'A larger Christian life': A. B. Simpson and the early years of the Christian and Missionary Alliance

The Christian and Missionary Alliance, an evangelical Protestant denomination with roots in the nineteenth-century holiness movement, was organized in 1887. The founder, Albert Benjamin Simpson (1843-1919), hoped to unite believers who aspired to "a larger Christian life" that encompassed aggressive evangelism and personal holiness. Simpson himself had several transforming experiences, including sanctification and physical healing. After three Presbyterian pastorates, he withdrew from his denomination in 1881. He subsequently built an independent congregation in New York City, edited a foreign missions journal, launched a Bible training institute, and led a series of doctrinal conventions preparatory to the formation of the Alliance.;Simpson intended that the Alliance would cooperate with the denominational churches. He therefore organized "branches" instead of churches and commissioned "superintendents" rather than pastors. The moderate numerical growth of adherents in North America was surpassed overseas, where the Alliance sponsored an increasing number of missionaries. After a period of transitional leadership that began during Simpson's final years, it was evident by the late 1920s that the Alliance had moved hesitatingly toward a denominational status unintended by the founder.;The doctrinal message of the early Alliance was the "four-fold gospel": salvation, sanctification, healing, and premillennialism. The most distinctive emphases were holiness and healing. The Alliance teaching of holiness strongly proclaimed sanctification for victory over sin and spiritual power for Christian service. A related emphasis, "the baptism with the Holy Spirit," marked the Alliance as an important antecedent of the pentecostal movement that developed in the early twentieth century and which considered speaking in "other tongues" as the initial physical evidence of Spirit baptism.;The most controversial teaching of the early Alliance was divine healing. Simpson saw it as available for all sanctified believers, and he propagated the message by various means, such as special homes for instruction. The proclamation of healing became muted, however, in reaction to pentecostalism and with the deaths of foreign missionaries who succumbed to disease despite their "prayers of faith." The diminishing attention to the original doctrinal positions left the Alliance known primarily as a missionary-sending agency.