What Is the Holiness Movement?
The Holiness Movement arose primarily within nineteenth-century Methodism as Christians sought a deeper experience of sanctification—a life increasingly governed by love for God and neighbor. Rooted in John Wesley’s teaching on Christian perfection, the movement produced influential churches, missionaries, reformers, and eventually helped prepare the soil from which modern Pentecostalism emerged.
A Movement Built Around One Question
The Holiness Movement began with a deceptively simple question:
How completely can the grace of God transform a Christian in this life?
All historic Christian traditions teach that believers are called to holiness. Scripture commands Christians to “strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14). Paul describes salvation not merely as forgiveness, but as liberation from the dominion of sin and growing conformity to Christ (Romans 6:1–14; 8:29).
The Holiness Movement placed unusual emphasis on this transformation. Its preachers insisted that Christianity was not merely about having one’s guilt pardoned while continuing indefinitely under the mastery of sinful desires. Christ came not only to forgive His people, they argued, but to cleanse, renew, and fill them with holy love.
Historically, the Holiness Movement was not a single denomination. It was a network of revivals, prayer meetings, camp meetings, publications, churches, missionaries, and reform organizations that emerged chiefly from nineteenth-century American Methodism. Although fundamentally Wesleyan in origin, its influence eventually reached Baptists, Quakers, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Anglicans, and other Protestants.
The Wesleyan Foundation
The movement’s theological roots reach back to the eighteenth-century Anglican priest and Methodist leader John Wesley.
Wesley believed that God’s grace works throughout the Christian life. Grace awakens sinners, brings them to repentance, justifies them through faith, gives them new birth, and continues transforming them into the likeness of Christ. Sanctification was therefore not an optional subject at the edge of Wesley’s theology. It stood near its center.
Wesley used expressions such as Christian perfection, perfect love, and entire sanctification to describe a mature work of grace in which love for God and neighbor becomes the governing disposition of the heart.
The word perfection easily creates misunderstanding. Wesley did not mean that a Christian could become omniscient, physically perfect, incapable of error, or equal to Christ. He explicitly denied that Christian perfection made someone infallible or freed a person from ignorance, weakness, temptation, or mistakes in judgment. Absolute perfection belongs to God alone.
For Wesley, Christian perfection was fundamentally perfection in love:
The heart becomes wholly directed toward God, and the believer seeks to love God with the whole person and the neighbor as oneself.
Wesley even avoided the expression sinless perfection because it could imply that sanctified Christians no longer needed Christ’s atoning work. He continued to emphasize dependence upon Christ, humility, spiritual growth, and the possibility of falling away. A person perfected in love could still grow further in grace and could lose what had been received.
An analogy may help. A compass may point steadily north while still being carried through difficult terrain. In the same way, Wesley believed the heart could become steadily directed toward God even while the Christian remained limited, vulnerable, and dependent upon grace.
From Wesley to the American Holiness Revival
Wesley died in 1791, but Methodism expanded rapidly throughout the United States. Circuit riders, revival meetings, small groups, and camp meetings carried Methodist preaching across the growing nation. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Methodism had become one of the largest religious forces in American life.
As Methodism grew larger and more socially established, some Methodists feared that Wesley’s emphasis on sanctification was being neglected. They did not necessarily believe Methodism had abandoned Christianity. Rather, they thought it had become satisfied with conversion without pressing believers toward the fullness of holy love.
The distinct Holiness Movement began taking shape during the 1830s and 1840s. Its most influential early organizer was not a bishop or seminary professor, but a Methodist laywoman named Phoebe Palmer.
Phoebe Palmer and the “Shorter Way”
Phoebe Palmer became a major leader of the Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of Holiness, a gathering begun by her sister Sarah Lankford in New York City. What started as a relatively small meeting eventually attracted ministers, bishops, laypeople, and visitors from several Protestant traditions.
Palmer believed many Christians waited unnecessarily for a dramatic emotional experience before trusting that God had sanctified them. She proposed what became known as the “shorter way.”
Her teaching was frequently summarized through the image of the altar:
The believer consecrates everything to God.
Christ sanctifies whatever is genuinely placed upon the altar.
The believer trusts God’s promise and testifies to what God has done.
The altar was metaphorical. Palmer was not teaching that Christians earned sanctification by making an offering. She believed sanctification was received through faith. Yet she presented the experience in a more immediate and structured form than Wesley normally had.
Her teaching spread through preaching tours, publications, testimony meetings, and her influential book The Way of Holiness. She also connected personal holiness with practical service, supporting ministry among the poor, opposing slavery and alcohol abuse, advocating just wages, and defending a greater public role for women.
Palmer’s approach was enormously effective, but it was not universally accepted. Some Methodist theologians believed she had made sanctification too predictable—as though fulfilling a spiritual formula obligated God to provide an immediate experience. This criticism is important because the Holiness Movement was never theologically uniform. Even those who affirmed entire sanctification disagreed over how closely Palmer’s “shorter way” reflected Wesley’s more careful and gradual account.
What Did Holiness Christians Believe?
Although individual churches differed, the classical Wesleyan-Holiness message usually followed a recognizable pattern.
1. Salvation Is Entirely the Work of Grace
Holiness Christians did not traditionally teach that people could make themselves holy through discipline or moral effort. Repentance, justification, regeneration, and sanctification were all understood as works of divine grace received through faith.
They were generally Wesleyan-Arminian rather than Calvinist. They emphasized that God’s grace reaches sinners, enables a genuine response of faith, and calls believers to continue faithfully in Christ.
2. The New Birth and Entire Sanctification Are Distinct
Conversion, or the new birth, begins the Christian life. The believer is reconciled to God, forgiven, and made spiritually alive.
Entire sanctification was ordinarily described as a deeper work of grace following conversion. In this experience, the believer surrendered fully to God and was cleansed from the inward disposition toward self-rule, sometimes called inbred sin or original sin.
Many Holiness preachers therefore spoke of two decisive works of grace:
The new birth: deliverance from the guilt and reigning power of committed sins.
Entire sanctification: purification of the heart and fullness of love toward God and neighbor.
The Church of the Nazarene, one of the movement’s largest descendants, continues to describe entire sanctification as a work of grace available to believers and associated with cleansing, love, and the witness of the Holy Spirit.
3. Sanctification May Be Both a Crisis and a Process
The word crisis does not necessarily mean emotional collapse. In Holiness language, it refers to a decisive moment of consecration and faith.
Many Holiness teachers believed sanctification developed gradually before and after this moment. God prepares the believer over time, brings the person to a decisive surrender, and then continues producing maturity afterward.
Wesley himself described entire sanctification as preceded and followed by gradual growth. He allowed that some believers experienced a clearly identifiable moment, while others could not identify precisely when the change occurred.
A wedding provides a useful, though imperfect, analogy. Marriage begins through a definite covenant, but the relationship must continue deepening afterward. Likewise, Holiness Christians often understood entire sanctification as a decisive surrender that opened into continuing growth rather than ending the need for discipleship.
4. Holiness Must Become Visible
The movement resisted any separation between an inward experience and an outward life.
A sanctified person was expected to display honesty, sexual purity, generosity, humility, sobriety, compassion, simplicity, and concern for the vulnerable. Holiness was not supposed to remain a private feeling reported at a revival meeting. It was meant to become a life ordered by love.
At its best, this conviction produced sacrificial service, missionary work, opposition to slavery, concern for the poor, temperance activism, and expanded opportunities for women in ministry. At other times, the emphasis on visible holiness hardened into detailed behavioral regulations that could be treated as universal measurements of spirituality.
That distinction is essential. Moral seriousness is not identical to legalism. Legalism begins when human customs are confused with God’s commandments or when obedience is treated as the cause of salvation rather than its fruit.
Camp Meetings and the Growth of the Movement
After the American Civil War, the movement expanded through large interdenominational camp meetings.
In 1867, Holiness leaders organized the first major meeting of the National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness in Vineland, New Jersey. Similar gatherings soon drew thousands of participants. Worshippers heard preaching, sang hymns, prayed at altar services, and testified to experiences of conversion and sanctification.
Railroads and inexpensive religious newspapers helped spread the message. Holiness evangelists could preach in one region while reports of the meeting circulated across the country. Camp meetings created a shared identity that crossed denominational boundaries.
Some advocates remained within the older Methodist churches, hoping to revive them from within. Others concluded that existing denominational authorities had become hostile to Holiness preaching. These tensions eventually contributed to the formation and expansion of distinct Holiness denominations.
Churches Shaped by the Holiness Movement
Several Christian bodies emerged from or were deeply shaped by the broader Wesleyan-Holiness tradition.
The Wesleyan Methodist Connection
The Wesleyan Methodist Connection was organized in 1843 by Methodists who opposed slavery and episcopal church government. Its founders wanted a church committed to practical godliness, moral reform, lay participation, and abolition. In 1968, the Wesleyan Methodist Church united with the Pilgrim Holiness Church to form The Wesleyan Church.
The Free Methodist Church
The Free Methodist Church was organized in 1860 under the leadership of B. T. Roberts. Early Free Methodists opposed slavery, rented pews, social elitism, and restrictions on women’s ministry. Their name expressed several forms of “freedom,” including free seating in worship and freedom for the Holy Spirit to work among ordinary believers.
The Salvation Army
William and Catherine Booth began the work that became the Salvation Army in London in 1865. Originally called the Christian Mission, it adopted the name The Salvation Army in 1878. Its Wesleyan-Holiness theology was joined to evangelism among the poor, practical relief, women’s leadership, and an unusual military-style organization.
The Church of the Nazarene
The Church of the Nazarene developed through a series of mergers among regional Holiness bodies. It traces its principal organizational anniversary to 1908, when northern and southern groups united at Pilot Point, Texas. Its founders sought to preserve Wesleyan teaching on entire sanctification while joining it to evangelism, compassionate ministry, education, and world missions.
These examples are not exhaustive. Other Holiness bodies include various Churches of God, independent Holiness associations, conservative Holiness churches, missionary societies, and educational institutions.
Women and African American Leadership
Women exercised an unusually prominent role within many parts of the movement.
Phoebe Palmer preached and taught at a time when women were frequently denied formal ministerial authority. Catherine Booth defended women’s preaching and became one of the principal founders of the Salvation Army. Numerous women served as evangelists, missionaries, writers, and church planters.
The movement also included important African American leaders. Amanda Berry Smith, born into slavery in Maryland, became an internationally respected Holiness evangelist and missionary. She preached in the United States, Britain, India, and Africa and later established a home for African American children. Her ministry demonstrates that the Holiness story cannot be told solely through white male denominational leaders.
The movement did not escape the racism and segregation of its age. Its interracial ideals were often applied inconsistently. Nevertheless, its emphasis on the direct calling of the Holy Spirit sometimes opened preaching and missionary opportunities to women, African Americans, working-class Christians, and others who possessed little institutional power.
Is the Holiness Movement the Same as Pentecostalism?
No, although the two movements are historically related.
Early Pentecostalism arose from religious networks already shaped by Holiness preaching, camp meetings, missions, divine-healing movements, and expectation of a powerful work of the Holy Spirit. Pentecostal pioneers inherited the Holiness conviction that dramatic encounters with grace could occur after conversion. They then identified baptism in the Holy Spirit—frequently accompanied by speaking in tongues—as a distinct Pentecostal experience.
Some early Pentecostals retained the classical Holiness sequence:
Conversion
Entire sanctification
Baptism in the Holy Spirit
Others rejected entire sanctification as a separate crisis and taught that sanctification begins at conversion and continues throughout life.
Consequently, some Pentecostal churches remain Holiness Pentecostal, while others do not accept the classical Wesleyan doctrine of entire sanctification. The Holiness Movement helped provide Pentecostalism with theological language, missionary networks, hymns, leaders, and expectations, but the two traditions should not be treated as identical.
Common Misconceptions
“Holiness Christians think they never make mistakes.”
Classical Wesleyan teaching denies this. Wesley explicitly stated that sanctified Christians remain subject to ignorance, temptation, bodily weakness, and errors in judgment.
“Entire sanctification means becoming equal to Jesus.”
No responsible Holiness theologian teaches this. Christ is the eternal Son of God and the sinless Savior. Christian holiness is always created, dependent, and received through union with Him.
“Holiness is earned by obeying enough rules.”
Historically, the movement taught sanctification by grace through faith. Some communities became overly preoccupied with external regulations, but that development should not be confused with the movement’s foundational claim that only God can sanctify the heart.
“Every Methodist believes in a second work of grace.”
No. All Methodists inherit some form of Wesleyan concern for sanctification, but not all Methodists interpret Christian perfection as a definite post-conversion crisis.
“Every strict or conservative church is a Holiness church.”
No. Holiness Movement is a historical and theological designation, not simply a description of churches with demanding moral standards.
The Central Theological Debate
The deepest disagreement concerns whether Scripture teaches a decisive experience of entire sanctification in which the sinful disposition is cleansed before death.
Holiness Christians appeal to passages such as:
“Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).
“Blessed are the pure in heart” (Matthew 5:8).
“Cleanse your hands… and purify your hearts” (James 4:8).
“May the God of peace himself sanctify you completely” (1 Thessalonians 5:23).
“Perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18).
They argue that God’s commands are joined to genuine promises of transforming grace.
Critics respond that the New Testament also portrays sanctification as an unfinished struggle. Paul says he has not already been made perfect but continues pressing toward the goal (Philippians 3:12–14). First John warns Christians against claiming to be without sin (1 John 1:8–10). Believers continually confess, repent, mortify sinful desires, and depend upon the mercy of Christ.
The debate cannot be resolved merely by observing that Scripture commands holiness. Every historic Christian tradition agrees that it does. The question is more precise:
Does Scripture promise the cleansing of the sinful disposition through a distinct work of grace in this life, or does sanctification ordinarily remain an incomplete process until death and glorification?
The Holiness tradition answers the first question affirmatively, while recognizing that even sanctified Christians must remain humble, watchful, teachable, and dependent upon Christ.
What the Holiness Movement Got Right
Even Christians who reject its distinctive doctrine can appreciate the movement’s central protest.
Christianity must never be reduced to a legal transaction in which sinners are declared righteous but left unchanged. Justification is not earned through sanctification, but the Christ who forgives also renews. The grace that pardons sin is opposed to sin’s continuing tyranny.
The Holiness Movement also recovered an important truth about love. Christian maturity is not principally measured by unusual experiences, public reputation, or mastery of theological vocabulary. According to the New Testament, the highest Christian virtue is love flowing from a heart devoted to God (Matthew 22:37–40; 1 Corinthians 13:1–13).
Wesley warned that visions, revelations, and extraordinary gifts were small things compared with humble, patient love. On this point, the Holiness tradition speaks with enduring clarity: any claim to sanctification that produces pride, cruelty, or contempt has contradicted the holiness it claims to possess.
Reflection
The Holiness Movement reminds the Church that Christ does not call His people merely to admire holiness from a distance.
He calls us to belong to Him.
The language of entire sanctification may remain disputed. Christians may disagree over whether purification is received in a distinct moment, through a gradual process, or through some relationship between the two. Yet no Christian is permitted to make peace with sin as though the mercy of Christ were permission to remain unchanged.
Holiness is not cold moral severity. It is the beauty of a life reordered by divine love. It is pride giving way to humility, resentment yielding to forgiveness, appetite submitting to wisdom, and self-rule being placed beneath the lordship of Christ.
We do not become holy by staring endlessly at ourselves. We become holy by abiding in the Holy One.
The lasting question raised by the Holiness Movement is therefore not merely whether we accept its particular vocabulary. It is whether we truly believe that the grace of Jesus Christ is powerful enough not only to pardon us, but to transform us.
The Savior who receives sinners also makes them saints. Every step toward holiness begins in His mercy, continues through His Spirit, and finds its everlasting fulfillment in His presence.
Selected Sources
Primary Sources
John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection.
Phoebe Palmer, The Way of Holiness.
Phoebe Palmer, The Promise of the Father.
Amanda Berry Smith, An Autobiography: The Story of the Lord’s Dealings with Mrs. Amanda Smith.
The historical statements and doctrinal standards of the Church of the Nazarene, The Wesleyan Church, the Free Methodist Church, and the Salvation Army.
Historical and Scholarly Studies
Melvin E. Dieter, The Holiness Revival of the Nineteenth Century.
Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War.
Charles Edwin Jones, Perfectionist Persuasion: The Holiness Movement and American Methodism, 1867–1936.
Donald W. Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage.
William Kostlevy, Historical Dictionary of the Holiness Movement.
Douglas M. Strong, “Wesleyan-Methodist and Holiness Traditions,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Protestantism.
Randall J. Stephens, “The Holiness/Pentecostal/Charismatic Extension of the Wesleyan Tradition,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Wesley.
Jay R. Case, “And Ever the Twain Shall Meet: The Holiness Missionary Movement and the Birth of World Pentecostalism, 1870–1920.”