Methodist missionary Thomas Birch Freeman (1809 1890) was one of the most successful missionaries of his day, founding churches in Nigeria and the Gold Coast. The son of an African father and English mother, he possessed great diplomatic skills in dealing with colonial administrators and native rulers, and Methodist churches spread rapidly using literate converts as lay preachers, particularly among freed and repatriated slaves. His resignation was caused by financial problems due to poor accounting. His Journal was serialised in a Methodist periodical between 1840 and 1843, published as a book in 1843, and revised the following year. His attempts to get the slave trade and the practice of human sacrifice abolished in Dahomey were frustrated, but he was much more successful in founding missions. The book is a fascinating picture of life in West Africa in the mid-nineteenth century.

Holliday Bickerstaff Kendall (1844 1919) was a Methodist minister and a social historian. Born into a family of Primitive Methodist ministers, Kendall himself served as a minister between 1864 and 1903. This volume, written during his retirement and first published in 1919, contains Kendall's history of the origins and development of the Primitive Methodist movement. The movement originated with Hugh Bourne (1772 1852) and William Clowes (1780 1851), who attempted to restore the mass evangelism they thought had been lost in the Wesleyan Church after 1810. Kendall explores the social and political context of this period, and discusses Bourne's and Clowes' influence on the origins of the movement. He then describes the growth and development of the movement in the nineteenth century, discussing the expansion of the church until 1918. This clear and concise volume is considered the definitive work on the history of the movement.

A leading figure in the Evangelical Revival in eighteenth-century England, John Wesley (1703 1791) is the founding father of Methodism and, by extension, of the holiness and Pentecostal movements. This Cambridge Companion offers a general, comprehensive introduction to Wesley s life and work, and to his theological and ecclesiastical legacy. Written from various disciplinary perspectives, including history, literature, theology, and religious studies, this volume will be an invaluable aid to scholars and students, including those encountering the work and thought of Wesley for the first time.

This is a major new study of the daily life and spirituality of early Methodist men and women. Phyllis Mack challenges traditional, negative depictions of early Methodism through an analysis of a vast array of primary sources - prayers, pamphlets, hymns, diaries, recipes, private letters, accounts of dreams, rules for housekeeping - many of which have never been used before. She examines how ordinary men and women understood the seismic shift from the religious culture of the seventeenth century to the so-called 'disenchantment of the world' that developed out of the Enlightenment. She places particular emphasis on the experience of women, arguing that both their spirituality and their contributions to the movement were different from men's. This revisionist account sheds new light on how ordinary people understood their experience of religious conversion, marriage, worship, sexuality, friendship, and the supernatural, and what motivated them to travel the world as missionaries.

"American Methodist Worship is the most comprehensive history of worship among John Wesley's various American spiritual descendents that has ever been written. It will be a foundational book for anyone who wishes to understand how American Methodists have worshipped."-Sacramental Life
"This groundbreaking study will help to reshape the way that we think about early American Methodist worship and how it connects to more recent trends."-- The Journal of Religion
"Karen Westerfield Tucker's exhaustive examination of the history of American Methodist worship may indeed launch a new genre in liturgical historiography: denominational liturgical histories. The genius of this contribution is its comprehensiveness in examining for the first time the worship life of an American ecclesiological tradition."--Doxology

With the decision to provide of a scholarly edition of the Works of John Wesley in the 1950s, Methodist Studies emerged as a fresh academic venture. Building on the foundation laid by Frank Baker, Albert Outler, and other pioneers of the discipline, this handbook provides an overview of the best current scholarship in the field. The forty-two included essays are representative of the voices of a new generation of international scholars, summarising and expanding on topical research, and considering where their work may lead Methodist Studies in the future.
Thematically ordered, the handbook provides new insights into the founders, history, structures, and theology of Methodism, and into ongoing developments in the practice and experience of the contemporary movement. Key themes explored include worship forms, mission, ecumenism, and engagement with contemporary ethical and political debate.

A critical contribution to the history of Britain and the U.S., this book demonstrates how the search for personal supernatural power lay at the heart of the so-called eighteenth-century English evangelical revival. John Kent rejects the view that the Wesleys rescued the British from moral and spiritual decay by reviving primitive Christianity. The study is of interest to everyone concerned with the history of Methodism and the Church of England, the Evangelical tradition, and eighteenth-century religious thought and experience.

Challenging the traditional interpretation that the years between Reconstruction and World War I were a period when blacks made only marginal advances in religion, politics, and social life, John Giggie contends that these years marked a critical turning point in the religious history of southern blacks. In this ground-breaking first book, Giggie connects these changes in religious life in the Delta region - whose popularity was predominantly black but increasingly ruled by white supremacists - to the Great Migration and looks at how they impacted the new urban lives of those who made the exodus to the north. Rather than a straight narrative, the chapters present a range of ways blacks in the Delta experimented with new forms of cultural expression and how they looked for spiritual meaning in the face of racial violence. Giggie traces how experiences with the railroad became a part of spiritual life, how consumer marketing built religious identities, ways that fraternal societies became tied in with churches, the role of material culture in unifying religious identity across the Delta, and the backlash against the worldliness of black churches and the growth of alternate practices. The study take into account folk religion as well as a panopoly of institutions - black Baptist churches, African Methodist Episcopal church, Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, black conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and churches that formed the African-American Holiness movement - and looks at how they vigorously quarreled over the proper definition of religious organization, worship, and consumption. Vivid evidence comes from black denominational newspapers, published and unpublished ex-slave interviews conducted by the Works Progress Administration, legal transcripts, autobiographies, and recordings of black music and oral expression. This work is an excellent fit with the strengths of the OUP lists in African American, Southern, and religious history.

The ways in which people change and grow, and learn to become good, are not only about conscious decisions to behave well, but about internal change which allows a loving and compassionate response to others. Such change can take place in psychotherapy; this book explores whether similar processes can occur in a religious context. Using the work of Julia Kristeva and other post-Kleinian psychoanalysts, change and resistance to change are examined in the lives of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, and his brother Charles, the greatest English hymn-writer. Their mother's description of them as young men as 'two scrubby travellers', was a prescient expression indicating their future pilgrimage, which they negotiated through many struggles and compromises; it points towards the 'wounded healer', a description which could be applied to John in later years. The use of psychoanalytic thought in this study allows the exploration of unconscious as well as conscious processes at work and interesting differences emerge, which shed light on the elements in religion that promote or inhibit change, and the influence of personality factors. 'Two scrubby travellers': A psychoanalytic view of flourishing and constraint in religion through the lives of John and Charles Wesley enriches our understanding of these two important historical figures. It questions the categorising of forms of religion as conducive to change and so 'mature', and other forms as 'immature', at a time when many, particularly young people, are attracted by fundamentalist, evangelical forms of belief. This book will be essential reading for researchers working at the intersection of psychoanalysis and religious studies; it will also be of interest to psychotherapists and psychoanalysts more generally, and to researchers in the philosophy of religion.

John Jea (b. 1773) and George White (b. 1764-c.1830) were two of the earliest African American autobiographers, each writing nearly a half-century before Frederick Douglass. Jea and White represent an earlier generation of African Americans who were born into slavery but granted their freedom shortly after American independence. Both chose to fight against slavery from the pulpit, as itinerant Methodist ministers in the North; Methodism’s staunch anti-slavery stance, acceptance of African American congregants, and use of itinerant preachers enhanced black religious practices and services in the late 18th century and throughout the 19th century. Graham Hodges’ substantial introduction to the book places these two narratives into historical context, and highlights several key themes, including slavery in the North, the struggle for black freedom after the Revolution, and the rise of African American Christianity.

This is an anthology of the writings of Charles Wesley. Best known for his hymns, such as `Hark! the Herald Angels Sing', and `Jesus, Lover of My Soul', Charles was the younger brother of John Wesley and the co-founder of Methodism. Despite his importance in the history of Protestantism, there is no collection of his writings in print, and indeed, little work has been done specifically on Charles in the last two generations. Tyson presents a chronologically arranged selection of the journals, sermons, letters, hymns, and poems in such a way as to both outline Wesley's life and illuminate the leading elements of his thought.

The first presentation of John Wesley's doctrinal teachings in a systematic form that is also faithful to Wesley's own writings. Wesley was a prolific writer and commentator on Scripture, yet it is commonly held that he was not systematic or internally consistent in his theology and doctrinal teachings. On the contrary, Thomas C. Oden intends to demonstrate here that Wesley displayed a remarkable degree of consistency over sixty years of preaching and ministry. The book helps readers to grasp Wesley's essential teachings in an accessible form so that the person desiring to go directly to Wesley's own writings (which fill eighteen volumes) will know exactly where to turn. This volume focuses on the main doctrinal teachings of Wesley. Subsequent volumes in this series will deal with his pastoral and ethical teachings.

Scholars have historically associated John Wesley's educational endeavours with the boarding school he established at Kingswood, near Bristol, in 1746. However, his educational endeavours extended well beyond that single institution, even to non-Methodist educational programmes. This book sets out Wesley's thinking and practice concerning child-rearing and education, particularly in relation to gender and class, in its broader eighteenth-century social and cultural context. Drawing on writings from Churchmen, Dissenters, economists, philosophers and reformers as well as educationalists, this study demonstrates that the political, religious and ideological backdrop to Wesley's work was neither static nor consistent. It also highlights Wesley's eighteenth-century fellow Evangelicals including Lady Huntingdon, John Fletcher, Hannah More and Robert Raikes to demonstrate whether Wesley's thinking and practice around schooling was in any way unique. This study sheds light on how Wesley's attitudes to education were influencing and influenced by the society in which he lived and worked. As such, it will be of great interest to academics with an interest in Methodism, education and eighteenth-century attitudes towards gender and class.

In 1992, Kevin Annett an ordained minister with the United Church of Canada in Port Alberni on British Columbia's Vancouver Island a logging town half populated with native Indians, discovered a history of abuse and atrocities ranging from torture sodomy and rape to murder suggesting genocide among the native children in the church's residential school which had taken place for more than a century. It later was revealed that such was the case in more than 140 schools run by the major churches with the complicity of the Canadian government. Refusing to remain silent he was defrocked by his Presbytery. For 15 years he has conducted a one man campaign for justice and the revision of colonial laws for a race of subjugated people.

Church and Chapel in Industrializing Society: Anglican Ministry and Methodism in Shropshire, 1760-1785 envelopes a new and provocative revisionist history of Methodism and the Church of England in the eighteenth century, challenging the Church's perception as a varied body with myriad obstacles which it dutifully and substantially confronted (if not always successfully) through the maintenance of an ecclesiastically and theologically rooted pastoral ideal. This model was lived out 'on the ground' by the parish clergy, many of whom were demonstrably innovative and conscientious in fulfilling their pastoral vocation vis-a-vis the new demands presented by the social, ecclesiastical, political, and economic forces of the day, not least of which was the rise of industrialisation. Contrary to the effete arguments of older cadre church historians, heavily reliant on the nineteenth-century denominational histories and primarily the various forms of Methodism, this book provides a thoroughly researched study of the ministry of John William Fletcher, incumbent of the parish of Madeley at the heart of the industrial revolution, whose own work along with that of his Evangelically minded Anglican-Methodist colleagues found the Church of England sufficiently strong and remarkably flexible enough to rigorously and creatively do the work of the Church alongside their non-Anglican Evangelical counterparts. Despite the manifest challenges of industrializing society, residual dissent, and competition from the Church's rivals, the Establishment was not incapable of competing in the religious marketplace.

Revised and updated, this popular book shows pastors and worship leaders the basics of United Methodist worship.

In this straightforward and updated commentary, Hoyt Hickman explains the basic pattern of United Methodist worship within the broader context of Christian worship. Drawing upon five basic principles, the author explains the formative nature of worship and how it can revitalize persons' lives. These principles are: God's Word is primary; active congregational participation is crucial; spontaneity and order are both important; worship should be relevant and inclusive; and worship is communion. This revision will highlight the African-American contribution to UM worship, discuss at greater length what the various worship styles mean for us today, say more about the formative nature of worship, and include updated resources including the Abingdon Worship Annual, the Abingdon Preaching Annual, and WorshipConnection.

Explains basic resources for planning and leading worship. Gives the basic pattern of UM worship and its origins. Gives practical suggestions how to renew and revitalize worship. Helps pastors be effective leaders in planning and revitalizing worship. Helps pastors understand and communicate the uniqueness of UM worship. Helps pastors lead their congregation into a deeper and richer experience of God through worship.

A Perfect Love is the full text of Wesley's "A Plain Account of Christian Perfection" edited and updated for the contemporary reader. It also includes in-text definitions and notes that explain names and terms that may be unfamiliar to the reader, as well as hymns by Charles Wesley that describe the work of grace in human lives that leads to perfection in love. The term Christian perfection, as Wesley used and understood it, may be translated as "Christian maturity"; it is the outcome of a life lived with and for God in Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Key features of this text: * How to study the text * Author and historical background * General and detailed summaries * Commentary on themes, structure, characters, language and style * Glossaries * Test questions and issues to consider * Essay writing advice * Cultural connections * Literary terms * Illustrations * Colour design