If you attend a free evangelical church in Germany and a Christian and Missionary Alliance church in Canada, you will notice how much the two have in common: a believers’ church model, an emphasis on personal conversion, a suspicion of state-church formalism, a missional orientation, and a broadly alliance-shaped theology that holds essentials firmly and grants liberty on secondary questions. You might assume they belong to the same movement. Historically, you would not be entirely wrong — and the story of how they diverged, and why they are converging again, is one of the more instructive in modern evangelical history.
The same soil
Both movements grew from nineteenth-century Protestant revival. The revivalist stream running from Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield through Charles Finney; the holiness stream centred on the Keswick movement’s teaching about the Spirit-filled life; and the alliance principle of evangelical cooperation across denominational lines — these fed both families simultaneously. Leaders from the two streams knew each other, borrowed from each other, and in some cases were the same people operating across fluid boundaries.
The clearest example is Fredrik Franson (1852–1908), a Swedish-American evangelist who trained under Dwight L. Moody in Chicago, worked across Scandinavia and Germany, and founded or directly inspired sixteen mission boards across Europe and North America.1 In 1890 he established the Scandinavian Alliance Mission (later renamed TEAM) as a faith-based sending agency aggregating resources from independent free church congregations. He also sparked the German Allianz-Mission — all while drawing his support base from free evangelical congregations. Franson was not building one movement or the other. He was building a transatlantic missionary network that drew on both, because at that stage the distinction barely existed.
Simultaneously in North America, A.B. Simpson (1843–1919), a Canadian-born Presbyterian minister, resigned his affluent New York pastorate, established training classes for lay missionaries, and in 1887 organised the Christian Alliance and the Evangelical Missionary Alliance, which merged in 1897 into the Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA).2 Simpson framed the C&MA’s theology as the “Fourfold Gospel” — Jesus as Saviour, Sanctifier, Healer, and Soon Coming King — and conceived of it not as a denomination but as a multi-denominational fraternal alliance for the deeper spiritual life and aggressive missions. The alliance logic was identical to what drove Franson; the institutional form was parallel.
How they diverged
Over time, the two streams institutionalised differently, and those institutional differences hardened into genuine theological distinctions.
Free evangelical churches consistently prioritised local congregational autonomy. National federations remained voluntary associations serving congregations without governing them. The ecclesiology was pure congregationalism: the local church is the primary reality, the federation exists to facilitate not to direct.
The Alliance movement, particularly the C&MA, moved toward a more connectional model. Internal conflicts in the early twentieth century over Pentecostalism led to centralisation of property and administration to protect institutional assets and preserve the mission focus. The contemporary Alliance World Fellowship (AWF) is a loose global network of largely autonomous national churches, but historically the C&MA carried more structured denominational authority than typical free evangelical federations.
The theological divergence went deeper on sanctification. Free evangelical churches, rooted in Lutheran-pietist or Reformed traditions, generally embraced a progressive view of sanctification: steady growth in grace over time, under Scripture and community, without requiring a distinct post-conversion crisis experience. The Alliance, shaped by Simpson’s Keswick-influenced theology, presented sanctification as a crisis of consecration followed by Spirit-filling — a discrete second experience that empowers for holy living and mission.3 The Alliance also formally integrated divine healing into its christological framework in a way that free evangelical confessions typically did not, though both maintained a cautious distance from classical Pentecostalism.
How they map internationally
The International Federation of Free Evangelical Churches (IFFEC), founded in 1948, links 31–34 national member federations representing roughly 700,000 believers, with its strongest presence in Europe. It is a fraternal association, not a sending agency: missions are handled by individual member boards like the Allianz-Mission or the Evangelical Free Church of Canada Mission.
The Alliance World Fellowship (AWF), organised in 1975, links national churches tracing their lineage to Simpson’s C&MA across 88 countries, representing over 6.7 million members — roughly ten times the IFFEC’s size, with its fastest growth in the Global South. The AWF’s national members share a common theological heritage in Simpson’s Fourfold Gospel in a way that IFFEC members, who come from various free church traditions, do not.
The scale difference reflects historical trajectory more than theological seriousness. The Alliance’s mission-agency model, combined with its Keswick-shaped evangelism and the C&MA’s capacity for centralised resourcing, produced rapid church planting across Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the twentieth century. Free evangelical mission was real but more decentralised, and slower to aggregate at scale.
Where they are converging
In the contemporary landscape, the boundaries between the two streams are becoming increasingly functional rather than meaningful.
In Germany, the historical division has been structurally resolved. The Allianz-Mission, which started as a classic interdenominational faith mission, has been the official foreign mission agency of the Bund FeG since 1960, and recent decades have brought further integration: the Neukirchener Mission merged into the Allianz-Mission in 2021, followed by the FeG Auslandshilfe in 2025. The mission agency now operates from the Kronberg Forum campus in Dietzhölztal-Ewersbach, shared with the Bund FeG’s own theological seminary. Alliance missional energy and Free Church congregational base have merged into a single institutional structure.
In Sweden, the Swedish Alliance Mission (SAM) and the Evangelical Free Church in Sweden (EFK) co-own and operate the Academy for Leadership and Theology (ALT) alongside the Swedish Pentecostal movement, pooling academic resources across traditions that once maintained separate institutions. In a highly secularised European context, the practical logic of shared training has overridden historical denominational distinctions.
There are also new tensions that, paradoxically, draw conservative members of both streams closer together. Within the broader free-church family in Sweden, the Equmeniakyrkan (which represents the Mission Covenant tradition within IFFEC) has adopted policies permitting same-sex marriages, while the SAM, the EFK, the C&MA, and the EFCA maintain traditional positions. The ethical divide is cutting across the old denominational boundaries, creating new alignment between conservative free evangelical and Alliance churches that share neither the same polity history nor the same founding theology, but find themselves on the same side of the most contested question facing European Christianity.
What this means for the free evangelical family
The Alliance stream and the free evangelical stream were never as separate as their distinct institutional histories suggest. They share common roots in the same revivals, the same missional urgency, and the same alliance logic of evangelical cooperation. Their divergences — on sanctification, on polity, on the role of the supernatural — were real but always secondary to those shared commitments.
What the contemporary convergence in Germany and Sweden illustrates is that the secondary differences are, in practice, yielding to the primary ones under pressure. A secular Europe largely indifferent to Christianity does not provide conditions in which free church federations and Alliance denominations can afford to maintain separate seminaries and separate mission boards out of fidelity to nineteenth-century institutional distinctions.
The alliance principle, which both streams claimed from the beginning, is now doing what it was designed to do.
See also: What is a free evangelical church? | Alliance thinking | What is the free evangelical movement? | Main free evangelical bodies
- On Fredrik Franson’s transatlantic network, see Sigurd Eskeland, Fredrik Franson: World Missionary (Chicago: TEAM, 1946), and more recently the analysis in Dana Robert, Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 84–86.↩︎
- On A.B. Simpson and the C&MA’s founding, see A.W. Tozer, Wingspread: A Study in Spiritual Altitude (Harrisburg: Christian Publications, 1943), and Charles W. Nienkirchen, A.B. Simpson and the Pentecostal Movement (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1992).↩︎
- On the Keswick theology of sanctification and its influence on the Alliance, see Steven Barabas, So Great Salvation: The History and Message of the Keswick Convention (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1952), and Dieter et al., Five Views on Sanctification (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1987).↩︎