During the nineteenth century, camp meetings became a signature
program of American Methodists and an extraordinary engine for
their remarkable evangelistic outreach. Methodism in the American
Forest explores the ways in which Methodist preachers interacted
with and utilized the American woodland, and the role camp meetings
played in the denomination's spread across the country. Half a
century before they made themselves such a home in the woods, the
people and preachers learned the hard way that only a fool would
adhere to John Wesley's mandate for preaching in fields of the New
World. Under the blazing American sun, Methodist preachers found a
better outdoor sanctuary for larger gatherings: under the shade of
great oaks, a natural cathedral, where they held forth with fervid
sermons. The American forests, argues Russell E. Richey, served the
preachers in another important way. The remote, garden-like
solitude provided them with a place to seek counsel from the Holy
Spirit, serving as a kind of Gethsemane. As seen by the American
Methodists, the forest was also a desolate wilderness, and a means
for them to connect with Israel's wilderness years after the Exodus
and Jesus's forty days in the desert after his baptism by John.
Undaunted, the preachers slashed their way through, following
America's expanding settlement, and gradually sacralizing American
woodlands as cathedral, confessional, and spiritual challenge-as
shady grove, as garden, and as wilderness. The threefold forest
experience became a Methodist standard. The meeting of Methodism's
basic governing body, the quarterly conference, brought together
leadership of all levels. The event stretched to two days in length
and soon great crowds were drawn by the preaching and eventually
the sacraments that were on offer. Camp meetings, if not a
Methodist invention, became the movement's signature, a development
that Richey tracks throughout the years that Methodism matured,
becoming a central denomination in America's religious landscape.
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