Search Results

Picks up the story of conversion narrative among evangelical Anglicans through a close reading of three case studies. Associated with the town of Olney, John Newton, William Cowper, and Thomas Scott lived near one another in the north-eastern corner of Buckinghamshire, where Newton and Scott were clergymen in the Church of England, and Cowper was a local gentleman-poet living on patronage. Like most evangelical Anglicans, they were moderate Calvinists when they wrote their narratives in the 1760s and 1770s, and the Calvinistic order of salvation provided a model for their self-understanding. However, in their autobiographies we find a vivid display of personality that appears not despite the presence of a model, but because of it. Within a similar theological framework, Newton interpreted his life typologically, Scott intellectually, and Cowper psychologically—each offering a unique expression of personal adherence to a common gospel.

This chapter traces the emergence and development of Anglican Evangelicalism from the early eighteenth century onwards. It argues that while Evangelicals have always harked back to the first, formative generations of their movement, this has tended to obscure the theological diversity, practical pragmatism, and fluid organization that characterized the new piety. What follows, then, examines the beginnings of an enduring movement, but it also outlines a distinct phase in its existence. The first section considers the gradual emergence of Evangelicalism as a distinct identity in the Church of England; the second, its ramification in clerical associations and among groups of prosperous laypeople; the third, its infiltration of metropolitan officialdom and provincial society via organized philanthropy and patronage. As well as mapping the networks that spread Evangelical influence, it explores the lasting tensions thus generated: above all, what did it mean to be both Anglican and Evangelical?

This chapter begins by telling the history of Indigenous sovereignty and placemaking in the author’s hometown of Toronto, where Frederick Du Vernet also lived. Orienting the reader to Frederick Du Vernet’s life lived along borders both geographical and spiritual, the chapter takes a classic biographical approach, setting his story within the broader web of his Huguenot and British ancestors who circulated within imperial networks across the British Empire. His Loyalist relatives fought for the British in the American Revolutionary War, moving northward to Canada after the war, settling in Indigenous territories that are now known as the Maritimes and the Eastern Townships of Quebec. With one great-grandfather who was a slave-holder and another who hosted Prince William on his 1788 royal tour, Frederick came from a long line of elite colonialists. His father was an Anglican minister, and his teacher and brother-in-law, Simon Gibbons, was the first Inuit Anglican priest. Upon moving to Toronto, first to study at Wycliffe College and eventually to teach there and to start a family with his wife Stella, Frederick became active in the evangelical Anglican missionary movement. The chapter concludes by transitioning to the rest of the book’s focus on storytelling through slow media.

This chapter explores the changing responses to Whitefield by evangelical Dissenters and Church of England evangelicals from his death in 1770 to the centenary celebrations of 1839. Though an Anglican priest, Whitefield was indifferent to denominational allegiance, a position that caused problems for his followers and opponents alike. The majority of his followers from 1770 to 1839 were Dissenters, who for theological reasons took a long time to come to terms with his catholicism; his opponents increasingly came to include Anglican evangelicals, who regarded his influence as extremely damaging to the Church. The following topics are covered: the contrasting treatment of Whitefield and Wesley in Calvinist evangelical literature after Whitefield’s death; the activities and identity of Whitefield’s heirs in the 1790s; attacks on Whitefield in evangelical Church of England periodicals; and the history of Whitefield’s hymn books and chapels in the early nineteenth century.