History Of The East Michigan Conference Of The Free Methodist Church

In Silenced: The Forgotten Story of Progressive Era Free Methodist Women, Christy Mesaros-Winckles delves into the gender debates within the Free Methodist Church of North America during the Progressive Era (1890-1920). This interdisciplinary work draws on narrative research and gender studies to reconstruct the lives of forgotten women who served as Free Methodist evangelists and deacons, examining their writings and speeches to illustrate how they promoted and defended their ministries. Mesaros-Winckles argues that the history of Free Methodist women is a microcosm of the struggle for recognition and acceptance faced by women across numerous evangelical traditions, especially amidst rising fundamentalism at the turn of the twentieth century. This book provides an important contribution to the fields of American history, theology, media studies, and gender studies, and will also be of interest to rhetorical history and communication theory scholars.

This new edition expands and updates the only general interpretation of the rise and influence of perfectionist revivalism in America and Europe. Fifteen years of expanding research on the holiness movement reinforce this volume's continuing seminal value to cultural and social research. The new concluding essay describes the history of the revival through the turn of the century. This book expands our understanding of the fragmentation and coalescence of American religion by analyzing the factors which created numerous new holiness denominations. Dieter also outlines the historical and theological factors that separate this largely Wesleyan and Methodist wing of evangelicalism from the fundamentalism of Reformed evangelicals. The identification of such nuances will prove especially helpful to those struggling with the extreme diversity in American religion, especially in evangelicalism. For students and scholars of American religious movements as well as students of the feminist, temperance, abolitionist, and populist movements in American society.