Foundation for Revival Anthony Horneck, The Religious Societies, and the Construction of an Anglican Pietism

Anthony Horneck (1641-1697) is a key figure for the migration of the continental Pietist sensibilities into Restoration Anglicanism and ultimately Methodism. Horneck was educated at Heidelberg and Leiden in Germany and then immigrated to England in 1661, the year of the Restoration. He became a committed Anglican, but his life and ministry were influenced by his early experience with continental Pietism: He preached salvation, avoided disputes over nonessentials, and-most significantly-organized religious societies of awakened souls, beginning in 1678. the rules Horneck drew up for these societies bear many of the marks of continental Pietism and laid the foundation for philanthropic and revivalist movements in England. At Horneck's death, a number of religious societies were located in and around London. For the next twenty years they expanded throughout the city and surrounding counties, profoundly affecting Anglican piety. By the 1720s their network provided the matrix of relationships through which Moravians (a continental Pietist group) and Oxoford Methodists met in what became the Anglo-evangelical revival. In the 1730s and '40s these societies enabled Methodism's rapid spread and were united into a new movement-anglican Pietism.

Scott Thomas Kisker began teaching at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., in 2002, in the fields of evangelism and Wesleyan and Methodist studies