Evangelicalism and Dissent in Modern England and Wales

This welcome paperback edition of Bebbington and Jones’s collection of essays on the interlinking histories of evangelicalism and the English and Welsh Free Churches makes a range of engaging scholarship more accessible to those whose budget did not stretch to the three-figure cost of the original 2020 volume.The introductory chapter provides a very helpful and comprehensive survey of the literature on Dissent and evangelicalism and the relationship between them and is a good starting point for anyone new to the two fields of study. The two following chapters then engage with the relationship between Dissent and the Evangelical Revival. Robert Strivens examines Isaac Watts’s suspicions of George Whitefield’s seeming lack of fixed ecclesiology as an example of the distancing of some Nonconformists from the revival in the name of good church order; the irony of Whitefield’s ‘rope of sand’ connexion lapsing into Nonconformity after his death is not lost. Whitefield’s role is examined further by David Ceri Jones, who highlights the role of the Baptist Anne Dutton in defending him against both Wesleyan and High Calvinist attacks.Of particular interest to readers of Wesley and Methodist Studies will be Martin Wellings’s chapter examining the relationship between Wesleyan Methodism and Nonconformity. He assesses how the often-ambiguous attitudes toward Dissent among Wesleyans following their founder’s death were changed by the rise of the Oxford Movement within parent Anglicanism, causing a closer alignment with the Free Churches during the latter part of the nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century a further development saw the merging of Wesleyan Methodism with the Primitive and United Methodist Churches, whose constituent parts were always more at ease with wider Nonconformity.Sarah Williams examines the relationship between feminism and the English Free Church tradition in the interwar years, following the initial battle for women’s suffrage, exploring the extent to which the growth of ‘liberal evangelicalism’ and the social gospel movement found an expression in Free Church women’s activism. Here Wesleyan Katherine Price Hughes is rightly cited; Ethel Snowden from the Primitive Methodist tradition might have also been worthy of consideration in what is an important contribution to an under-documented area of study.Alistair Chapman in his study of the relationship between Anglican evangelical leader John Stott and Nonconformity provides a reassessment of the deep and lasting schism that occurred between evangelicals following the disastrous National Assembly of Evangelicals in 1966. Chapman posits the clash between Stott and his opponent Martyn Lloyd Jones over whether remaining within theologically mixed denominations or separation was the best way to guard the pure gospel as one between Stott’s Anglicanism and Lloyd Jones’s Nonconformity. This, however, sidesteps Lloyd Jones’s disapproval of those Nonconformists who refused to separate, and his decision to withdraw his own church, Westminster Chapel, from the Congregational Union the following year. The chapter is far from without merit in terms of historical reportage, however, especially regarding Stott’s life and ministry.The final chapter sees John Maiden examine the often-uneasy relationship between white liberal Methodist inner city congregations and the evangelical African and Afro-Caribbean congregations they increasingly played host to from the 1970s onwards. That this rich and fascinating collection of essays ends here is a reminder that the evangelicalism that emerged among suspicion from Dissenters during the eighteenth-century revival still endures into the twenty-first century, even though suspicion now sometimes comes from those who perhaps might to be expected to be more readily identifiable as its descendants.