1
Founding of the Pilgrim Holiness Church
The Pilgrim Holiness Church contributed roughly half of the people to what
we now call The Wesleyan Church in 1968 when Pilgrims merged with the Wesleyan Methodist Church. When it comes to our history however, we now often
forget the Pilgrim half like families forget to tell about their nutty aunt or
weird great-grandfather. I was born in the Pilgrim Church so I understand this. It is far cooler today to tell how “our
denomination” was founded by anti-slavery preachers in 1843 than to tell about
a group of evangelists who started a revivalist movement in the front room of
what is now a building at God’s Bible school in Cincinnati. In this series I intend to come clean and reflect
on “the other half” of our church heritage—the Pilgrim half.
The Pilgrim Church wasn’t really a denomination at all when it began; it was a movement
more like a para-church organization. Like John Wesley, the original Pilgrims were
members of other churches and stayed members for quite a while even after
joining The International Holiness Union and Prayer League. The original constitution and
by-laws consisted of the grand total of four small pages in a pamphlet, the
first one being a title page. This would be the approach of Pilgrims for
decades—minimum structure with most of the focus on direct evangelism and
missionary work instead of denominational structure. But I’m getting ahead of
the story. Two evangelists were the founders of what became The Pilgrim Church,
though they may have not fully realized it before they died.
Seth Cook Rees
Seth Rees was a Quaker
raised in Westfield, Indiana who eventually entered 
evangelism. Nobody seems to be able to find evidence
of his ordination. Saved at
nineteen he became a missionary among the Modoc, Cherokee and Peoria Indians in
Kansas and was closely connected with A. B. Simpson the
founder of the Christian & Missionary Alliance. He (and the resulting PHC)
was heavily influenced by Simpson’s “fourfold gospel” which emphasized
primarily: Salvation, Sanctification, Healing and the Second Coming. By age 40
Rees was pastoring the independent Emmanuel Church in Providence, Rhode Island. During his
two years as pastor more than a thousand people were saved. He organized his
people in a Salvation-Army-like system of six “corps”: the Slum Corps,
the Sailor Corps, the Prison Corps, The City Mission
Corps, the Hospital Corps, and the Open Air Corps. The six Corps
shows what the church was doing. This church was not a lighthouse on the shore
but on a life-saving mission to those in the water. Right in the middle of this
incredible revival in Providence,
Rees sensed the call to evangelism and took his fervent preaching style on the
road. His thunderous style of preaching got him the moniker, “Earth
Quaker.” At age 42 he went to Cincinnati to hold evangelistic meetings where he met the other
founder in this story.
Martin Wells Knapp
Knapp was a Napoleonic sized
(5’4”) Methodist pastor in Albion, Michigan when Methodist Bishop William Taylor (“Taylor University”) led him into the experience of Entire Sanctification, and infected 
him with a
life-long passion for world missions. Like Rees, Knapp left his pastorate and
entered evangelism. No “earth Quaker” in preaching style, Knapp was more low
key but had similar success. He was a great writer and possessed a burden for
publishing. At age 44 Knapp auctioned
off some of his household good to finance the publishing of his first book, Christ
Crowned Within. It turned out to be
a good investment, 21,000 copies were sold in a short time. Knapp continued
preaching with surprising success but especially focused on writing and publishing.
He made his base in Cincinnati by age 39 because it was an ideal place to publish
and the city was full of sin and thus an ideal place for evangelism. He founded
a monthly magazine, The Revivalist which soared to a circulation of
25,000.
The International
Holiness Union and Prayer League.
Seth Cook Rees and Martin
Wells Knapp met in September, 1897 in Knapp’s front room in Cincinnati and put together the simple pamphlet organizing a
new union or “prayer league.” Rees himself summarized the meeting later by
calling it, “a small affair with a big name.” At the founding of the Pilgrim Holiness Church even the founder dismissed the four-page pamphlet of
structure, a tendency that would last for several decades. It is not clear how
many members the new organization had at first, but some thought not more than
a dozen, but soon the ranks swelled through Rees’ preaching and Knapp’s writing
and publishing. Rees was the first
President, with Knapp serving as Vice President. There were other holiness “unions”
at the time, including some that would later merge with this one. The union
founded by Rees and Knapp was a nonsectarian interdenominational fellowship, “a
fraternal union…designed to promote deep spirituality among all believers.” The
only membership requirement was to have a pure heart or “an ardent desire for
the experience.” The motto on the title page of the bylaws was “In essentials,
unity; in non-essentials, liberty, in all things, charity.” In this era it was common to think that the
time had arrived to melt away denominational distinctions and emphasize the
unity of Christians.
Related movements
As Rees and Knapp organized
their union all kinds of other unions and leagues were being organized, many of which later became a part of The Pilgrim
Holiness Church so that we could honestly select any one of them as the origin,
though Pilgrims have preferred the story of Rees and Knapp. By the end of the
1800’s the “Holiness movement” was congealing into organizations and leagues in
America and Canada. Methodists had a corner on holiness for most of
1800’s but increasingly “holiness people” faced restraints and even opposition
from “anti-holiness” pastors and bishops. They began to organize themselves in unions
and leagues beyond their local membership. When they did so, their pastor or
Bishop often considered this a sign that the holiness folk were disloyal
divisive troublemakers.
The holiness people who were
organizing the unions paid no attention.
They were not interesting in preserving the past so much as saving the
future. They wanted to get drunkards and wife-beaters saved. They wanted to
lead prostitutes and sailors to Christ and then on to “full salvation” of holy
living. Banned from holding “holiness meetings” in their own churches they
rented public halls, refurbished barns and put up tents to spread their message
and rescue sinners. They contrasted
themselves from the “formal churches” who seemed more interested in their
church disciplines denominational committees and church manuals than lost
people. They gathered at independent
camp meetings and attended holiness conventions even when their Methodist
pastors frowned scornfully when they admitted it. These are the kind of laity
who joined The International Holiness Union and Prayer League founded by
Seth Cook Rees and Martin Wells Knapp in 1897. The organization would
later become The Pilgrim Holiness Church.
They were an unruly mob if you were a Methodist Bishop trying to
regulate or were concerned with structure, denominational loyalty or the
church’s Discipline or Manual. But if you were concerned with fiery preaching,
the conversion of the lost, the sanctification of marginal believers and the
rescuing of drunkards, prostitutes, prisoners and sailors these were exactly
the kind of people you wanted to join with. Thousands did.
I think….
I think that the Pilgrims
were deeply influenced by their heritage and founders. For a long time Pilgrims
didn’t give a hoot for structure or any kind of denominationalism. They were a para-church organization at first and when someone tried to
herd them they got loose and did their own thing. They were more of a rag-tag
mob than an orderly denomination. They were passionate about powerful
preaching, winning the lost, leading people into holiness, rescuing the
perishing, offering healing to the poor and they wanted to get it all done soon
because they believed the pre-millennial return of Christ was at hand. The
Pilgrims had problems and I’ll mention those in later, but I kind of admire
their passion at their founding. That’s
what I think.
So what do you think?
During the first few weeks, click here to comment or
read comments
Keith Drury September 8, 2009
www.TuesdayColumn.com
To
think about….
- What was going on in
the church world near the turn of the century that relates to this story?
- What specialties of
these founders still exist in the church they founded? What have been
lost?
- What similarities are
there between the holiness folk of 1897 and the charismatic folk of the
1960’s?