From a Sermon to a Movement, and Its Aftermath

Entire sanctification did not stay confined to Wesley's sermons. Early Methodist class meetings in England and America treated the pursuit of perfect love as an ordinary, expected part of Christian discipleship, tracked alongside justification in personal testimony and in the movement's own record keeping. In nineteenth century America the doctrine became the center of a distinct holiness movement within and around Methodism, associated with camp meetings, Phoebe Palmer's altar theology of instantaneous consecration, and a wave of new denominations, including the Church of the Nazarene, the Wesleyan Church and the Free Methodist Church, that formed in part because their founders judged the mainline Methodist bodies to have cooled toward the doctrine.

The Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church still names Christian perfection among the church's doctrinal standards, carried through John Wesley's Explanatory Notes and the church's Articles of Religion, but contemporary United Methodist preaching typically frames it as a lifelong process of growth in holy love rather than a single crisis experience to be dated and testified to. That gap between the holiness bodies, which largely kept Wesley's language of a further definite work of grace, and the larger mainline Methodist churches, which absorbed the doctrine into a more gradualist account of sanctification, is itself part of entire sanctification's afterlife, a single sermon read two different ways by traditions that both still call themselves Wesleyan.