmond Temple. Lancaster, and her daughter, Leila Buchanan, were the main pre-millennial journalists in the Pentecostal journals of the 1920s, while Greenwood was strongly oriented towards evangelism and missions, an early adopter of radio preaching in Victoria, and a dominant figure in the formation of the Assemblies of God in 1937. The gender difference is important – even as the founder of her Church Lancaster covered the fact of her leadership in the myth that her husband was the pastor. Greenwood, on the other hand, was competitive, struggled to get out from underneath the dominant shadow of the great international evangelists of the 1920s, and masculinist. Not surprisingly, Lancaster’s teaching on the Holy Spirit is intimate, maternal, self-effacing, often sourced in visions and personal experiences:
Beloved! Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, and to-day, and for ever. Having made a full consecration, present your body a living sacrifice, and let the Lord fill you to overflowing with the Holy Ghost, the Comforter.[7]
Greenwood’s, on the other hand, is rhetorically militant, with an emphasis on personal power for a victorious life, and on giftedness. This in 1927:
That is why Jesus came. He came to set men and women free from the demon powers that bind them. He came to breathe new hope into the hearts that are bereaved. He came to heal the suffering bodies of men. The paralytics can hear His matchless voice say to them, "Thy sins be forgiven thee. Rise take up thy bed and walk." The lame can leap.[8]
Or this in 1929:
I WANT to bring to you to-night the possibilities that are in God's Word of attaining unto a life that is really worth living, and also to bring before you the reality of a life hid with Christ in God. I have chosen this Scripture to-night because to me it is full of divine possibilities. It is full of a life taken up with God. On the other hand it is full of disappointment in not letting God have His way in our lives. So for a moment I look at Paul, who must appear before Caesar. Under no circumstances was it possible for him to be free from it because God spoke to him and told him he must appear, but in doing so he has the privilege of speaking to the king. So he faces the king moved by the unction and the power of the eternal God through the Holy Ghost. So in that wonderful hour the king must face up with the reality of knowing the moment has come in his life when he must either accept or reject Jesus Christ.[9]
One shouldn’t overemphasize the differences in content, of course, as both preached on the Second Coming, on Baptism in the Spirit, on the Deeper Life. The real difference between the two was audience and function. For Lancaster, the Holy Spirit brought freedom – including freedom to hold divergent theological positions, to follow divergent paths. For Greenwood, it was more instrumental, the basis for drawing people to the altar, to catalyze a decision which would make them willing servants of Jesus, contributing to the growth either of the mission or of his church. Ultimately, the two clashed – and Greenwood used the issue of orthodoxy to marginalize Good News Hall, and promote his own cause.
The continuing emphasis on the Second Coming says much about the social location of Pentecostal churches in the 1920s. While the ministerial ranks of Australian churches, such as the Methodists, were not decimated in the same way as, for instance, the Canadian Methodist church, there is little doubt that between death, incapacitation and disillusionment, mainline Churches were heavily impacted by the War. Even evangelicals, such as Gypsy Smith (who preached through Australia in the 1920s) or the Presbyterian ‘Cardinal’, R. G. Macintyre, shifted ground on issues such as potential, or conditional, immortality. As a reviewer of MacIntyre’s 1920 book The Other Side of Death noted in the Sunday Times, ‘The general indifference to the hypothesis of immortality symbolises a rather amazing failure of the Church.’[10] In such a setting, the emphasis on eschatology combined with the practice of healing in Pentecostal preaching took on the aspect of identity formation. The former was a symbol of resistance to the liberalization that seemed to be spreading through the mainstream, while the latter was the evidence of biblical truth. It is no coincidence that the first Sydney Pentecostal churches were born out of a division in William Lamb’s end-times preaching Central Baptist Church over the healing methods of Smith Wigglesworth. Fundamentalism alone stood upon a foundation, the intellectual foundations of which were specifically anti-modernist (though it would, historically, be more accurate to say that modernism stood upon foundations which were specifically anti-foundationalist). As Donald Gee noted, however, the Pentecostal synthesis rested on scripture-proofed-by-experience:
In the final analysis, the baptism of the Spirit is not a doctrine but an experience, and the test of whether I have received is not a cleverly woven doctrine that will include me within its borders, but whether I know the experience in burning FACT in my heart and life…. the Pentecostal believer has an unanswerable argument to all the artillery of modern pulpit higher critical doubt of God's Word— he has the answer of an experience that proves the old Book true.[11]
No man possessed of a Scriptural experience needs be afraid of an argument; he is beyond its reach. Any man rejoicing in a living experience of God in his life has a power independent of, and mightily beyond, all external training in logic or theology. [12]
As Brett Knowles notes of New Zealand Pentecostal churches in the same period, such a synthesis drew both those who were non-fundamentalist revivalists, and those who were non-revivalist fundamentalists.[13] Don Westbrook in Queensland was typical: