History of Christianity in Australia Research Papers (original) (raw)

St Mark’s Review, No. 238 (December 2016), 110-115

Pride of Place is a richly detailed history, based solidly on primary sources. The minutes, correspondence, letters and other ephemera of the congregation, held in the Mitchell Library, have been plundered, as well as a broad range of other contemporary sources, to provide us with an engaging account of one of Sydney’s iconic churches. Though clearly a local church history, with a focus on successive leaders and their often adversarial relationships with lay leaders, it also provides insight into the place of Pitt Street in wider NSW Congregationalism. Pitt Street may indeed take pride in its place among the churches of Sydney and the authors of this volume may take a similar pride in providing us with this fine history.

St Mark’s Review, No. 248 (June/July 2019), pp. 54--62.

2015 will see the bicentenary of the arrival to the colony of New South Wales, at the age of twenty-nine, of the first Wesleyan Methodist minister, the Rev. Samuel Leigh. Of course, Leigh was not the first Methodist to arrive, lay preachers and class leaders such as Edward Eagar and Thomas Bowden already being active in their own ministries. Nonetheless, in spite of its opportunities for lay ministry, early nineteenth century Wesleyan Methodism was a movement dominated by clerical authority, so it is appropriate that Leigh’s arrival be seen as the beginnings of formal British-Conference-approved Methodism in the colony. Methodist ministers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century were primarily missionaries, both at home and abroad. By almost every measure Leigh was a failure as a missionary. He made few converts, failed to establish thriving circuits, and his relationships with his fellow missionaries were strained all around. This paper will provide an introduction to Leigh and his work through discussing three sets of relationships - with Governor Lachlan Macquarie, with the clergy of the Established Church, and with his fellow workers.

This paper examines the response of the Victoria and Tasmania Conference of the Methodist Church to the First World War with particular reference to the Rev. A. T. Holden, Methodist Chaplain-General to the Commonwealth Military Forces, and President of the Conference in 1915. It argues that the Church’s initial response to the War was restrained and cautious, resisting the demonisation of the enemy, and expressing disapproval of armed conflict between professedly Christian nations as incompatible with the teaching of the New Testament. As the conflict escalated, however, the Church’s discourse shifted toward one more supportive of the British imperial agenda and its ‘struggle against barbarism.’ Holden, a decorated veteran of the South African War, was a shaping influence on broader Methodist sentiment in this direction. Methodists played their part in the formation of the Anzac myth through the publication of chaplains’ reports about the heroism of Australian soldiers and Holden’s public addresses. Theological reflection upon the fallen soldiers included the possibility that their sacrifice may have earned their salvation, regardless of their personal piety.

The Church of God may have had its international headquarters in Cleveland, Tennessee; but its emergence in Australia in the 1970s would not be furthered by its American identity so much as by the diversity of its immigrant communities who came to Australia already identifying with the Church of God in their home country. With its origins among the mountain Holiness people of southern Appalachia, the form of red-hot Holiness religion it exhibited was radical enough, but as it moved out beyond the ‘hollers’ it encountered an even more radical strain of Christianity. The Pentecostal ‘blessing’ brought those who had already received the ‘second blessing’ of entire sanctification to an even greater intensity. The ‘baptism of the Holy Ghost and fire’ seemed to bring the conversion and sanctification experiences to their logical fulfillment. For a while, and in its formal doctrinal statements, the Church of God (Cleveland) sought to be both Holiness and Pentecostal. However, as time went on and the non-Wesleyan form of Pentecostalism dominated the religious landscape, it became more difficult for the Church of God to remember its Wesleyan roots. Not wanting to remain aloof from other Christians, but finding Wesleyan churches suspicious of their ‘tongues’ orientation, the Church of God (Cleveland) left its Wesleyan roots left behind, and a Pentecostal orientation was fully embraced.

The Wesleyan-Holiness Churches that emerged in Australia after the Second Word War encountered considerable opposition from other Evangelicals who distrusted their brand of perfectionism. The explicitly American origin of these Churches was both the cause of their exclusion and at the same time a mechanism for their survival. The emergence of the Holiness denominations in Australia is not an example of American cultural and religious imperialism. Rather it has been a creative partnership between like-minded Evangelical Christians from two modern nations sharing a general cultural and social similarity and a common set of religious convictions.