Sources: John Smyth, Short Confession of Faith (1610); John Wesley, Journals and Sermons; George Whitefield’s sermons; the First London Confession (1644).

Baptist and Methodist movements represent the two great waves of evangelical renewal in English-speaking Protestantism. Baptists (~1609): John Smyth in Amsterdam baptized himself and then his congregation, rejecting infant baptism for believer’s baptism — the conviction that only conscious personal faith, not infant membership in a covenant community, is the basis for baptism. This makes Baptist ecclesiology radically congregational: each local congregation of believers is the church, requiring no external authority. General Baptists (Arminian) and Particular Baptists (Calvinist) emerge as distinct streams by 1640. Baptists became the largest Protestant denomination in America, shaping its culture of religious voluntarism, separation of church and state, and revivalism. Methodism (~1738–1791): John Wesley’s Aldersgate experience (“I felt my heart strangely warmed”) launches a renewal movement within Anglicanism that eventually becomes a separate denomination. Wesley’s theological distinctives: Arminian free will, prevenient grace (God’s grace enables all humans to respond to the gospel), the possibility of entire sanctification (perfection) in this life, and the use of lay preachers and class meetings for accountability. Wesley and Whitefield’s open-air preaching reached the industrializing working class that the established church ignored. Methodism spawned the Holiness movement, which spawned Pentecostalism.