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Where Wesley's Followers Went Awry
Three new books by scholars of American Methodism explain why Methodists flourished in the 19th century and faltered in the 20th.
Reviewed by Jennifer Woodruff Tait | posted 8/08/2008 12:33PM
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By contrast, Richey's book—the concluding volume of a five-volume denominational self-study, "United Methodism and American Culture"—looks inward in institutional self-analysis and paints a mixed picture of the results (occasionally in terminology most comprehensible to insiders). Richey identifies Methodism's most distinguishing ecclesiological marks as connectionalism, discipline, catholicism, and itinerancy (the Methodist practice of bishops sending pastors to churches, rather than churches calling pastors), but he notes that these characteristics, once held closely together in Wesley's ideal of the movement, no longer "cohere as marks, or collectively as a vision of the church." Rather than means to spreading scriptural holiness, they often become bureaucratic ends in themselves. Methodists still believe that they pray and sing and preach the best, but they are less confident what, why, and how.
All of these books make it clear that the American religious tradition is incomprehensible without understanding the Methodist witness, whether that witness was countering the cultural message or carrying it. (This is a point argued more and more firmly by American religious historians in the last few decades; see Gregory Schneider, The Way of the Cross Leads Home [Indiana University, 1993] and John Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm [Oxford, 1998]). These books also capture Methodism's initial world-conquering energy—against which the modern era inevitably suffers by comparison. The question left open is the direction—perhaps even the possibility—of current reform. Richey ends with a plea that Methodists think theologically as well as pragmatically about changes in their policy and structure. His plea is not for Methodist ears alone.
Jennifer Woodruff Tait is Methodist Librarian at Drew University, Madison, NJ, and a Ph.D. candidate in American church history at Duke University, Durham, NC.
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