ABSTRACT
The context in which Methodist spirituality was shaped is generally held to be the Evangelical Revival of the eighteenth century. This involves, however, a contested concept, with John Kent, in Wesley and the Wesleyans (2002), speaking about the ‘so-called evangelical revival’ as one of ‘the persistent myths of modern British history’ – although even he has to admit that Wesleyanism grew because John Wesley ‘responded to the actual religious demands and hopes of his hearers’.6 The view of Henry Rack, who connects the Evangelical Revival with the rise of Methodism, represents a position which has been one that has been widely accepted.7 David Bebbington, in his seminal work, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, goes so far as to argue that the decade beginning in 1734 ‘witnessed in the Englishspeaking world a more important development than any other, before or after, in the history of Protestant Christianity: the emergence of the movement that became Evangelicalism’.8 Bebbington has proposed that evangelicalism is a movement comprising all those who stress the Bible, the cross, conversion and activism.9 This quadrilateral can be set alongside the well-known ‘Methodist Quadrilateral’ – scripture, tradition, reason and experience. Both illuminate Methodism.
