The holiness movement traces its origins to John Wesley. The worship of the holiness churches, however, was shaped primarily by the liturgical forms of the camp meeting movement.
In 1784 John Wesley recognized the establishment of the Methodist Episcopal Church in America and attempted to offer guidance for its worship through the publication of his revision of The Book of Common Prayer. Wesley’s work was entitled The Sunday Service of the Methodists in North America and Other Occasional Services. Elements that survived Wesley’s abridgment of The Book of Common Prayer included morning and evening prayer, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, rites of ordination (for deacons, elders, and superintendents), the Psalms, the litany and collects, and Epistles and Gospels for the Lord’s Supper. Worship was to be marked by weekly sacramental celebration. The Sunday Service, however, was never widely accepted or used in America. Wesley had not accurately perceived the North American situation, nor had he anticipated the influence of Francis Asbury, the General Superintendent. The “father of American Methodism” was not committed to worship in the prayer book tradition. By the general conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1892, only one year after the death of Wesley, the restructuring of worship was apparent. The Sunday Service, a book of more than three hundred pages, had been reduced to fewer than forty pages of “Sacramental Services, &c” which were included within the church’s Discipline. What remained of Wesley’s services were the orders for baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and ordination. An order of worship was also included in the 1792 Discipline; the standard, however, was no longer a service of Word and sacrament, but one in which evangelistic proclamation, occasionally followed by eucharistic celebration, was primary.
Within ten years of the 1792 Discipline, camp meeting religion was crossing the frontier. Although originally an interdenominational enterprise, camp meetings quickly became predominantly Methodist institutions. Methodism’s theology, organization, and evangelistic fervor were well suited to the challenge of an isolated, often illiterate, and largely unchurched populace. Camp meetings provided fellowship with rarely seen neighbors and relief from the hardships and monotony of life on the frontier. Worship utilized simple and repetitive “gospel songs.” Above all, camp meeting religion called the unchurched to a conversion experience.
By the 1820s, the simple, evangelistic worship model of the camp meeting was being appropriated by revivalists like Charles G. Finney to meet the challenge of the new frontier, the unconverted city. The rise of revivalism ran parallel to an increasing emphasis upon the doctrine of holiness as understood by John Wesley. In the same year that Finney published Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835), Sarah Lankford and Phoebe Palmer began, in New York City, the “Tuesday Meetings for the Promotion of Holiness.” By 1839, Timothy Merritt’s Guide to Christian Perfection provided the holiness movement with a vehicle to promote the cause and to publish the effects of this recovered doctrine. No longer was worship intended solely to call the unconverted to conversion; it was also to call the converted Christian to a complete consecration. The holiness movement appropriated for its own purposes the prevalent revivalistic model of worship consisting of singing, praying, preaching, and the call to response (“harvest”). The holiness movement of the nineteenth century was not a movement of liturgical reform; it was, rather, the revival of a doctrinal emphasis perceived to have been lost. The origins of the Church of the Nazarene, the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the Wesleyan church, and the Pentecostal movement can be traced to the era and theological thrust of the holiness movement.