Through an examination of Methodist mission to Southeast Asia at the turn of the twentieth century, this broad-ranging book unites the history of globalization with the history of Christian mission and the history of Southeast Asia. The book explores the international connections forged by the Methodist Episcopal Church's Malaysia Mission between 1885 and 1915, putting them in the context of a wave of globalization that was sweeping the world at that time, including significant developments in Southeast Asia. To establish intellectual connections between the study of globalization and this historical setting, the book suggests six metaphors for understanding the mission. Each metaphor is based on some aspect of secular globalization: the Methodist connection as a migratory network, mission agencies as multinational corporations, the Malaysia Mission as a franchise system, the Methodist Episcopal Church as a media conglomerate, mission institutions as civil society organizations, and Methodist mission as a global vision. In chapters exploring each metaphor separately, the book reviews how each form of secular globalization functions to create transnational connections before examining the details of how the Malaysia Mission functioned in a similar fashion. Along the way, the book investigates the lives of all involved in the mission: missionaries, church members of the mission, and mission supporters. Although Southeast Asia (including the Straits Settlements, Federated Malay States, Sarawak, and Netherlands Indies) and the United States are important geographic foci for the book, India, China, Britain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Germany, Australia, and Canada all have parts to play. In exploring these metaphors, the book draws on several scholarly fields including migration studies, business history, media studies, political theory, and cultural history, blending them together into a social history of the mission. By so doing, it identifies both ways in which the effects of Christian mission paralleled other globalizing forces and unique contributions Christian mission made to turn-of-the-twentieth-century globalization.

Despite the fact that women are often mentioned as having played instrumental roles in the establishment of Methodism on the Continent of Europe, very little detail concerning the women has ever been provided to add texture to this historical tapestry. This book of essays redresses this by launching a new and wider investigation into the story of pioneering Methodist women in Europe. By bringing to light an alternative set of historical narratives, this edited volume gives voice to a broad range of religious issues and concerns during the critical period in European history between 1869 and 1939. Covering a range of nations in Continental Europe, some important interpretive themes are suggested, such as the capacity of women to network, their ability to engage in God's work, and their skill at navigating difficult cultural boundaries. This ground breaking study will be of significant interest to scholars of Methodism, but also to students and academics working in history, religious studies, and gender.

A Will to Choose traces the history of African-American Methodism beginning with their emergence in the fledgling American Methodist movement in the 1760s. Responding to Methodism's anti-slavery stance, African-Americans joined the new movement in large numbers and by the end of the eighteenth century, had made up the largest minority in the Methodist church, filling positions of authority as class leaders, exhorters, and preachers. Through the first half of the nineteenth century, African Americans used the resources of the church in their struggle for liberation from slavery and racism in the secular culture.

This book assesses the conceptualisation of international mission in the Methodist Church Ghana. It demonstrates that Ghanaian Methodists possess a robust ecclesiology with roots in the Akan concept of "abusua" and an evangelical theology rooted in John Wesley. The author gives interpretations to the ways mission takes place and proposes twelve models of mission whereby members of diasporic communities are agents of mission. As mission is seen a responsibility of the whole church, mission is a common theme related to the migration of Ghanaian Methodists to other contexts, often understood in terms of in the global North. The church's presence in North America and Europe presents challenges and opportunities that must be negotiated in a broader Methodist mainline milieu.

Most Wesleyan-Holiness churches started in the US, developing out of the Methodist roots of the nineteenth-century Holiness Movement. The American origins of the Holiness movement have been charted in some depth, but there is currently little detail on how it developed outside of the US. This book seeks to redress this imbalance by giving a history of North American Wesleyan-Holiness churches in Australia, from their establishment in the years following the Second World War, as well as of The Salvation Army, which has nineteenth-century British origins. It traces the way some of these churches moved from marginalised sects to established denominations, while others remained small and isolated. Looking at The Church of God (Anderson), The Church of God (Cleveland), The Church of the Nazarene, The Salvation Army, and The Wesleyan Methodist Church in Australia, the book argues two main points. Firstly, it shows that rather than being American imperialism at work, these religious expressions were a creative partnership between like-minded evangelical Christians from two modern nations sharing a general cultural similarity and set of religious convictions. Secondly, it demonstrates that it was those churches that showed the most willingness to be theologically flexible, even dialling down some of their Wesleyan distinctiveness, that had the most success. This is the first book to chart the fascinating development of Holiness churches in Australia. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of Wesleyans and Methodists, as well as religious history and the sociology of religion more generally.

A response to the prominent Methodist historian David Hempton's call to analyse women's experience within Methodism, this book is the first to deal with British Methodist women preachers over the entire nineteenth century. The author covers women preachers in Wesley's lifetime, the reason why some Methodist sects allowed women to preach and others did not, and the experience of Bible Christian and Primitive Methodist female evangelists before 1850. She also describes the many other ways in which women supported their chapel communities. The book also includes discussion of the careers of mid-century women revivalists, the opportunities home and foreign missions offered for female evangelism, the emergence of deaconess evangelists and Sisters of the People in late century, and the brief revival of female itinerancy among the Bible Christians. -- .

This is a study of the transplantation of a creed devised by and for African Americans--the African Methodist Episcopal Church--that was appropriated and transformed in a variety of South African contexts. Focusing on a transatlantic institution like the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the book studies the complex human and intellectual traffic that has bound African American and South African experience. It explores the development and growth of the African Methodist Episcopal Church both in South Africa and America, and the interaction between the two churches. This is a highly innovative work of comparative and religious history. Its linking of the United States and African black religious experiences is unique and makes it appealing to readers interested in religious history and black experience in both the United States and South Africa.

This resource displays the variety of ways in which the Wesleys' concept of 'the religion of the heart' (that is, the affective dimension of Christian faith) has been understood and embodied in the Methodist tradition. The author then offers some practical suggestions on how a livelier piety, a more deeply felt faith, can be fostered in local congregations, without leading into anti-intellectualism, fanatical emotionalism or maudlin sentimentality. This part approaches theology, worship, preaching, pastoral care, and educational ministry.

Why did the Wesleyan Methodists and the Anglican evangelicals divide during the middle of the eighteenth century? Many would argue that the division between them was based narrowly on theological matters, especially predestination and perfection. Ryan Danker suggests, however, that politics was a major factor throughout, driving the Wesleyan Methodists and Anglican evangelicals apart. Methodism was perceived to be linked with the radical and seditious politics of the Cromwellian period. This was a charged claim in a post-Restoration England. Likewise Danker explores the political force of resurgent Tory influence under George III, which exerted more pressure on evangelicals to prove their loyalty to the Establishment. These political realities made it hard for evangelicals in the Church of England to cooperate with Wesley and meant that all their theological debates were politically inflected. Rich in detail, here is a book for all who seek deeper insight into a critical juncture in the development of evangelicalism and early Methodism.

While the most standard treatments of John Wesley's theology focus their attention on his distinctive 'way of salvation', they fail to provide a thorough examination of Wesley's 'means of grace.' This book offers the first detailed discussion of the means of grace as the liturgical, communal, and devotional context within which growth in the Christian life actually occurred. Knight shows how the means of grace together form an interrelated pattern that enables a growing relationship with God.

Methodism has played a major role in all areas of public life in Australia but has been particularly significant for its influence on education, social welfare, missions to Aboriginal people and the Pacific Islands and the role of women. Drawing together a team of historical experts, Methodism in Australia presents a critical introduction to one of the most important religious movements in Australia's settlement history and beyond. Offering ground-breaking regional studies of the development of Methodism, this book considers a broad range of issues including Australian Methodist religious experience, worship and music, Methodist intellectuals, and missions to Australia and the Pacific.

John William Fletcher (1729-1785) was a seminal theologian during the early Methodist movement and in the Church of England in the eighteenth century. Best known for the Checks to Antinomianism, he established a theology of history to defend the church against the encroachment of antinomianism as a polemic against hyper-Calvinism. Fletcher believed that the hyper-Calvinist system of divine fiat and finished salvation did not take seriously enough either the activity of God in salvation history or an individual believer's personal progress in salvation. Fletcher made the doctrine of accommodation a unifying principle of his theological system and further developed the doctrine of divine accommodation into a theology of ministry. As God accommodated divine revelation to the frailties of human beings, Fletcher argued that ministers of the gospel must accommodate the gospel to their hearers in order to gain a hearing for the gospel without losing the goal of true Christianity. 'True Christianity' contains insights from Fletcher, who devoted himself, according to Wesley, to being 'an altogether Christian'.

John Wesley has arguably influenced more English-speaking Christians than any other Protestant interpreter. One reason for this wide influence is that Wesley often spoke about the "heart" and its "affections"-that realm of life where all humans experience their deepest satisfactions, as well as some of their deepest conundrums. However, one of the problems of interpreting and appropriating Wesley is that we have been blinded to Wesley's actual views about "heart religion" by contemporary stereotypes about "affections" or "emotions." Because of this, it is rare that either Wesley's friends or his critics appreciate his sophisticated understanding of affective reality. To make clear what Wesley meant when he emphasized the renewal of the heart, Gregory S. Clapper summarizes some recent paradigm-changing accounts of the nature of "emotion" produced by contemporary philosophers and theologians, and then applies them to Wesley's conception of the heart and its affections. These accounts of emotion throw new light on Wesley's vision of Christianity as a renewal of the heart and make it possible to reclaim the language of the heart, not as a pandering or manipulative rhetoric, but as the framework for a comprehensive theological vision of Christian life and thought. The book closes with several practical applications that make clear the power of Wesley's vision to transform lives today.

Perceptible inspiration, a term used by John Wesley to describe the complicated relationship between Holy Spirit, religious knowledge, and the nature of spiritual being, is not unlike the term 'Methodist' which was also coined by critics of Methodism during the eighteenth century in Britain. John Wesley's adversaries, especially the pseudonymous John Smith with whom Wesley exchanged letters for a period of three years, frequently challenged the plausibility of direct spiritual sensation, which Wesley defended. What does Wesley mean by perceptible inspiration? What does the teaching reveal about the nature and existence of God in Wesley's thinking? What does it suggest about the spiritual nature of humankind? In John Wesley's Pneumatology, it is argued that 'perceptible inspiration' more than a sidebar of Methodist thought, offers a useful model for considering the various features of Wesley's views on the work of the Spirit in relation to human existence, participatory religious knowledge, and moral theology.

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.

Teaching on the sanctification of Christians using the difficult word "perfection" has been part of Christian spirituality through the centuries. The Fathers spoke of it and Augustine particularly contributed his penetrating analysis of human motivation in terms of love. Medieval theologians such as Bernard and Thomas Aquinas developed the tradition and wrote of levels or "degrees" of "perfection" in love.However, the doctrine has not fared so well among Protestants. John Wesley was the one major Protestant leader who tried to blend this ancient tradition of Christian "perfection" with the Reformation proclamation of justification by grace through faith. This book seeks to develop Wesley's synthesis of patristic and Reformation theology in order to consider how Christian "perfection" can be expressed in a more nuanced way in today's culture. Noble examines what basis may be found for Wesley's understanding of sanctification in the central doctrines of the church, particularly the atonement, the doctrine of Christ, and the most comprehensive of all Christian doctrines, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. What he sets out is a fully trinitarian theology of holiness.

Methodism played an important part in the spread of Christianity from its European heartlands to the Americas, Asia, Africa and the Pacific. From John Wesley's initial reluctance, via haphazard ventures and over-ambitious targets, a well-organized and supported Wesleyan Society developed. Smaller branches of British Methodism undertook their own foreign missions. This book, together with a companion volume on the 20th century, offers an account of the overseas mission activity of British and Irish Methodists, its roots and fruits. John Pritchard explores many aspects of mission, ranging from Labrador to New Zealand and from Sierra Leone to Sri Lanka, from open air preaching to political engagement, from the isolation of early pioneers to the creation of self-governing churches. Tracing the nineteenth-century missionary work of the Churches with Wesleyan roots which went on to unite in 1932, Pritchard explores the shifting theologies and attitudes of missionaries who crossed cultural and geographical frontiers as well as those at home who sent and supported them. Necessarily selective in the personalities and events it describes, this book offers a comprehensive overview of a world-changing movement - a story packed with heroism, mistakes, achievements, frustrations, arguments, personalities, rascals and saints.

Believe anything you want. The twentieth century has brought with it a myriad of opinions, philosophies, doctrines and ideologies. Each one of them important; each one valid. And the world says, 'Believe what you want.' Authors Wes Tracy and Stan Ingersol have authored Here We Stand to shatter that conclusion. More than ever, it is important that we know what we believe. Here We Stand is a comprehensive study of a wide range of beliefs and where Nazarenes fit into the ideological puzzle. Tracy and Ingersol provide the most contemporary and complete overview of major religions and religious beliefs since Why I Am a Nazarene . Nazarenes have the unique opportunity to reestablish their identity with a new generation of people. Here We Stand gives a clear view into other traditions in a language and approach understood by today's pastors and laymen. Here We Stand contributes to the distinctiveness of each group without sacrificing the Christian community as a whole. Pastors, Sunday School teachers and new Christians will find this unabridged version of the book What Is a Nazarene? an excellent resource because it lends a knowledgeable, objective voice to discussions of doctrine, witnessing and spirituality. Here We Stand provides the historical and theological background needed to establish identity and ownership among new and life-long Nazarenes. Kivar.

During the last 40 years a considerable amount of scholarly attention has been given to John Wesley's way of doing theology. There is extensive debate within Wesleyan circles (particularly in North America) regarding the conception and utility of his theological method, usually identified as the Wesleyan quadrilateral (Scripture, reason, tradition and experience). Many claim it is a unique and fruitful model, with invaluable application for the church today. In this book, Wesley's theological methodology is uncovered from the perspective of his holistic vision of the God-human relationship being centred in love and defined by the qualities of trust and passion, rather than an intellectual comprehension of propositional truths about God. Accordingly, pastoral theology is much more important than academic, systematic theology for Christian experience and spiritual formation. In Wesley's theological method Scripture, reason, community ethos and Christian experience are utilised in an interconnected dynamic network, energised by the presence of the Holy Spirit. God is clearly the sole theological authority and the elements of the system are the means he uses for communication with his people.