Paper presented at the 10^th EPCRA conference in Leuven , Belgium,

by

David Bundy

T.B. & Laura Barratt

Thomas Ball Barratt (22 July 1862-21 January 1940), the founder of Pentecostalism in Europe, began his career as a Methodist Episcopal pastor. The talented son of an expatriate British mining engineer, who had studied music with Edvard Grieg and art with O. Dahl, He experienced “sanctification” in a Methodist Episcopal Church in Bergen and entered the Methodist ministry. He quickly moved up the ecclesiastical ladder. He served as a local pastor (1886-1889), was ordained deacon (1889), pastored Third Methodist Church, Christiania [Oslo] (1889-1892), and was ordained elder (1891). From 1898-1902 he served as presiding elder of the Christiania [Oslo] district which made him even more essential to the Americans.

Each stage of his ministry was characterized by frenetic activity. Driven by his holiness theology to transform his world, he established a national youth program for the church and in his congregations. He was active nationally in the temperance movement. He created (with his sister Mary) an orphanage and a home of unwed mothers. He worked for civil rights for religious dissenters, fought for national independence from Sweden, and was numerous elected a number of times to the city council in Kristiania/Oslo.[1] The debt ridden congregation in Oslo to which he was assigned in August 1889 had marginal chance for survival unless it became self-supporting and had little hope of becoming self supporting because of the structures of the Methodist Episcopal Church and its mission program. It was a congregation of the poor that was being forced by the structures imposed by the Methodist Episcopal system to function like a congregation with money.

It is clear that already by 1890, Barratt was troubled by the ministry paradigm established in Norway on the American model and administered by the Bishop and the Missionary Society. He wrote extensively for the Norwegian Methodist periodical, Kristelig tidende on two subjects: ministry models and “Christian perfection.” The essays on William Taylor and James Hudson Taylor were more than historical essays![2] They reflected both the central themes of personal and social holiness, but also his appreciation for the radical ministerial styles of the two Taylors. It was also about this time that he discovered that if every church in Oslo was filled to capacity, only a small percentage of the population could be accommodated in a worship service. In a period that saw significant migration to the cities of those who were unable to survive in the rural areas, none of these churches were either welcoming or had significant success with the urban poor and working classes who had the most to lose by cutting the nominal membership in the state church. Engaging the larger non-church population in ways that they could hear the Gospel became a primary desideratum for Barratt’s ministry, and made the approaches of William Taylor and James Hudson Taylor all the more interesting to the struggling pastor.

Barratt began to examine other paradigms of ministry. He quickly realized that the established church of Norway and the mission churches that transported ecclesial and theological traditions of establishment from other nations (whether the USA, Germany or England) were not going to establish connections with people of Oslo. The onus of membership in these groups was too heavy to overcome. Therefore, the dream became the establishment of a form of the church that could allow for free voluntary association without the social problems posed by membership and that could minister among the poor. One successful ministry in Norway was the Salvation Army which eschewed the traditional trappings of church, and which was determinedly holiness in theology and praxis. He began to cooperate with the Salvation Army and to organize inter-denominational meetings.[3] However, the Salvation Army had the drawback of being too rigid in ecclesiology and membership expectations.

During a visit to England (September 1890-May 1891), at the request of Bishop John Hurst, to raise money for the struggling Third Methodist Church of Christiania (Oslo), Barratt visited Methodist Central Hall in London. It matched precisely what Barratt had been attempting to accomplish in his ministry at Third Church. It offered a structure for a Wesleyan/Holiness ministry to the poor and the exploited working classes.[4]

On returning to Christiania (Oslo), he began to explore the possibility of a “Central Mission.” The concept was presented to Bishop M. Walden who ordained him elder in 1891 and Barratt reported in his journal: “it met to a certain extent with his approval. In fact he would endorse the scheme provided the means were forthcoming.”[5] Barratt was not one to avoid a challenge and immediately reorganized his network of social and evangelistic ministries in Christiania (Oslo) into the Methodist Central Mission under the aegis of Central Methodist Church. Of course, being a Methodist he was soon assigned to another congregation, but refused to give up working with the mission project, and certainly no one else wanted the responsibility.

In 1902, Barratt was given one of his wishes. He was asked by Bishop McCabe to resign from First Methodist Episcopal Church in Christiania (Oslo) and become full time director of the Bymission (City Mission). This was accepted by the Conference only after an emotional appeal from the Bishop and a supportive address by his mentor Ole Olsen. However, the Conference did refuse to give him a furniture or salary! Barratt began his new ministry with neither furniture nor money to care for his family. Bishop McCabe personally took up an offering to which he himself contributed significantly in order to get Barratt started in the project.[6] The new endeavor began with Barratt renting Tivoli Theatre in central Kristiania (Oslo) where he conducted a series of meetings. These attracted considerable attention in both the religious and secular press with some writers commenting on the “American” aspects of the Bymission. Through that first year, Barratt, his family and a few volunteers used social services, classical concerts and lectures as well as more traditional evangelistic means to reach the city. It was a ministry that offered both sophisticated classical culture at a reasonable price and that offered food, clothing, legal counsel, and shelter to those who needed it. He organized and did prison ministry, organized evangelistic work among the young women who poured from the villages into the Kristiania factories. He published religious literature that offered heroes as well as advice on self-help and holiness. By the end of the first year, the Methodist Conference was ready give more willing approval, albeit not funding, to the Bymission. They accepted Barratt’s analysis: “Some were afraid that the Mission would weaken the other churches, but this has not been the case. It has strengthened them.”[7]

After a year of Bymission work, Barratt was still without furniture or decent housing. At the suggestion of the Bishop he wrote to the Missionary Society requesting assistance. The response from Society: “You know that it is expected on the Protestant mission field that the people will provide whatever is necessary in the way of property, parsonages and furniture….[8] At this same time, he was reading a biography of William Taylor written by the Swedish Wesleyan/Holiness Movement leader G. A. Gustafson.[9] This biographical and missiological treatise brought the problems faced by Barratt into a larger framework.

In Byposten the range of sources cited and the perspectives offered quickly moved beyond the range of traditional Methodist sources to include Scandinavian pietism, Reformation figures and American independent Wesleyan/Holiness Movement writers. The central foci of the articles were personal holiness, radical social ministry and self-supporting ministry. He was convinced that “baptism in the Holy Spirit” and the continued pursuit of holiness would transform the individual and then motivate and empower them to transform society. The periodical achieved a circulation of about 6,000 with about 1300 regularly paid subscriptions. Barratt was able to attract advertisements for the paper from Kristiania businesses and therefore able to support the paper on a self-supporting basis. Through the contributions provoked by the paper and the reputation of the ministry, he was able, barely, to keep the entire enterprise financially solvent. [10]

At the instruction of the Methodist Episcopal Bishops who saw the potential for this ministry Barratt continued to request funding for the Bymission. Eventually he was asked by the Bishops to raise funding in the USA,[11] but the Mission Board made it impossible for him to do so. [12] In this crisis over ministry and money, Barratt, in an African American congregation in New York, through the prayers of women, found a new religious experience of “baptism in the Holy Spirit.”[13]

When Barratt returned to Kristiania, he was without money or ecclesiastical support. The newspapers of the city mocked this city councilman who spoke in tongues; the cartoonists developed classic images of anti-Pentecostal polemics. The Methodist Episcopal Church, embarrassed withdrew from Barratt. He was urged not to participate in Methodist events and was eventually “read out” of the Methodist Episcopal Church although in reality the rupture happened in January 1907.[14] The Bymission was given over to his assistant and was dismantled by the Methodists. The advertisements from Kristiania businesses disappeared. Barratt was left with his mailing list, the financially strapped periodical, Byposten and his penniless ministry to the poor.

Barratt was starting over. He could not afford the rent on the theatre but was given inexpensive room in a struggling Holiness church that also became Pentecostal. The laity of that congregation remained loyal to their own pastor, as Barratt would appear to have desired. Barratt brought a significant number of his congregants from the Bymission and others were converted. He conducted revival services every day, often at noon, and the building was consistently packed. The congregation moved to and from a number of sites. He was then provided space in a labor union hall where he ministered for several years. There, just down the street from his old Central Methodist Church, he developed a congregation and offered hospitality to hundreds of people from around the world who traveled to Kristiania to see how a Pentecostal personal spirituality, corporate worship, evangelism, and congregational care worked. By June 1907, he had named his congregation the “Filadelfia Church.”[15]

Byposten reflects the financial difficulties of starting over in ministry as well as his new conviction about the centrality of the need for spiritual transformation as a prerequisite for the transformation for the rest of life. The periodical continued as a revival news bulletin. It focused on news of the Pentecostal revival in Europe and Kristiania became only one of the cities from which reports were provided. The focus was on spirituality as before. Funds were not solicited, although donations to missions were reported.

By 1910, Barratt was moving from leadership of a quite unstructured, albeit carefully guided revival movement toward a more organized congregation and denomination. He moved into his own building in the Møllergatan, and [16]instituted Sunday schools in 1910. Byposten became Korsets Seier, and during the next few years developed into Finnish, Swedish, and Russian editions. A Spanish version was at least considered. That year he published a theological manifesto entitled “Fundamental Principles that are Proclaimed in the Revival.”[17] This was developed in cooperation with Jonathan Paul, the German Pentecostal leader who insisted upon the interdenominational character of the revival. It is a theological statement from a Pentecostal perspective (it does not insist on tongues at the sign, but as a “precious token”) in which the only ethical statement is the necessity of love.

However, Barratt could not move very far from his Holiness Methodist activist roots. In May 1912 he published a pamphlet entitled The Evangelical Mission in 28 Møllergatan.[18] This text had two parts. The first dealt with the content of the Pentecostal message (much like the 1910 document). The second section set forth principles for the development of the Pentecostal movement. Here he insisted that a Pentecostal congregation must be involved in both mission (at home and abroad) and in social work that takes seriously human need. Jesus is coming soon, he insisted, and it is the duty of the Pentecostal Christians to reach out with God’s love to those in need. Social ministry is a form of evangelism, but ordained of God for its own sake. His own congregation became involved in ministry in ways not unlike the Bymission of earlier days. Mission giving was significant, both for support of the missionaries and for the alleviation of suffering among the people being evangelized. An important desideratum for research is to see how this concern has been transmitted in the churches in a nation that has a sophisticated social services program.