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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

For almost 200 years, the city of Birmingham has been a key location for the training of clergy. From 1828 Anglican clergy studied at the Queen's College and in 1881 the Methodist Church developed their own training facility at Handsworth College. In this book, Andrew Chandler tells the tale of these two colleges. This is a history not simply of the creation and evolution of these two religious institutions, but a study full of significance for the wider history of Christianity in British society across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The foundation of both colleges occurred in a confident age of civic progress and reform and their subsequent histories reveal much that was at work in the experience of the British churches at large. They were at first expressions of denominational identity and a determination to educate a class of clergy. In time they found themselves negotiating new prospects within the ecumenical currents of a later age and the deepening realities of secularization. In 1970 they united. This is a book which blends local, national and international dimensions and also shows how the two theological colleges came to embrace all kinds of intellectual, cultural, social and political history in a period of restless change.

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.

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.

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."

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."

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

With the conclusion of the Civil War, the beginnings of Reconstruction, and the realities of emancipation, former slaves were confronted with the possibility of freedom and, with it, a new way of life. In The Times Were Strange and Stirring, Reginald F. Hildebrand examines the role of the Methodist Church in the process of emancipation--and in shaping a new world at a unique moment in American, African American, and Methodist history.Hildebrand explores the ideas and ideals of missionaries from several branches of Methodism--the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, and the northern-based Methodist Episcopal Church--and the significant and highly charged battle waged between them over the challenge and meaning of freedom. He traces the various strategies and goals pursued by these competing visions and develops a typology of some of the ways in which emancipation was approached and understood.Focusing on individual church leaders such as Lucius H. Holsey, Richard Harvey Cain, and Gilbert Haven, and with the benefit of extensive research in church archives and newspapers, Hildebrand tells the dramatic and sometimes moving story of how missionaries labored to organize their denominations in the black South, and of how they were overwhelmed at times by the struggles of freedom.

These twelve sermons by renowned author and pastor William Willimon, with responses by theologian Stanley Hauerwas, demonstrate the fruitfulness and difficulty of the interaction between theologians and practicing pastors. In this book, the authors suggest an intriguing way to think about theological work within the church. In this intriguing book, the authors suggest a new way to think about theological work within the church.

The Central Jurisdiction was created for African American members of the merger in 1939 of: The Methodist Episcopal Church, The Methodist Episcopal Church South, and The Methodist Protestant Church.

Offering a revisionist reading of American Methodism, this book goes beyond the limits of institutional history by suggesting a new and different approach to the examination of denominations. Russell E. Richey identifies within Methodism four distinct "languages" and explores the self-understanding that each language offers the early Methodists. One of these, a pietistic or evangelical vernacular, commonly employed in sermons, letters, and journals, is Richey's focus and provides a way for him to reconsider critical interpretive issues in American religious historiography and the study of Methodism. Richey challenges some important historical conventions, for instance, that the crucial changes in American Methodism occurred in 1784 when ties with John Wesley and Britain were severed, arguing instead for important continuities between the first and subsequent decades of Methodist experience.

As Richey shows, the pietistic vernacular did not displace other Methodist languages Wesleyan, Anglican, or the language of American political discourse nor can it supplant them as interpretive devices. Instead, attention to the vernacular severs to highlight the tensions among the other Methodist languages and to suggest something of the complexity of early Methodist discourse. It reveals the incomplete connections made among the several languages, the resulting imprecisions and confusions that derived from using idioms from different languages, and the ways the Methodists drew upon the distinct languages during times of stress, change, and conflict."

The history of the Methodist attempt to evangelize Native Americans is riddled with spectacular failures as well as dramatic successes. In this balanced yet forthright account, Homer Noley helps you gain new insights and a richer understanding of Methodist missionary activities with native Americans from the 1600s to today."

A collection of essays by leading Wesleyan/Methodist scholars Richard Heitzenrater, Roberta Bondi, David Lowes Watson, Theodore Runyon, Jean Miller Schmidt, W. Stephen Gunter, and Randy L. Maddox. These essays demontrate the specific impact Wesley's Aldersgate had not only on his life and theology, but also on subsequent generations of Methodists.