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Nor Silver, Nor Gold:

The Burning Bush Movement

and the

Communitarian Holiness Vision

Abstract

by

William Kostlevy

The Metropolitan Church Association (MCA), informally known as the “Burning Bush Movement,” began as merely one of the hundreds of urban Holiness Movement missions in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Initially organized in Chicago, as a mission congregation of the Rock River Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, the MCA gradually drifted outside the pale of institutional Methodism and into fellowship with Holiness Movement champions of premillennial eschatology.

Once separated from Methodism, the MCA established a Bible School, orphanage and most notably a periodical, the Burning Bush. Although only one of many groups to establish communal living arrangements, its forceful rejection of private property and colorful attacks upon perceived Holiness Movement and Evangelical compromises with wealth and sin made the MCA one of the most notorious religious groups of the period.

This study explores the logic and practices of evangelical communalism while introducing a number of remarkable religious figures in the history of the Holiness Movement and Pentecostalism. These include Martin Wells Knapp, founder of God’s Bible School and the Pilgrim Holiness Church; colorful Holiness Movement evangelist and Church of the Nazarene folk hero, Bud Robinson; F. M. Messenger, Holiness Movement entrepreneur and Church of the Nazarene board chairman; and two pioneers of early Pentecostalism, A. G. Garr, the first white person to speak in tongues at the Azusa Street Revival and Glenn A. Cook, treasurer of the Azusa Street Mission. This study examines the MCA’s role in the emergence of Pentecostalism, making the first substantial use of MCA sources to document the origins of the twentieth century’s largest new religious movement. Finally, it traces the MCA’s decline and the remarkable religious odyssey of two generations of Evangelical nonconformists.

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