Methodism's Many Pasts and Futures

From the time the brothers John and Charles Wesley first convened a "holy club" of friends at Oxford University in 1729, Methodists have declared theirs a pursuit of “holiness” or “Christian perfection.” 

For early Methodists, the pursuit of Christian perfection led inevitably to disagreements about what it meant to live a holy life.   As early as 1741 the Wesleys distanced themselves from their closest collaborator, George Whitefield, over his Calvinist teachings.  And while Wesley proclaimed himself to possess "a catholic spirit," his practices - not least, his own refusal to conform to the conventions of Anglican parish ministry - were widely perceived by his contemporaries to be divisive or even "schismatic."

Methodism on the other side of the Atlantic retained this same spirit, which should come as little surprise since it was born in an act of separation - in 1784, Wesley consecrated Thomas Coke as Superintendent, setting in motion the creation of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the newly independent United States.

Here is a partial listing of divisions or separations witnessed by the first generations of the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) ...

• In 1787 Richard Allen, Absalom Jones and others established the Free African Society in Philadelphia, leading to the establishment of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1793/94.

• In 1822 James Varick was ordained the first Bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, established from among members of the MEC in New York.

• In 1828 members of the MEC separated over disputes about the roles played by clergy and laity to form the Methodist Protestant Church.

• In 1843 abolitionists separated from the MEC to form the Wesleyan Methodist Connection, which would later become the Wesleyan Church.

• In 1844, the MEC split in two over the issue of slavery, with the creation of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.

• In 1852 a number of churches, desiring more local control, left the MEC to establish the Congregational Methodist Church.

• In 1860 the Free Methodist Church was created by leaders who rejected rejected common MEC practices like the selling of seats in church pews.

... but let me stop (for now) at the convenient marker of the U.S. Civil War, before things get too complicated with the spectacular splintering (flowering?) of the holiness and Pentecostal movements of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

By this time, though, American Methodism had also grown powerful enough to take on greater aspirations – just “successful” enough, that is, to pose a threat to its own self-understanding.   Encouraged by their continued growth in numbers, wealth and political clout, Methodist leaders began to appropriate the organizational tools of the modern, industrial economy.  In the 1880s church leaders began to commit major resources to what would become a vast network of denominational boards and agencies.  By the early decades of the twentieth century the denomination had become a well-oiled bureaucratic machine, its “organizational chart” resembling that of the modern American corporation.  

The rest of the story is not difficult to summarize in broad strokes.   The naivete of the social gospel was shattered on the rocks of two world wars and the Great Depression.  The public theological consensus of early 20^th century liberalism splintered into the disparate ideological camps of the postwar era.   Members of the baby-boom generation, whose endemic mistrust of bureaucratic institutions did not exclude religious ones, fled the UMC – and other mainline churches – in droves. New generations, shaped by the emergent culture of advanced communications technologies dismissed religious talk -  much less church talk, much less denominational talk – altogether.  The bewildering multiculturalism of late 20^th century America proved impervious (with notable exceptions) to mainline evangelization. 

This fly-over history causes me to reconsider the current threat of division that is confronting the United Methodist Church at its 2016 General Conference.

What if Methodism was not meant to be a large, monolithic, bureaucratic machine?   What if 20th-century Methodists, who oversaw the multiple mergers which resulted finally in the 1968 creation of the United Methodist Church, were mistaken in "thinking of theirs," as the historian Robert Handy once aptly put it, "as a kind of unofficial national church"? 

Call me naive, but I find talk of the United Methodist Church breaking up oddly reassuring.  Maybe going our separate ways will force us to truly consider who we are – or, perhaps better, to reconsider who we were meant to be.  Methodists were not meant to be managers of religious institutions.  We were meant to raise up holy people.   

And if we are not agreed about what it means to be "perfected in love," why not chart our separate courses, allowing us all to recommit ourselves to exploring what a people searching after personal and social holiness can accomplish for the work of God in the world?