Yoke of Obedience

Women in the United Methodist tradition have long expressed their commitment to Christ and to their sisters and brothers. Here is a collection of essays and primary source documents that tells the stories of pioneering ministries of United Methodist women--of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds--from the eighteenth century. Each essay traces the individual faith journeys and self-understanding of its subject. The stories also reveal the sexism and racism that confronted each woman overtly or covertly in church and society, as well as their own attitudes toward it.

A selection of primary source documents by the subject follows each essay; these personal statements express vividly each woman's vision of vocation. In this way, the volume provides a lens for interpreting and analyzing the subjects' lives through their own words and enables women and men of today to identify with the commitment, experiences, and struggles of these pioneers and apply them to their own faith journeys. Thus, through the witness of these women, Spirituality and Social Responsibility calls the church to accountability and discipleship, both pastorally and prophetically.

Asserting that the "return to Wesley" that is represented in the Quadrilateral is "intellectually wrongheaded," William J. Abraham argues that the Quadrilateral is not, and should not be, United Methodist doctrine. Abraham's lively treatise makes a provocative appeal for a reasoned exploration of the significance of the UMC's doctrinal identity. He reveals how churches have faced incompatible doctrinal proposals within their midst and examines the specific issues facing the United Methodist church as a whole.

For the first time, students of Wesley have access to Albert C. Outler's widely acclaimed "introduction" to Volume 1 of The Works of John Wesley in a single inexpensive paperback.

No student of John Wesley will need to be reminded of Albert Outler's stature, or the significance of his contribution to twentieth-century Wesleyan studies.

Contents A Career in Retrospect The Preacher and His Preaching The Sermon Corpus Theological Method and the Problems of development Wesley and His Sources On Reading Wesley's Sermons

This first effort at constructive Wesleyan theology to appear in United Methodist circles since the formation of the denomination in 1868 draws on the historical and literary work that has characterized Wesley studies in recent years. However, it moves beyond them to propose a way of reconstructing essential elements of Wesley's thought in service of the life and mission of United Methodists today.

Throughout this book, Scott J. Jones insists that for United Methodists the ultimate goal of doctrine is holiness. Importantly, he clarifies the nature and the specific claims of "official" United Methodist doctrine in a way that moves beyond the current tendency to assume the only alternatives are a rigid dogmatism or an unfettered theological pluralism. In classic Wesleyan form, Jones' driving concern is with recovering the vital role of forming believers in the "mind of Christ, " so that they might live more faithfully in their many settings in our world.

The Elect Methodists is the first full-length academic study of Calvinistic Methodism, a movement that emerged in the eighteenth century as an alternative to the better known Wesleyan grouping. While the branch of Methodism led by John Wesley has received significant historical attention, Calvinistic Methodism, especially in England, has not. The book charts the sources of the eighteenth-century Methodist revival in the context of Protestant evangelicalism emerging in continental Europe and colonial North America, and then proceeds to follow the fortunes in both England and Wales of the Calvinistic branch, to the establishing of formal denominations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

A history of the New Room and of Methodism in Bristol and Kingswood in the time of John and Charles Wesley and the subsequent history of the building.The first full-scale history of the New Room, Bristol - the oldest Methodist Chapel in the world. It was built by John Wesley in 1739 and is the cradle of Methodism.