4 - The Keswick Convention and Anglican Evangelical Tensions in the Early Twentieth Century

Summary

In the early decades of the twentieth century the moderate holiness spirituality of the annual convention held in the English Lake District – the Keswick Convention – was, for many conservative evangelicals in England, particularly in the Church of England, the accepted expression of evangelical experience. David Bebbington notes that by the dawn of the twentieth century Keswick teaching ‘went unchallenged’ at the Islington Clerical Conference, and ‘so had clearly triumphed in Anglican Evangelicalism’. Hundreds of Anglican clergy as well as Free Church ministers were known to attend the convention. In the 1870s there had been much suspicion of Keswick’s teaching about the transformed life, but by 1907 attitudes had changed so significantly that the Anglican evangelical weekly, The Record, could report with satisfaction that the numbers attending Keswick each year for the convention (many travelling from London by special Keswick trains) had grown to between 5000 and 6000. By this stage many mini-Keswicks were also being held both in other parts of Britain and overseas. Practical holiness through dependence on Christ and the power of the Spirit was seen as open to all: it was a transdenominational and pan-national form of evangelical spirituality. The Keswick movement had, by the early decades of the twentieth century, entered fully into the evangelical bloodstream and seemed set to forge a highly significant context for evangelical unity, not only in Britain but in many other parts of the world.

The theology of Keswick in this period was set out in a number of publications, for example in the book Holiness by Faith, which was described as a ‘Manual of Keswick Teaching’ and which had chapters by Handley Moule (bishop of Durham), together with another Anglican, a Baptist and a Presbyterian – all Keswick leaders. However, there were various challenges to the Keswick position in this period. As tensions increased, the most significant new Keswick leader who emerged was John Stuart Holden, vicar of St Paul’s, Portman Square, London, a thriving West End congregation. Holden was open to new thinking in a number of areas – theologically, ecclesially and socially. A friend of Holden’s, Marshall Broomhall, noted that for those who ‘wanted to hear only the old shibboleths’, Holden’s approach ‘was not always acceptable’. The period before, during and after the First World War saw a widening of the theological views promulgated at Keswick, but this brought about a crisis.