For early American Methodists, quarterly meetings were great festivals at the heart of Methodism's liturgical life. The meetings lasted several days and could attract thousands. In this volume, Lester Ruth offers a revisionist description of worship at the quarterly meetings in early American Methodism (ca. 1772-1825). The author describes the quarterly meeting as the setting in which early Methodism most "dramatized" itself for public view as graced fellowship. He explores each of the liturgical dynamics of this experience, including the distinction between public and private worship, the loud exuberance of American Methodists, the vivid proclamation of God's Word, the role of the sacraments and of Wesley's liturgical innovations, the power of fellowship as eschatological manifestation, and the interaction between the personal experience of grace and ecclesial inclusion.

A Real Christian: The Life of John Wesley fills a void in available books in Wesleyan studies by providing a brief, solid biography that focuses on Wesley himself. While exploring Wesley's ancestry, birth, death, and every major biographical and theological event between, Collins also explores the theme of John Wesley's spiritual growth and maturation.

Wesley came to the conclusion that real Christians are those whose inward (and outward) lives have been transformed by the bountiful sanctifying grace of God -- what he termed real Christianity, and this he strove to obtain for himself. Real Christianity, as Wesley understood it, embraces both works of piety and mercy, the person and the social.

No issue more polarizes American Protestants today than the church s stance on homosexuality. In recent years, a number of denominations have engaged in prolonged and divisive debates on the subject, and it appears that these debates will continue to occupy their attention. The contributors to this volume call for the formation of a loyal opposition that is serious in its commitment to the difficult process of reconciliation and forgiveness. Faithfulness to the gospel, they remind readers, requires nothing less than that Christians will be committed to the full inclusion of all persons in the body of Christ not least of all those who disagree theologically and ethically.

The book offers readers a multifaceted argument that the gospel requires a commitment to the full inclusion of all persons in the body of Christ. It focuses on how members of mainline denominations can respond to official denominational positions with which they disagree. Readers are offered an alternative response besides staying in the denomination and remaining silent or leaving the denomination because one disagrees with its official position on this issue.

Contributors include: J. Philip Wogaman, Roy Sano, Stanley Hauerwas, Jeanne Audrey Powers, Victor Paul Furnish, Dale Dunlap, Gil Caldwell, and Joretta Marshall. Foreword by Leontine Kelly.

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The demands of congregational ministry are many, the rewards sometimes seem few, and burnout becomes a real possibility. Small wonder, then, that churches become stuck in a state of arrested spiritual development. When the pastor is functioning in a survival or maintenance mode, the church's vitality is often the first casualty. Yet Wills's own experience demonstrates that churches can turn around; the wind of the Spirit can be felt anew. This happens when the congregation is infected by the vision of what God is doing in their midst--a vision which the leaders, particularly the pastor, must bring before them.

In Waking to God's Dream, Richard Wills shares the spiritual disciplines and insights which he believes account for the transformation of the congregation he serves from a large church in decline to one that is growing and reaching out to its community in a variety of creative ministries. Detailing the steps and initiatives that led to this turnaround, Wills demonstrates how personal commitment on the part of the congregation's leaders and ministers have been the key to the work they have accomplished.

The purpose of this book is simple -- to reclaim a vision for church leadership from the great spiritual awakening known as the Wesleyan movement. Yet the way one goes about this work, contends Lovett H. Weems, Jr., is anything but simple. It involves walking a tightrope between continuity and change. The task is neither to repeat the past, nor to ignore it. Rather the need is to locate the genius behind the achievements of the past from which we can learn for our day. It is to choose selectively those themes and emphases of the Wesleyan movement that can best inform the practice of ministry today, and to seek to grow into them. In order to achieve this, Weems identifies such principles of early Wesleyanism as beginning with where people are, focusing on service, and remembering the poor. He then enumerates practices of Wesleyan leadership, such as leading from the center and the edge, living in tension, and making "connection" happen. Finally, he names the core passions of the Wesleyan spirit: knowing God, proclaiming Christ, and seeking justice.

John Wesley: Holiness of Heart and Life is a six-week study on John Wesley, the major themes of his theology, the spread of Wesleyanism to North America, and renewal in the Wesleyan tradition. Chapters include reflection questions. The Study Guide offers step-by-step plans for each session.

In this fourth edition, the bibliographies define the basic resources for students and instructors of seminary-level courses in United Methodist history, doctrine, and polity, as determined by the Advisory Committee of the Division of Ordained Ministry of the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry of the United Methodist Church.

This essential, completely updated reference tool provides basic bibliographies for students of the Methodist movement and Wesleyan heritage. It identifies standard texts with emphasis on the best modern critical interpretations available. Materials are arranged topically, each entry carrying an item number, with an index for cross-referencing.

Noted author and scholar David McKenna celebrates these simple, yet distinctive foundations and shares with enthusiasm the chalenges facing present-day Wesleyans in his timely new book.

In a time when the United Methodist Connectional System is being questioned throughout the denomination, this volume explains the roots of the system, its rationale, and its success. Chapter essays: Connectionalism and Itinerancy; Constitutional Order in United Methodism and American Culture; African American Methodists; Methodist Identities and the Founding of Methodist Universities; Redesigning Methodist Churches: Auditorium Style Sanctuaries; Wesley's Legacy of Social Holiness; United Methodist Campus Ministry; The Effect of Mergers on American Wesleyan Denominations; Determinants of the Denominational Mission Funding Crisis; and others.

These new essays summarize the latest research by highly respected United Methodist scholars, exploring the distinctive doctrines and discipline of the denomination. Essays include An Untapped Inheritance: American Methodism and Wesley's Practical Theology; The Scripture Way of Salvation: Narrative Spirituality and Biblical Praxis in Early Methodism; Theology, Religious Activity, and Structures of the Lives of Ordinary People; The Doors of Opportunity: Methodist Theological Education, 1866-1925; What Makes "United Methodist Theology" Methodist?; The Church as a Community of Moral Discourse; and Exploring Both the Middle and the Margins: Locating Methodism within American Religious History."

A work that will inspire cross-cultural sensitivity, this practical guide provides a road map to the basic worship practices of the major ethnic and cultural groups in North American Protestantism.

"In Worship Across Cultures, Kathy Black reports information about actual Christian worship practices gathered in collaboration with persons who come from and minister with churches in twenty-one different cultural contexts in the US. This book is a uniquely valuable resource whether for pastors who regularly lead Christian worship in cultural contexts beyond their own, or for persons visiting worship in another context to attend a marriage or a funeral. By approaching the study of worship through description of actual practices, it will inspire cross-cultural sensitivity, as well as providing food for thought and new ideas for worship. I heartily recommend it for laity, pastors, and seminary classes."--Ruth Duck, Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary

A Wesleyan Spiritual Reader provides resources for a 26-week devotional experience. The volume includes Scripture, spiritual readings (primarily quotes from the writings of John Wesley), and an essay by the author. This material is woven into a pattern for daily prayer and reflection. This devotional experience will lead readers to live with Wesley's ideas and spirit as a window or vehicle for reaching God. Among the 26 themes explored are: Scriptural Christianity; Life in Christ; Reaching Out to the Poor; The Means of Grace; Holiness of Life; Justifying Grace; The Ministry of All God's People; Sanctifying Grace; and God's Love and Ours.

While intended for devotional use by both clergy and laity, pastors will also find this a helpful resource for sermon preparation. This wonderful guide to deeper spirituality will become a cherished companion for all who seek to grow in faith and knowledge of God.

8 sessions. This study helps adults understand better the goals and beliefs of the United Methodist Church. This study book includes leader helps, ideal for classes that prefer shared leadership.

While this work takes proper notice of its origins in John Wesley's 18th-century movement in England, it is primarily concerned with the church's origins and history within the United States. Offering an account of the construction and reconstruction of the Methodist church, the authors examine the various institutional practices of the church, its organization, leadership and form of training and incorporating new members. Through their treatment of Methodism as defined by conferences bound together by a commitment to episcopal leadership and animated by various forms of lay piety, the authors help the reader understand the internal history of the denomination and its development in the United States. This student edition, ideal for classes in American Religion, Denominational History, Protestantism, and American social and cultural history, includes a chronology of significant events in the history of the church in the U.S., and concludes with a bibliographic essay intended as a guide for further reading in the history of Methodism.

Histories of women and American religion have tended to focus on women's religious activities rather than on women's religious lives. Studies of early American religion and spirituality have usually depended on the journals and sermons of male preachers. In order to understand the religious lives of ordinary Methodist women, Jean Miller Schmidt has looked at their diaries, letters, spiritual autobiographies, and the accounts of their pious lives and holy deaths that appeared as obituaries in publications like the Methodist Magazine. These powerful stories of faith are part of the shared history of Methodist people.

These sermons are written to be preached. They are inspired, practical, and filled with fascinating illustrations that keep members of a congregation listening for more.
Leonard Mann writes that the ..". purpose of this small book is] to examine some preludes to Pentecost. By these God was anciently leading his people into larger places of spirit and mind, giving them insights for living, incentives for growing, ever making them ready..."
Sermon titles include:
Pentecost: Postscript or Prelude?
The Glory Of Being Human
The Anatomy Of A Journey
Does God Bother About Our Troubles?
Getting A Fix On The Future A Right Use Of Angels
... and more
Leonard Woodson Mann served as pastor of United Methodist churches for 37 years. Now in retirement, he is involved with special occasion preaching, research, and writing. He has written nine books, has been the editor of two volumes, and has been a major contributor to the preaching journal "Emphasis." He received an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from Ohio Northern University and serves as a life member of its Board of Trustees. During his active ministry Mann was senior minister of some of Ohio's largest Methodist congregations.

One of the most surprising developments in contemporary Methodist theology is the degree to which leading Methodist and Wesleyan systematic theologians are reengaging John Wesley, finding his works instructive, provocative, and stimulating for their own theological reflection. Such a broad and purposeful dialogue with Wesley by theologians of the Wesleyan heritage is unprecedented in this century, and much rarer in the previous century than is popularly believed. This volume presents a set of original essays that represent and embody this new engagement allowing the reader to see how several prominent theologians are self-consciously reexamining and reappropriating their theological tradition.

Commissioned by the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry for use in United Methodist doctrine/polity/history courses.

Runyon sets Wesley's own discussion of the "way of salvation" in the larger context of Christian doctrine, beginning with the Creation (and the Fall) and moving through the drama of salvation towards its eschatological fulfillment in the "new creation" of all things.

"This is for me the Wesley book at the end of the century, with new perspectives for the next millennium. Reliable in historical research, brilliantly written, it offers the social witness of John Wesley for today's crises. Professor Runyon gives a coherent picture of Wesley's theology for the Christian oecumene and far beyond. I am very grateful for this book."--Jurgen Moltmann
The New Creation has been translated into 5 languages: Korean, Portuguese, Russian, German, and Spanish."

A study of skilled artisans in the 1820s and 1830s whose evangelical faith raised suspicions toward capitalist innovations.

When industrialization swept through American society in the nineteenth century, it brought with it turmoil for skilled artisans. Changes in technology and work offered unprecedented opportunity for some, but the deskilling of craft and the rise of factory work meant dislocation for others. Journeymen for Jesus explores how the artisan community in one city, Baltimore, responded to these life-changing developments during the years of the early republic.

Baltimore in the Jacksonian years (1820s and 1830s) was America's third largest city. Its unions rivaled those of New York and Philadelphia in organization and militancy, and it was also a stronghold of evangelical Methodism. These circumstances created a powerful mix at a time when workers were confronting the negative effects of industrialism. Many of them found within Methodism and its populist spirituality an empowering force that inspired their refusal to accept dependency and second-class citizenship.

Historians often portray evangelical Protestantism as either a top-down means of social control or as a bottom-up process that created passive workers. Sutton, however, reveals a populist evangelicalism that undergirded the producer tradition dominant among those supportive of trade union goals. Producers were not socialists or social democrats, but they were anticapitalist and reform-minded. In populist evangelicalism they discovered a potent language and ethic for their discontent.

Journeymen for Jesus presents a rich and unromanticized portrait of artisan culture in early America. In the process, itadds to our understanding of the class tensions present in Jacksonian America.

Founded by free people of color in Philadelphia in the aftermath of the American Revolution, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church emerged in the nineteenth century as the preeminent black institution in the United States. In 1896, the church opened mission work in South Africa, absorbing an independent ""Ethiopian"" church founded by dissident African Christians a few years earlier. In the process, the church helped ignite one of the most influential popular movements in South African history. Songs of Zion examines this remarkable historical convergence from both sides of the Atlantic. James Campbell charts the origins and evolution of black American independent churches, arguing that the very act of becoming Christian forced African Americans to reflect on their relationship to their ancestral continent. He then turns to South Africa, exploring the AME Church's entrance and evolution in a series of specific South African contexts. Throughout the book, Campbell focuses on the comparisons that Africans and African Americans themselves drew between their situations. Their transatlantic encounter, he argues, enabled both groups to understand and act upon their worlds in new ways. |Discusses the interaction between the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and in South Africa, arguing that each group influenced the other to understand and act on their worlds in new ways.

With a historian's precision and a passion for social justice, Alice Knotts shows in this book how the activities of the Methodist women's movement for civil rights developed decade by decade. Their activities were rarely in the public eye, yet they were shaping and being shaped by events and public opinion.

An astute and insightful history, Fellowship of Love documents the contributions of white Methodist women in the American civil rights struggle. The research for this volume has won the Jessie Lee Prize from the General Commission on Archives and History of The United Methodist Church. It documents in one volume otherwise disparate information important to understanding the contributions of women in the Methodist Church to race struggles in 20th-century America. 0687030870671 Many pastors are stymied by lack of activity, the barring of doors, and the erecting of barriers. They want to make a change. They know that change is necessary to break through gridlock and conflict, but they do not know what skills and techniques are needed to deliver the desired results.

In Unlocking Church Doors: 10 Keys to Positive Change, Paul Mundey provides

According to The Book of Discipline, Wesley believed that the "living core of the Christian faith" is revealed in Scripture, illumined by tradition, "vivified" by personal experience, and confirmed by reason. The thesis of Wesley and the Quadrilateral is that the Church needs serious conversation about reappropriating the Quadrilateral in a manner that is consistent with historical Methodist identity (beginning with Wesley), a conversation that takes the church's past identity with the utmost seriousness while recognizing present and future cultural trends.

In the Methodist lexicon, 'conference' refers to a body of preachers (and later, of laity as well) that exercises legislative, judicial, and executive functions for the church or some portion thereof. 'Conference, ' says Richey, defined Methodism in more than political ways: on conference hinged religious time, religious space, religious belonging, religious structure, even religiosity itself. Methodist histories uniformly recognize, typically even feature, conference's centrality, but describe that in primarily constitutional and political terms. The purpose of this volume is to present conference as a distinctively American Methodist manner of being the church, a multifaceted mode of spirituality, unity, mission, governance, and fraternity that American Methodists have lived and operated better than they have interpreted.

Of the many hymnbooks published by John and Charles Wesley, the most important was A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists (1780). Taking this volume as a case study and concentrating on the Charles Wesley hymns included in it, Teresa Berger clarifies the relationship between the language of doxology of worship and praise of God and the substance of theological reflection. She identifies the central theological themes and emphases in this body of hymnody, and raises the question of how theology can be embodied in hymns. Central to her argument is the claim that the theological analysis of doxological material is possible only when it takes care to recognize and safeguard the characteristics, the criteria of authenticity, and the tests of authority and legitimacy peculiar to doxological language. Part One of the book sets the whole discussion within the context of a renewed interest in doxological and liturgical traditions across Christianity by showing how the relationship of doxology and theology is an important topic of theological discussion in Roman Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and ecumenical circles. Part Two is devoted to a thorough theological analysis of the central themes and images of the 1780 Collection. Part Three attempts to clarify the nature of doxology in its relation to theology.