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Martha’s Work and Mary’s Contemplation? The Women of the Mildmay Conference and the Keswick Convention 1856–1900
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
For many Evangelical clergy and lay people, the ‘annual conference’ became a vital feature of Christian life during the second half of the nineteenth century. Dominant among these was the Mildmay Conference, only later rivalled by the convention held at Keswick. The small beginnings of ‘conference going’ were a group of friends who responded to the invitation of the Revd William Pennefather to meet together in his parish at Barnet in 1856. He had not intended to found an annual gathering, but the momentum of the movement he set off was such that after he left Barnet in 1856 for the parish of Mildmay in London’s northern suburbs, the Conference which followed him grew into a powerful organization which not only brought together some three thousand Evangelical clergy and lay people each year, but also involved itself in welfare work which extended beyond the parish boundaries into other areas of London, and supported a wider network of workers in Britain and overseas. The Convention which began to meet at Keswick in 1875 was far removed from the social concerns of Mildmay, and its commitment to a controversial teaching of’holiness’ kept it on the fringes of Evangelical respectability for the first decade of its existence; but by the 1890s the popularity of ‘Keswick teaching’ could no longer be denied. While other Evangelicals sought to attack or denounce the perceived evils which were creeping into both Victorian Church and society, these conference goers sought to renew Evangelicalism from within in a way that would enable them to speak to that changing world with a new, but still distinctively Evangelical, voice.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1998
References
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