The Holiness Church, founded by Sophia Chambers (1838–87), is one of the rare religious denominations in any country founded and led by a woman. The central primary source is the periodical created and edited by Chambers, the Holiness Advocate. The article argues that Sophia Chambers's leadership approach provides an additional exception to common scholarly conceptions of women's ministry, leadership, and gender roles of the late Victorian period. To make this argument, the extant sources for Sophia Chambers and the Holiness Church are provided, narratives of her life and of the history of the Holiness Church during her lifetime are reconstructed, and her theological framework is examined. At her death, she left the leadership in the hands of four of her male subordinates. The developments in the transition of power and their effect on the church are examined before reflecting on her approach to leadership. It demonstrates that the ‘two spheres’ paradigm is not adequate for understanding Chambers.
Barclay Fowell Buxton, a missionary in Japan from 1890 to 1903, was appointed by the Church Missionary Society by special arrangement as an independent missionary. When Alphaeus Paget Wilkes joined him in Japan (1897), they organized (1903) the Japan Evangelistic Band (日本伝道隊, Nihon Dendōtai). Buxton attracted young Japanese people wanting to learn his spirituality, theology, and approach to evangelism. This network made important contributions to Japanese Christianities, as his friends and disciples adapted and promoted these understandings. Building on the work of Miyakoda, Kudō Hiroo, Mullins, Bebbington, Randall, and Bundy, this essay examines the religious orientation of Buxton in the British Radical Holiness movements, as well of his Japanese disciples and colleagues. It argues that the locus of the significant continuities between Buxton and his Japanese colleagues was in the Radical Holiness movements in the United Kingdom.
During the last quarter century, a veritable flood of research has been made available on the role of French Protestants in the development of world Christianity. Generally unnoticed by scholarly communities outside the francophone world, this enterprise is transforming historiographies of Europe, Africa, and Oceania. It addresses questions of churches and mission, colonialism, conflict, intercultural relations, power, gender, racism, and more. The research has been largely provoked by that of Jean-François Zorn (professor emeritus, Institut Protestant de Théologie at Montpellier), especially his Le grand siècle d’une mission protestante; La Mission de Paris de 1822–1914. This work created cultural and intellectual space for other scholars. The resulting research is important not only for French Protestantism but for the Christianities of francophone countries, with implications generally for world Christianity. This essay introduces the work of Zorn and the last quarter century of research on the developments of Christianity in the francophone world.
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