ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the existing holiness emphasis in Australian evangelicalism about which mid-century Holiness arrivals from America knew very little. The Keswick Convention Movement and the Holiness movement in the Methodist Church of Australasia are considered. The 1928 Norman Dunning Campaign is investigated as a case study of the kind of Holiness teaching Australian Methodists had been exposed to. It goes on to consider the first rise of independent Wesleyan-Holiness movements in the early twentieth century, including Eliot John Rien and the Bethshan Holiness Mission, E.P. May and the Church of God (Anderson), A.B. Carson and the Holiness Movement Church, and forerunners of the Church of the Nazarene in Australia. These early representatives would not be warmly received. In order for the Wesleyan-Holiness churches to gain entrance to the existing ‘Evangelical club,’ whose roots were in Great Britain, and so move from ‘outsider’ to ‘insider’ status, they had to negotiate difficult and unfriendly territory.
