The church needed to be returned to the people and so Alline moved to find the church's earlier purer form. He rejected the power structures in the church, its idea of predestination, and many of its traditions and ceremonial practices. He may have been "the first North American evangelical to argue the case against predestination." The new teaching revealed that all people have free will and so can be reborn into a personal relationship with God. He portrayed an eternally-loving God, who was waiting for those chose to take the right path. Those ideas were heavily influenced by earlier writers such as William Law.