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Article Excerpt
In 1862 Mary O'Bryan Thorne, daughter of the founder of the Bible Christian Connexion and a Bible Christian local preacher, wrote in her diary: "At our East Street anniversary I spoke at 11, and Serena [her daughter] at 2:30 and 6; one was converted in the evening." (1) She regarded this as a routine engagement; something she had been doing since her sixteenth year, and that her daughter had every right to continue. Female traveling preachers (itinerants) were important, perhaps crucial, in establishing the Bible Christians as a separate denomination and their use was never formally abandoned. (2) The persistence of this tradition makes their history an important case study of women preachers' experience in nineteenth-century Britain, showing a trend toward marginalization similar to the experience of many other nineteenth-century women who sought to enter increasingly professionalized occupations open only to men. (3) Even in the early years of the Connexion when the organizational structure was fluid and evolving, women were never on an equal footing with male preachers. With the development of a formal organization in the 1830s their numbers started to drop and the gap between male and female responsibilities widened, with women never assigned the full duties of male ministry. By the 1870s there were no woman itinerants and most Bible Christian women who felt called to preach did so locally without pay. By then there were new opportunities open to the more adventurous, and some became professional evangelists or missionaries, often expected to appeal to or work with other women. Perhaps to take advantage of this group's experience, and uniquely among the Methodist sects, in the 1890s the Bible Christians again recruited women itinerants. One woman succeeded in making a career within the Connexion's formal organization before losing her position in 1907 when the Bible Christians combined with the Free Methodists and the New Connexion to form the United Methodist Church.
The Bible Christian Connexion was neither the first nor the only Protestant sect to allow women to preach. (4) Protestant Christianity, with its emphasis on individual revelation and salvation, always contained the potential for members of marginalized groups to bear witness to their personal experience in public, and to claim that in doing so they were attempting to save the souls of others. (5) Women preached in public in the seventeenth-century Interregnum, most notably among the Quakers, but also in more ephemeral sects. In the early days of eighteenth-century Wesleyan Methodism women like Mary Bosanquet and Sarah Crosby had preached with Wesley's cautious approval, although he did not think they should travel and preferred to see their talents used in the more domestic class meeting. (6) After Wesley's death, as Methodist leadership became more professional and turned more conservative, women's sphere of action was severely restricted. In 1803 the annual Methodist conference limited women who had "an extraordinary call to preach" to addressing "only other women, only in her home circuit or by written invitation from the head of another circuit, and only after gaining the approval of both her superintendent and the quarterly meeting." (7) Similarly, Quaker women of the second generation and beyond generally spoke only to other women in women's meetings. (8)
Yet principles central to the Evangelical revival associated with Wesleyan Methodism made it more difficult for Wesleyans than Old Dissenters to deny women's right to speak in public. Evangelicals were Arminians, rejecting the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and insisting on individual free will and the possibility of redemption for all. Conversion, an acceptance of religion as one's guiding principle in all aspects of life, was the fundamental religious experience, and the emphasis was on evangelism--the conversion of others through preaching. A number of people, including men like Zachariah Taft, a Wesleyan Methodist married to a woman preacher, saw no reason why women should not witness to their conversion in public, and were prepared to argue against the biblical texts that appeared to forbid it. In 1803, criticizing the Wesleyan relegation of women to private gatherings, Taft made a spirited defense of women's right to speak in public, and while he remained within Wesleyan Methodism, the Primitive Methodist Hugh Bourne and the Bible Christian William O'Bryan were able to draw on his arguments to justify their acceptance of women preaching. Maintenance of women's right to preach was not a determining cause for their secessions from Wesleyan Methodism in either case, but it became a distinguishing mark of both Connexions. (9)
The increasing centralization and formality of Wesleyan Methodism and the ferment of millenarianism during the Napoleonic Wars led to sectarianism within the denomination, resulting in the secessions of the Independent Methodists (1796), the Methodist New Connexion (1797), the Primitive Methodists (1812), and the Bible Christians (1815). (10) Doctrinally none differed substantially from Wesleyans, and their differences were largely over issues of practice and organization, often rooted in their founders' personal conflicts with official Methodist authority. In their formative years all sects relied on lay preaching and made few distinctions between lay people and officially recognized preachers. Organization was loose, preaching was usually outdoors or in rented or donated spaces, frequently supporters' homes, and the emphasis was on the conversion of souls. They were, to use Deborah Valenze's term, "cottage religions," whose central religious practices--family prayer, Bible study, class meetings--were located in the home, encouraging women's active participation in spaces identified with them. (11) William O'Bryan, the founder of the Bible Christians, included in his account of the Connexion's early days many examples of women providing space for evangelical preaching, often in defiance of male hostility. On the very day in 1815 when he had formalized his break from Methodism by enrolling ten followers in a separate society, a woman invited him to preach in her sister's house. "Many people attended to hear. I preached in the dwelling house. The husband, who was from home when preaching began, was, on his return, much displeased that he could not get into his own house, it being so full, and would permit us to come there no more: but the Lord provided us another house in the same village, and also applied the word to many hearts." (12) Under these conditions some women were emboldened to speak in public, often on an uncontrollable impulse. Two women connected with the early Bible Christians, Johanna Brooks and Mary Thorne, both created a stir in their parish churches by speaking out about their conversion experiences, and in Brooks's case her husband and a parish officer had her physically removed for daring to speak in public. (13)
William O'Bryan was raised in the atmosphere of cottage religion; his parents regularly invited itinerant Methodist preachers to stay in their Cornish farmhouse and hold prayer meetings for the family and other local people. He was well educated and while young managed the tin mining concessions and farm property he inherited from his father. He felt called to the ministry, but resisted until the death of his young son and his own recovery from illness convinced him he could ignore it no longer. Barred from itineracy because he was married with children, he began as a local preacher, but his insistence on undertaking evangelical journeys in North Cornwall and Devon where there was little or no Methodist preaching twice led to his expulsion from his Cornish Methodist circuit. After attracting large crowds and establishing a relatively firm basis of support in rural North Devon, in 1815 he officially established his own independent circuit around the hamlet of Shebbear. This became the Bible Christian heartland, although the sect's greatest numbers and support came from Cornish mining areas.
By 1816, after a year of independent existence, the Bible Christians had 600 members, organized into a single circuit based on Shebbear, and two itinerant preachers, O'Bryan himself, and Mary Thorne's son James, who was to dedicate his entire life to the Connexion. By 1819, the year of the first annual conference, there were twelve circuits with over 2,000 members, and thirty itinerants. Fourteen, almost half, of these traveling preachers were women, a considerably larger proportion than among the Primitive Methodists; at their first conference in 1820 they had forty-eight male itinerants and six female, a ratio of one to seven. (14)
Attitudes towards women speaking in public varied among the Methodist sects. The New Connexion's policy echoed the Wesleyan: "females, while invited to be useful in leading classes, visiting the afflicted, teaching the young, and exhibiting lovely examples of domestic piety, are not introduced into stations of authority and publicity." (15) Only the Primitive Methodists and the Bible Christians allowed woman itinerants, but among the considerably more numerous Primitive Methodists women were always a small proportion of the total number. The millenarian "prophetesses" like Johanna Southcott (born in South Devon, fairly close to the Bible Christian heartland) had emboldened other women, and initially both Hugh Bourne's and William O'Bryan's acceptance of female preaching was circumstantial, making effective use of women who were already attracting audiences. (16) Their willingness to retain them may possibly have been because of difficulties in recruiting men in rural areas where they could not leave their farms; not an important issue for the predominantly urban New Connexion, but vital to the Bible Christians. William O'Bryan had another incentive; confining women to speaking in private situations would be denying his wife Catherine Cowlin O'Bryan's call to speak in public. A pious young woman, Catherine had a conversion experience at age nineteen that made her so zealous that her parents complained of "so much of religion," and her father threatened to cut off his support. (17) After years of maintaining her husband's farm and mining interests and raising her family while he pursued his evangelism, she became an active helper in her husband's independent ministry, taking charge of female converts. In 1814, while accompanying a male preacher, she was embarrassed because her companion felt unable to speak before a large congregation. She "felt the spirit moving her thereto, yielded to the call, being constrained to speak;.and she, and the people, soon were in tears together. It being such a strange thing, for a woman to preach, the people became very anxious about it, so that she was well received where she went, and the Lord blessed His word by her." Although her husband was at first unsure about encouraging her, his doubts were removed when he slipped in unnoticed to hear her speak and became convinced of her call. She began to take her husband's place to speak at local meetings when he was away and "multitudes flocked to her, and many were greatly profited." (18) She quickly became an essential member of the preaching team; her husband reported: "Hitherto places for preaching that had increased, were in the neighbourhood of my circuit, so that with the help of a few local preachers, and my wife, I was able to supply them." (19) In a letter to her daughter Mary in 1818 she described her "time filled up with filling in on circuits." (20) Later, while in her forties, she worked very successfully as an itinerant in the Isle of Wight, causing her husband to write to her daughter, "It was forcibly applied to my mind how highly I was favored. I, my wife, & daughter, 3 of the family at the same time laboring for the Lord. What an honor!" (21) In her funeral sermon in 1860 Catherine's grandson credited her with probably doing "more than can now be fairly estimated in breaking down the prejudice against female preachers." (22)
Initially, William O'Bryan regarded his wife's call as exceptional and did not deliberately recruit women. Women like Johanna Brooks and Mary Thorne preached locally without formal appointments; according to F. W. Bourne, the Connexion's official historian, "Mr. O'Bryan scrupled at first to put their names on the plan, and the idea of their becoming travelling preachers had not occurred to anyone." (23) His gradual acceptance of female itinerants came as he realized their advantages. In 1816 Elizabeth Dart, a former Wesleyan, had considerable success in attracting converts around Shebbear. James Moxley, later a Bible Christian itinerant, described how his father went out of curiosity to hear her preach and converted with three of his children. (24) In the summer of 1817 eight Bible Christian women attracted large crowds when they preached at a large open-air meeting; in 1818 Mary Thorne made an evangelical journey into Cornwall, and several women were traveling as "helpers." (25) It was the women's success in bringing in converts, "owned by God for his messengers, in turning many from the error of their ways," that changed O'Bryan's mind. The novelty of a woman preacher usually attracted a large audience, increasing the opportunity for conversions. Female preachers appealed powerfully to other women and were less vulnerable to arrest during the unrest in the years immediately after the Napoleonic Wars when authorities mistrusted large meetings and itinerant preachers were often reputed to be Jacobins. (26) Moreover, many...
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