Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 26:2 (Spring 2012)
Article: The Life And Influence Of Jessie Penn-Lewis: “Jesus Christ And Him Crucified”
Author: Sharon Baker-Johnson

PP 26:2 (Spring 2012) p. 23

The Life And Influence Of Jessie Penn-Lewis:
“Jesus Christ And Him Crucified”

Sharon Baker-Johnson

Sharon Baker Johnson was familiar with the life and writing of Jessie Penn-Lewis as a teenager. Her missionary father considered Penn-Lewis a “mentor,” and Sharon’s grandmother was also impacted by Penn-Lewis’s writing. Sharon’s first in-depth examination of the importance of women to the Christian faith began with Katherine Bushnell’s God’s Word to Women, a book that Penn-Lewis relied on to defend her ministry of preaching and teaching.

Nineteenth-century England experienced a significant period of transition with cultural influences, reflected by Enlightenment thinking, shifting to include romantic tendencies. One of the growing evangelical developments that included the latter was the focus on the “deeper Christian life,” or the Keswick movement, which officially began in 1875. Jessie Penn-Lewis came to prominence in speaking, writing, and furthering this movement on an international basis. Her primary focus was on the impact of the cross in gaining victory over sin. Besides being a well-known woman teacher/preacher, she distinguished her mission further by putting in print her biblical rationale for her call to preach. The influence of her writing continues today, especially in the area of spiritual warfare.

Historical Context

There were several religious movements, some coming to prominence, others weakening to obscurity, in nineteenth-century England. The Keswick movement, named after the town in which the first official conference was held in 1875,1 grew into an international movement and still affects evangelical thinking today.2

Its major concern was to speak to the need of deepening one’s spiritual life. It was thoroughly evangelical in that it espoused the belief that the Christian life begins with conversion, it focused on the cross, it held the Bible as the final authority, and it asserted that a changed life results in Christian mission.3

Keswick was criticized by both the Reformed and Wesleyan movements,4 even though it drew from both theologies.5 Its distinctiveness lay in the belief that the power of sin could be repressed in one’s life by the work of the Holy Spirit: “Consecration did not terminate sin; it inaugurated the ongoing process” of living above sin.6 A critic writing in a Wesleyan/Holiness periodical made this distinction:

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