Women of Faith in Church HistoryPhoebe Palmer: The Woman Who Put Holiness Into Action
There are women in church history whose names are remembered because of the extraordinary things that happened to them.
And then there are women whose names deserve to be remembered because of what they did.
Phoebe Palmer belongs in the second category.
Born in New York City in 1807, Palmer became one of the most influential women in nineteenth-century American Christianity. She was a Methodist, a writer, an evangelist, a teacher, a social reformer, and one of the principal figures in the development of the American Holiness movement.
Yet Palmer did not begin with a pulpit, a denomination, or a large organization.
She began in her home.
And what began as a small gathering for prayer eventually became an international movement.
1. The Woman in the Parlor
In 1835, Phoebe Palmer began a weekly prayer meeting in her home.
It became known as the Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of Holiness.
At first, it hardly looked like the beginning of anything historic. Women and men gathered in a private home to pray, testify, and seek a deeper experience of God.
But Palmer's Tuesday meetings became a remarkable center of Methodist spiritual life. People came to hear, to pray, and to testify to what they believed God was doing in their lives.
The meeting remained lay-led, even though clergy participated and supported it. Eventually the Palmers' parlor became a gathering place for people who would carry the holiness message far beyond New York City.
That is one of the intriguing things about Palmer.
She did not wait for an institution to give her a platform.
She used the room God had already given her.
And the room became a ministry.
2. The “Shorter Way”
Palmer became convinced that Christians did not have to regard holiness merely as a distant goal toward which they slowly traveled.
She believed that God called believers to consecrate themselves completely to Him and that, through faith, they could receive the sanctifying grace God had promised.
She called this approach the “shorter way” to holiness.
Her teaching was simple and direct: surrender everything to God, trust His promise, and believe that He is able to sanctify what has been placed upon His altar.
Her best-known book, The Way of Holiness, published in 1850, carried this message to a much larger audience.
Palmer's teaching was not universally accepted.
Some Methodist theologians believed she had made sanctification too mechanical and predictable. Nathan Bangs, for example, argued that her approach risked treating the work of the Holy Spirit as though human beings could summon it according to a formula. Wesley's understanding, he believed, left more room for the mysterious freedom of God's Spirit.
That disagreement matters.
Palmer was not simply repeating an uncontested Christian doctrine.
She was making a theological argument.
And she was willing to defend it.
3. A Woman Who Spoke
This becomes even more remarkable when we remember the world in which Palmer lived.
In nineteenth-century America, the question of whether women should publicly teach and preach the Gospel was being vigorously debated.
Palmer did not remain silent.
In 1860 she published The Promise of the Father, arguing for the right and responsibility of women to participate in Christian ministry.
Her conviction was not merely that women could have private spiritual influence.
She believed God could call women to public Christian service.
The Methodist historical record identifies Palmer's 1860 book as a significant declaration of women's right to preach the Gospel.
Palmer therefore became more than a teacher of holiness.
She became an example of what she believed.
She preached.
She wrote.
She organized.
She traveled.
She taught.
And she helped create opportunities for other women to serve.
The woman who had begun by opening her parlor had become a public religious leader.
4. Holiness Leaves the Room
But perhaps the most important thing about Palmer's understanding of holiness is that holiness was never supposed to remain an inward experience.
If a person was genuinely surrendered to God, Palmer believed that surrender ought to produce a life of service.
And so her ministry moved beyond the respectable parlor of a middle-class New York home.
Palmer became involved in the Five Points Mission, serving people living in one of New York City's most notorious neighborhoods.
There, the language of holiness met the realities of poverty.
Children needed care.
Families needed help.
People trapped in terrible circumstances needed someone willing to enter their world.
Palmer's Christianity therefore became practical.
The General Commission on Archives and History records her involvement with the Five Points Mission as well as her opposition to slavery, her advocacy for women, her concern for fair wages for domestic workers, and her opposition to alcohol.
This is an important corrective to any understanding of Palmer that reduces her to a woman who merely preached a particular doctrine of sanctification.
For Palmer, holiness was supposed to produce love in action.
The altar led to the street.
The prayer meeting led to the mission.
The experience of God led to service for people.
5. The Controversial Woman
Palmer's influence grew, but so did opposition to her ideas.
That is worth remembering because church history becomes distorted when its heroes are presented as though everyone immediately recognized their wisdom.
They didn't.
Palmer's teaching about sanctification generated serious theological controversy within Methodism.
Her opponents believed she had oversimplified something that Wesley had deliberately left as a continuing work of grace.
Her supporters believed Palmer had recovered something Christians had been making unnecessarily complicated: the possibility of completely surrendering oneself to God and trusting His promise.
The debate continued.
But Palmer continued as well.
After the Civil War she became an important leader in the National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness. She and her husband also carried their ministry beyond the United States, conducting holiness meetings in Canada, Great Britain, and Europe.
The woman who had begun with a Tuesday meeting in New York had become an international evangelist.
And she had done it without waiting for the usual structures of power to make room for her.
6. A Legacy She Could Not See
Phoebe Palmer died in 1874.
She did not live to see the full development of the movement she had helped shape.
But the influence continued.
The holiness movement spread through American Methodism and beyond it. People who encountered Palmer's teaching carried it into preaching, missions, evangelism, and Christian service. Her writings continued to circulate, and her Tuesday meetings became an important model of holiness fellowship and testimony.
That may be the most interesting part of Palmer's story.
She did not begin with a grand vision of changing American Christianity.
She began with a conviction:
God wanted His people to be holy.
Then she acted on it.
She opened her home.
She gathered people for prayer.
She taught what she believed.
She wrote.
She preached.
She entered the slums of New York.
She defended the ministry of women.
She traveled.
And she kept insisting that Christian faith must become Christian life.
There is something wonderfully practical about that.
The history of the church is often told through bishops, presidents, denominations, revivals, buildings, and famous preachers.
But sometimes history turns because someone opens a door.
Phoebe Palmer opened hers.
And through that door passed a movement.
A Woman Who Put Holiness Into Action
Whether we agree with every part of Phoebe Palmer's theology is another question.
But it is difficult to look at her life and call her passive.
She believed God had something for ordinary Christians to do.
So she did it.
She believed holiness mattered.
So she taught it.
She believed women could proclaim the Gospel.
So she proclaimed it.
She believed holiness should result in love for people who were hurting.
So she went to them.
Perhaps that is the most useful way to remember Phoebe Palmer.
Not simply as the woman who fou
nd a “shorter way” to holiness.
But as the woman who refused to leave holiness in the prayer meeting.
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While the social action Phoebe Palmer took is indeed one element of holiness, there is much more. Next week's article "Holiness: Set Apart for God" gives the complete Biblical pictture of this this condition "without which no man shall see the Lord." Hebrews 12:14
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Called Unto HOLINESS
“Called unto HOLINESS,” church of our God,
Purchase of Jesus, redeemed by His blood;
Called from the world and its idols to flee,
Called from the bondage of sin to be free.
Refrain:
“HOLINESS unto the Lord” is our watchword and song,
“HOLINESS unto the Lord” as we’re marching along;
Sing it, shout it, loud and long,
“HOLINESS unto the Lord,” now and forever.
“Called unto HOLINESS,” children of light,
Walking with Jesus in garments of white;
Raiment unsullied, nor tarnished with sin;
God’s Holy Spirit abiding within.
“Called unto HOLINESS,” praise His dear Name!
This blessed secret to faith now made plain:
Not our own righteousness, but Christ within,
Living, and reigning, and saving from sin.
“Called unto HOLINESS,” glorious thought!
Up from the wilderness wanderings brought,
Out from the shadows and darkness of night,
Into the Canaan of perfect delight.
“Called unto HOLINESS,” bride of the Lamb,
Waiting the Bridegroom’s returning again!
Lift up your heads, for the day draweth near
When in His beauty the King shall appear.
Leila N. Morris, 1900
For God hath not called us unto uncleanness, but unto HOLINESS. 1 Thes. 4:7
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