A brief but classic account of a Cornish revival is to be found in Salome Hocking’s book Some Old Cornish Folk, published in 1903. Writing semi-fictionally but also semi-ethnographically about a number of years before, the author, herself sprung from Cornish Methodism, described the thronging penitents, the exuberant singing and the ‘thrill of excitement’ that went through the village. Crucially she commented on the circumstances. The revival, she explained, had arisen ‘at a time when no one was thinking about it, and no special services were being held. It seemed to have nothing to do with the preacher either…’ The event, she was suggesting, was entirely spontaneous. Although it was triggered by a young girl going forward to kneel as a convert below the pulpit, the subsequent stir was not the result of any earlier contrivance. The awakening was unexpected, not planned. Much of the writing about revivals – periodic episodes of religious enthusiasm attended by mass conversions in evangelical Protestantism – revolves around this distinction. Nineteenth-century advocates of revivals, in America as well as in the British Isles, contrasted the older pattern in which ‘Christians waited for them as men are wont to wait for showers of rain’ with the later way in which the episodes were promoted by ‘systematic efforts’. Subsequently historians have taken up the theme. John Kent, the leading commentator on English revivals of the Victorian era, while recognizing the existence of planning among some early nineteenth-century Methodists, places the dividing line between the prevalence of contagious spontaneity, and the use of devices to achieve conversions, after 1860.

Historians of evangelicalism in Canada and the United States have long debated the timing and nature of changes in revivalism in the northeast during the nineteenth century and the vocabulary that best describes these changes. Calvinist and Arminian theologies provided two approaches to this history: revivalism and ‘declension’ as widespread but cyclical, and wholly dependent on God; or revivalism as a dispersed but continual force, sustained also by human effort. The former framework has informed studies of Baptists and Congregationalists, and the latter, studies of Methodists, whose history did not fit common periodizations of the Second Great Awakening.

In January 1875 John Blackham, a West Bromwich draper, a deacon and Sunday school teacher from the Ebenezer Congregational Church, went to Birmingham intent on hearing the American evangelist Dwight D. Moody. So large was the crowd that Blackham was turned away from the meeting. He then went to look for an alternative Christian gathering and, in his own words,

Historians of religion should be used to seeing phenomena such as revivals ‘reduced’ to some other social or cultural phenomenon. Fifty years ago, Perry Miller was exasperated by attempts to explain the American Great Awakening in terms of ‘debtors against creditors’, ‘the common man against the gentry’ or any other such social relations. The Great Awakening, he insisted, was its own event and one that both illuminated and moulded the society that witnessed it. The Welsh Revival of 1904–5 was not as far-reaching in its consequences but it shares a stubborn irreducibility with other great revivals and, as I will argue, it provides vital perspectives on non-religious phenomena. The bold suggestion here is that, rather than looking to social phenomena to explain revival, we use the coruscating clarity of revival to explore ‘secular’ social phenomena – in this case, the powerful threads of sporting affiliation that had been insinuating themselves in the cultural pattern since the 1870s.

When the Wesleyan, Primitive and United Methodist Connexions combined in 1932 to form the Methodist Church of Great Britain, much was made of their shared evangelical heritage. The doctrinal clause of the founding Deed of Union affirmed that the Connexion ‘ever remembers that in the Providence of God Methodism was raised up to spread Scriptural Holiness through the land by the proclamation of the Evangelical Faith and declares its unfaltering resolve to be true to its Divinely appointed mission.’

One fruitful organizing theme around which to write the history of the worship of the Church of England in the early part of the twentieth century might be that of the revival of ancient practice. In church music, for instance, the early years of the century saw the gradual readoption of plainsong, the rediscovery of the repertoire of the Tudor and Stuart Church, and the adoption of English folk-song, most visibly in the English Hymnal of 1907. In the placing of contemporary visual art in churches, however, the contrast is marked. Recent analysis of this period has tended to posit a Church largely indifferent to the visual arts, except for the activities of isolated individuals, and of two men in particular: George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, and Walter Hussey, Dean of Chichester and formerly Vicar of St Matthew’s, Northampton. This sense was shared by Sir Kenneth Clark, former Director of the National Gallery, in a retirement tribute to Hussey, with whose patronage Clark had collaborated since the early 1940s. ‘What’ he asked ‘has the Church done in the way of enlightened patronage of contemporary art in the present century?’ Only one man, Hussey, ‘has had the courage and insight to maintain – I wish I could say revive – the great tradition of patronage by individual churchmen’.

This essay is a study of the religious revival that didn’t quite happen in Britain after the Second World War. It focuses on conservative evangelical Anglicans, whose own renaissance during these years puts them at the centre of discussions about the post-war increase in churchgoing. Its central contention is that human agency and cultural peculiarities are just as important for understanding this chapter of English religious history as any seemingly inexorable, broad-based social changes inimical to religious practice. More particularly, the chapter focuses on Anglican evangelical clergy and their attitudes to religious revival. In so doing, it highlights the fact that the practices and prejudices of church people are an essential part of the story of post-war English religious life. Scholars looking to explain religious malaise in post-war Britain have frequently looked everywhere except the decisions made by the churches and their leaders, the assumption seeming to be that because decline was unavoidable there was nothing pastors, priests or their congregations could do to stem the tide. This chapter seeks to redress the balance by examining the ways in which evangelical Anglican clergy pursued revival in England, some of the obstacles they faced in this pursuit, and how they responded when they felt they had failed. Among the things they discovered was that ‘revival’ was a word to be handled with care.

Historical analyses of twentieth-century evangelicalism have rarely focused on the experience of the parish. In many respects this is unsurprising. The renaissance in the historiography of evangelicalism since the 1970s has concentrated primarily on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, leaving the twentieth – and especially the period after the Second World War – relatively unexplored. Where work has been done, it has tended to focus on ecclesiastical politics, activity in universities, and biographies of major leaders. Nor are more general histories particularly illuminating in this respect. Roger Lloyd, for example, concentrates on Anglo-Catholics and modernists rather than evangelicals and Paul Welsby, whose work devotes considerable space to pastoral ministry, is more concerned with its organization than with its practice. The consequence of this historiographical gap has not been so much to create a vacuum in relation to mid-twentieth century Anglican evangelicalism as to leave an impression of a rather elitist movement, dominated by the products of Public Schools and the Inter-Varsity Fellowship (IVF) and therefore almost irremediably middle class. Ironically, this impression has been reinforced by the one substantial study of mid-twentieth century parish evangelicalism so far in print – Alister Chapman’s study of the ministry of John Stott at All Souls, Langham Place: ‘Evangelical Anglicans,’ he notes, just as much if not more than other Anglicans, continued to be associated with the middle classes, and they had significant difficulties reaching people lower down the social scale.’

Dissenters, whatever their cause, challenge the boundaries of their society. Revivalist dissenters are no exception. Their dissent has often been studied in terms of doctrinal nuance and generational tension. The slight variations of enthusiasm are bewildering to the outsider if dissent is understood simply as a ‘second generation movement’ attempting to ignite past passion in a revival that has become clerical and formulaic. This essay places one particular instance of revivalist dissent within the wider context of a counter-cultural stance towards migration, disadvantage, local spirituality and ecclesiastical governance and suggests that the movement is better understood by this holistic approach.

According to Callum Brown in The Death of Christian Britain, from 1963 Christianity in Britain went on a downward spiral. More generally, Brown sees the 1960s as the decade in which the Christian-centred culture that had conferred identity on Britain was rejected. This claim, however, which has received much attention, needs to be set alongside David Bebbington’s analysis of British Christianity in the 1960s. In Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, Bebbington notes that in 1963 charismatic renewal came to an Anglican parish in Beckenham, Kent, when the vicar, George Forester, and some parishioners received the ‘baptism of the Holy Spirit’ and began to speak in tongues. During the next quarter of a century, Bebbington continues, the charismatic movement became a powerful force in British Christianity. Both Brown and Bebbington view the 1960s as a decade of significant cultural change. Out of that period of upheaval came the decline of cultural Christianity but also the emergence of a new expression of Christian spirituality – charismatic renewal. Within the evangelical section of the Church this new movement was an illustration of the ability of evangelicalism to engage in adaptation. To a large extent evangelical Anglicans were at the forefront of charismatic renewal in England. The Baptist denomination in England was, however, deeply affected from the mid-1960s onwards and it is this which will be examined here.

The twenty-five theological colleges of the Church of England entered the 1960s in buoyant mood. Rooms were full, finances were steadily improving, expansion seemed inevitable. For four years in succession, from 1961 to 1964, ordinations exceeded six hundred a year, for the first time since before the First World War, and the peak was expected to rise still higher. In a famously misleading report, the sociologist Leslie Paul predicted that at a ‘conservative estimate’ there would be more than eight hundred ordinations a year by the 1970s. In fact, the opposite occurred. The boom was followed by bust, and the early 1970s saw ordinations dip below four hundred. The dramatic plunge in the number of candidates offering themselves for Anglican ministry devastated the theological colleges. Many began running at a loss and faced imminent bankruptcy. In desperation the central Church authorities set about closing or merging colleges, but even their ruthless cutbacks could not keep pace with the fall in ordinands.

African Christian history in the twentieth century furnishes many examples of what can justifiably be described as revival or renewal. To the extent that Christian evangelization in sub-Saharan Africa was propelled by the European missionary movement, it is not surprising that an important element in revival should be a concern to ground the Gospel in an African milieu, expressive of African cultures and sensibilities, and driven by an autonomous African agency. The missionary forms in which Christianity was expressed came under critical scrutiny. This essay is an examination of the East African Revival, a movement which originated in the Protestant mission churches in the 1930s and which continues to be a major element in the contemporary religious life of Christian churches throughout the region. There has been considerable scholarly debate about whether the East African Revival should best be seen as an ‘importation’ and ‘imposition’ of a western Evangelical revival culture in an African setting, or as marking the emergence of a distinctive ‘African’ religious sensibility expressed within Christian forms. In endeavouring to avoid the implicit essentialism which such polarities often convey, the essay aims to show how the East African Revival can fruitfully be understood as belonging both to the larger Protestant revivalist tradition, while springing out of the distinctive responses of East Africans to the Christian message as they experienced it from within African cultures which were themselves being transformed by colonialism and modernity.

In 1993, commenting on the changing proportion of Christians in the major regions of the world, John V. Taylor (1914–2001), a past General Secretary of the Church Missionary Society (1963–74) and later Anglican bishop of Winchester (1975–85), wrote: