Serving the Present Age

During the nineteenth century, revivalism spurred the rapid growth of Methodism in Canada, helping to make it the largest Protestant denomination in the country at the time of Confederation. But, at the dawn of the new century, the revivalist and perfectionist ideals spawned by John Wesley came face to face with a changing world and the Methodist church underwent a pivotal transition. In her examination of this transition, Phyllis Airhart considers the key role Methodism played in the collapse of the nineteenth-century evangelical consensus and discusses the way in which the changes in Methodism decisively shaped twentieth-century mainstream Protestantism in Canada.