Dissenters and Sectaries (aka Methodism)

The Church of England never learnt to cope with dissent. More groups split away from the church throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The American high churchman, Samuel Johnson (not the English dictionary compiler) referred to those affected by the so-called Great Awakening in America in the 1730s and 1740s disparagingly:

There is nothing they will stick at: they patronize monstrous enthusiasm, strolling teachers and wild notions.¹)

Similar attitudes were found in the mother church. At the same time the Duchess of Buckingham reacted with horror to the “Methodism” introduced into aristocratic circles by the Countess of Huntingdon: “Their doctrines are most repulsive, strongly tinctured with impertinence and disrespect towards their superiors. It is monstrous to be told you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl the earth”. (The Duchess of Buckingham is only notable otherwise as the illegitimate daughter of James II).

John Wesley was born in 1703, the son of the rector of Epworth, in Lincolnshire. Whilst at Oxford, he gathered a group of devout undergraduates around him who attempted to live their Christian faith methodically: they became known as the ‘Holy Club’ or ‘Methodists’. Ordained priest in 1728, he went to America as a missionary in 1735: it was an unmitigated disaster, and he fled back to England. In 1738 he had (another?) conversion experience at a meeting of a Moravian church group in London: “I felt my heart strangely warmed”. He determined to devote his life to evangelistic work. Finding the churches closed to him, he began preaching out doors, and developed his own organization with the help of lay preachers and extended his activity to cover the whole of the British Isles by 1751. Although he lived and died as an Anglican priest, and wanted his organization to remain within the Church of England, in 1784 he ordained Thomas Coke as a superintendent for the growing Methodist organisation in America.

But what is his relevance to Anglican self-understanding? It is simply this: God raises up men and women within the church who are capable through grace of reforming the church, strengthening it for the task ahead. Most times the Church ignores or persecutes them, only recognising the meaning and value of their contribution with hindsight. Whenever we despair of the paucity of resources available to the church in its challenges today, we should remember John Wesley, and look for his equivalent among our number today.

1. Richard Webster, A history of the Presbyterian Church in America from its origin until the year 1760, with biogr. sketches of its early ministers, (Philadelphia, 1858 [↩]