Clyde Binfield

Amazing grace : Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States

In Amazing Grace sixteen church historians provide a survey of evangelicalism throughout the Anglo-Saxon world. Some articles focus on colourful leaders and thinkers; others draw on economic, political, social, and cultural history as well as theology. In this comparative history the authors show how conversionism, revivalism, activism, and confidence in the authority of Scripture united world evangelicals, while historical and cultural differences set apart each groups expression of faith.

The Bolton Prelude to Port Sunlight: W. H. Lever (1851–1925) as Patron and Paternalist

Christ Church United Reformed Church (formerly Congregational), Port Sunlight, and St George’s United Reformed Church (formerly Congregational), Thornton Hough, do not spring to mind as Free Church buildings. There is scarcely one architectural respect in which either announces a Dissenting presence. Each conforms to nationally established tradition. Their quality, however, is as incontestable as it is incontestably derivative. Their role in their respective village-scapes is important, even dominant. As buildings, therefore, they are significant and perhaps suggestive, but do they say anything about ecclesiastical polity? The answer to that question illustrates the interaction between elite and popular religion in Edwardian English Protestant Nonconformity, for the polity to which these two churches give space is in fact successively congregational, Congregational, and Reformed. It is representative throughout but never democratic. Yet can any shade of Congregationalism truly develop in either a squire’s village or a manufacturer’s? And what might be deduced of the man who provided these buildings, created their villages, shaped their communities, and regarded himself lifelong as a Congregationalist even if a masonic lodge were the only fellowship to which he could statedly commit himself? These questions prompt this paper.

‘We Claim our Part in the Great Inheritance’: the Message of Four Congregational Buildings

It is religious Nonconformity’s fate to be misknown. Where it truly non-conforms the historian of the mainstream must find it an irritant, a tiresomely indispensable footnote to his thesis. For other historians it is its eccentricities which appeal—its Muggletonians and Southcottians, its Ranters too. What is less appealing is its most insistent theme and its chief continuity, the constant fight for due recognition (which means parity) in constant tension with the natural urge to conform. For who is to say when Nonconformity has served its purpose or when conformity is indeed reconcilable with that higher conformity to which each Nonconformist witnesses?