Author: Brian Chalmers
Chalmers, Brian, 2016 Methodists and Revivalism in South Australia, 1838-1939: The Quest for 'Vital Religion', Flinders University, School of Humanities and Creative Arts
Terms of Use: This electronic version is (or will be) made publicly available by Flinders University in accordance with its open access policy for student theses. Copyright in this thesis remains with the author. You may use this material for uses permitted under the Copyright Act 1968. If you are the owner of any included third party copyright material and/or you believe that any material has been made available without permission of the copyright owner please contact copyright@flinders.edu.au with the details.
ABSTRACT OF THESIS
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Methodism was the most
vigorous religious group in South Australia with the largest body of regular church
attenders and Sunday school enrolments. A handful of Methodists were present at the
commencement of the colony in 1836. By 1900, self-described Methodists
comprised 25 per cent of the state’s population, and hovered around the same figure
through to 1939. This thesis explores the contribution of revivalism to conversionary
growth and institutional expansion in the period from 1838, with the first recorded
religious revival, to 1939. It results from a conviction that the study of revivalism
within Methodism has received too little attention from historians. It is argued in this
thesis that revivalism provided the Methodist churches with an effective
methodology for conversionary growth in the quest for ‘vital religion’ – a religion of
the heart.
This study includes a chronology of recorded revival activities. Collation of the
evidence has depended in large part on Steve Latham’s taxonomy of revival. His six
distinguishing forms of revival events provided the methodological framework for
arranging and categorising the relevant information. The narrative includes a
selective utilisation of both statistics and topics relevant to the argument. In addition,
an ‘Annual Conversion Index’ locates each revival within its denominational context,
while an examination of the number of reported conversions against membership
data also enables an assessment of the contribution of revivalism to denominational
growth. The main sources for reported conversions, membership, and narrative
information were denominational periodicals and church statistics.
Part One examines the place of revivalism in the initial colonial period from 1838
to 1865, with particular reference to the foundational elements within South
Australian Methodism which aided revivalism. Part Two covers the period from
1866 to 1913. This examines the contribution of specialist revivalists of international
or Australian origin who conducted large-scale missions in Adelaide alongside the
revivals that occurred in rural and suburban Methodist circuits as the result of local
evangelistic preaching. Part Three, from 1914 to 1939, examines how traditional
revivalism adapted to various challenges, both intellectual and internal. There was
diminished revival activity in the inter-war period. The thesis demonstrates that
revivalism was far more extensive than previously thought, and was a very
significant factor in the numerical growth of South Australian Methodism during the
period studied.
Keywords: Methodism, Methodists, Methodist, Vital Religion, Revival, Revivals, Revivalism, South Australian Methodist revivals
Subject: Theology thesis
Thesis type: Doctor of Philosophy
Completed: 2016
School: School of Humanities and Creative Arts
Supervisor: Dr Josephine Laffin