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When white American Methodists began encountering Africans in the slave South, they found in the feeling, physically expressive traditional spirituality of Africans a natural complement to their own lively faith. Soon many African Americans joyously accepted the gospel through the Methodist witness—though most remained appalled at the hypocrisy and cruelty of so many "Christian" slave masters. Slave Christians expressed the joy of a new, inner spiritual freedom in their conversion testimonies, spirituals, and dancing "shouts."

At the same time, white and black Methodists began mixing at camp meetings and churches (though with some of the restraint that would later manifest as segregation, leading to the birth of the African Methodist Episcopal and African Methodist Episcopal Zion churches). At such meetings, for a season, the two races enjoyed together what white denominational leaders loved to call "melting times" of celebratory fellowship, sometimes shouting, sometimes falling blissfully in the Spirit, always telling the Good News and testifying to its reality in their hearts. Here is one strong root of recent attempts to heal the ugly racial divide in this country's churches.

For Wesley, the impact of True Christianity was never to stop within the body of believers, however blissful its fellowship. From his Holy Club days at Oxford through to the end of his life, he insisted on the importance of works of mercy. He and his fellow Oxford Methodists gave significant portions of their income to succor the poor and spent much time ministering to condemned prisoners (after a lifetime of lavish giving, Wesley died a relatively poor man). Wesley also abhorred slavery, and for at least the early decades of America's involvement in that dark institution, Methodists were among those most firm in their opposition to slavery (their later record was not so sterling—see Don Mathews's Religion in the Old South).

Such crusades as the successful fight to reduce the drunkenness rampant in nineteenth-century America also found significant leadership within Methodism—Women's Christian Temperance Union president Frances Willard is just one example. By the close of the nineteenth century, the Salvation Army, a Wesleyan denomination, was doing more for the poor in America than any other group.

In his landmark book Revivalism and Social Reform, historian Timothy L. Smith has laid forever to rest the old myth that the concern for "souls" and the concern for social reform have never met in American religion. His "Exhibit A"? The reforming efforts of people who identified with the nineteenth-century Wesleyan holiness movement.

This book and Donald Dayton's Discovering an Evangelical Heritage are still well worth reading on this major aspect of Wesleyans' impact in America.

Though Methodism and its holiness and Pentecostal offshoots have not always upheld this heritage of social action, they often have—in spectacular ways. Perhaps the most visible sign of their success in evangelical Wesleyan circles is the holiness and Pentecostal storefront church—a twentieth-century fixture in many inner-city areas from which more "mainstream" churches fled, creating a "donut effect." Those churches often served more than the spiritual needs of their congregations, linking to an array of social ministries.

Wesley and his followers changed the American landscape in many other ways.

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June (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47