'A pure and popular character': Case studies in the development of the Methodist 'organizational' Church, 1884-1925

Canada's Methodist Church was transformed in the four decades before 1925. So extensive was the transformation that it may be said to mark an early stage in a much larger and ongoing transformation in the character of religious organization. Writing of the experience of American churches, Gibson Winter has called this larger transformation "an organizational revolution that is far from complete.".;The rapidly changing nature of Canadian society, and Methodism's insistence that it play a pure and popular role in that society, provided the stimulus for the development of the "organizational" church. Through it, Methodism sought to establish uniform standards of citizenship and welfare, thereby ensuring order, stability, and its own survival in the new environment. There were failures, of course. The politics of inclusion, compromise, and consensus, by which Methodism sought to include interested parties in the decision-making process and reach mutually acceptable decisions, did not always work. But there were successes, too. By the 1920's Methodism had built a national structure of boards and agencies which in turn had developed a vast array of pure and popular programmes for the use of congregations across the country. This, in essence, was the "organizational" church: an increasingly larger, more complex, and more cosmopolitan structure of integrated institutions through which Methodism could interpret and influence the broader society. Methodism was renewed.;This dissertation seeks to contribute to our understanding of that "organizational revolution", and to assess whether it represented the decline, or the renewal, of the Methodist Church (Canada, Newfoundland, Bermuda). In particular, this dissertation focuses on movements within Methodism, and particularly Toronto Methodism, which help to demonstrate the rise of what is called the "organizational" church. Chapters include case studies of: church beneficence, finance, and the growth of Methodism's administrative and board structure; Toronto city mission and social service work; women's church work as conducted nationally by the deaconess movement; and local church financing, reequipment, and extension work as conducted in Toronto. Together, these studies illustrate the defining features of the Methodist "organizational" Church: its sheer scale, complexity, and cosmopolitanism; and the politics of inclusion, compromise, and consensus which built it.