Peculiar Prophets: American Methodism as Irregular, Disestablished Anglicanism

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The “Mother of American Methodism,” Barbara Heck, arrived in North America in 1763. Methodism had its roots in the 18th-century Wesleyan Revival that brought religious renewal to the British populace at the hands of itinerant (mostly lay) preachers. It was organized into societies, each connected to the leadership of John Wesley, himself an ordained presbyter in the Church of England. Wesley was a reluctant innovator: he famously said of the Church’s official liturgy, The Book of Common Prayer (BCP), “In religion I am for as few innovations as possible. I love the old wine best.” (James F. White, John Wesley’s Sunday Service of the Methodists in North America, 1984, 11) But tensions between the Methodists and the larger Church of England persisted throughout his lifetime, and more than once, he acted in ways which were not in keeping with the official practices of the Church. When the political unrest of the North American colonies resulted in the disestablishment of the Church of England in its former colonies, his attempts to secure clergy for the Methodists in North America were met with refusal, and Wesley did what he felt was necessary to care for his followers’ spiritual needs. He adapted the BCP for the frontier circumstances of the former colonies, and created a new denomination that was still indebted to its origins in the Church of England. It could thus be said that American Methodism is irregular, disestablished Anglicanism. 

In England, the entire Church was divided into dioceses and within them parishes; each parish had an incumbent, an ordained presbyter who was responsible for the spiritual care of all people within those parish boundaries. Unfortunately, not all parish clergy were supportive of the Wesleyan Revival or of participation in the Methodist societies, and some were in fact hostile to one or both.  

Wesley created the class meeting, a group of roughly twelve lay people which came to offer spiritual accountability and oversight. It paralleled regular Anglican practice but took its authority and legitimacy from Wesley’s irregular ministry as a traveling evangelist rather than from the incumbent of the local parish. In a similar parallel practice, the BCP allows for the hearing of confession by laity as well as clergy; Wesley found occasion to divide those class meetings into smaller band meetings, which were aimed at appropriating confession and penitence in the absence of supportive clergy. In neither case was the Methodist practice prohibited by the regular, endorsed ministry of the Church, and like Wesley’s other innovations, they had precedents in church history. 

Those precedents did not necessarily create positive associations for the Methodist societies. In fact, many of those precedents created suspicions of rebellion in the minds of the British establishment, precisely because of the political and religious loyalties of the practices’ originators. The ministry practices of John Wesley and his Methodists thus brought conflict and tension with the established Church even while the Methodists’ leadership sought to remain within the Church. When it came to the North American Methodists, this stigma was not as strong because of the colonies’ frontier character, but those same irregular ministry practices would ultimately foster an independent ethos that drove Methodism to separate itself from the Church of England both in North America and later in England itself. In North America, the decisive break would come with the end of the Revolutionary War. 

Initially supportive of the American Revolution, when fighting broke out, John Wesley quickly soured on the Revolution and openly opposed it. Barbara Heck and other early Methodist lay leaders in New York fled to Canada. The Methodist preachers in North America would try to remain neutral, but most eventually fled, as did Anglican clergy in the colonies supportive of the Methodist societies. By 1778, of the original ten lay preachers Wesley had sent to the American colonies, only Francis Asbury remained. By the end of the Revolution, Anglicans in North America had divided into three groups: New England Anglicans led by Samuel Seabury; Middle Colonies Anglicans led by William White; and the Methodists. 

For their part, the Methodists in the nascent nation had always looked to John Wesley for spiritual leadership; whereas the larger Anglican church in North America had no unifying figure, Wesley himself served as a unifying figure for Methodists. Wesley, however, was a presbyter and not a bishop. He had no power to ordain Anglican clergy within the Anglican system. So when the Revolution ended, Wesley asked the Bishop of London to ordain and consecrate a bishop specifically for the Anglicans in North America (including the Methodists). He was rebuffed. While the other factions of American Anglicans set about seeking consecration through other channels, Wesley saw the extraordinary circumstances in America and set about creating what amounted to a succession plan. 

Although Wesley often protested that he was a loyal clergyman of the Church of England, as early as 1755 he had expressed doubts about certain aspects of Anglican polity. In particular, Wesley had come to believe that the New Testament did not distinguish between the holy orders of bishop and presbyter. It seems that Wesley only refrained from acting as a bishop in England out of deference to church order; now with the disestablishment of the Church of England in America, he held no such scruples when it came to the American colonies. For Wesley, the two holy orders were elder (his preferred translation of presbyteros, or presbyter, from which the English language also gets the word “priest”) and deacon. (Wesley did not like the term “bishop,” either, preferring “superintendent.”) As an elder with ministerial oversight, he held that he could ordain other elders and deacons as assuredly as anyone the Church of England marked as a bishop; this he did, ordaining fellow Anglican presbyter Thomas Coke as a “superintendent” for the Methodists in North America, and ordaining Richard Whatcoat and Thomas Vasey as elders; Wesley gave them instructions to ordain Francis Asbury as a second “superintendent” when they arrived in the United States. 

Wesley also edited and abridged the BCP, of which he nonetheless wrote glowingly in his abridgement’s preface. As James White points out in the introduction to his John Wesley’s Sunday Service of the Methodists in North America, Wesley amended the BCP to produce his Sunday Service in a number of important ways. He replaced references to bishops with “superintendent”; he removed the service for private baptism; he removed words which seem to presume the inevitability of regeneration in baptism (though White notes that “Wesley does not eliminate the concept of baptismal regeneration but seems to remove any presumption of it,” 20). Wesley also changed the wording of the rubrics in a number of places to “minister,” instead of a specific holy order, leaving only “elder” in a few places around the celebration of Holy Communion. Wesley also changed the Eucharistic service’s absolution into a prayer, by changing the words to “us” instead of “you.” By 1779, Wesley had argued that presbyters could not absolve sins judicially in Popery Calmly Considered—his critique applied to his own Church of England as well. The Apocrypha was almost entirely excised from the Sunday Service—only a reference to Tobit 4:8-9 remained. 

In creating a succession plan for the American Methodists, Wesley continually looked to his own church, the Church of England. Alongside the BCP’s ordinal (revised to fit his own ecclesiology), Wesley looked to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion as a baseline for belief among the Methodists. In creating his own Twenty-Four Articles of Religion, Wesley retained most of the Thirty-Nine Articles; the most profound theological differences lie in the rejection of any possible Calvinistic interpretation of predestination and election, alongside Wesley’s rejection of three holy orders and the removal of the Athanasian Creed (the article “Of the Creeds” is removed entirely, but statements from the Nicene Creed appear elsewhere in the Twenty-Four Articles, and the Apostles’ Creed shows up repeatedly in the Sunday Service). 

Alongside the Sunday Service and the Articles, Wesley prepared a selection of his own sermons which would be considered as the basis for doctrine. The Standard Sermons followed in the steps of Cranmer’s Book of Homilies (whose Article Wesley removed, somewhat ironically), though unlike the Homilies, Wesley’s Standard Sermons were never expected to be read aloud during church services (as Art. XXXV of the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles declared). In setting a plan of church governance for the American Methodists, Wesley borrowed liberally from the Church of England, with the Sunday Service mirroring the BCP, the Twenty-Four Articles of Religion mirroring the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, the Standard Sermons mirroring the Book of Homilies, and the ordination of elders/deacons mirroring that of bishops/priests/deacons. The American Methodists would be profoundly indebted to their Anglican spiritual ancestry. 

Wesley’s amendments in his Sunday Service were taken up by the American Methodists initially, but its widespread usage in America would not last. As White puts it, though the Sunday Service was adopted at the founding Christmas Conference of 1784, by 1792, it had “virtually disappeared except for 37 pages of ‘Sacramental Services &c.’ and the ‘Articles of Religion’” (White, 12). He notes that an early Methodist clergyman, Jesse Lee, explained its disappearance thus: many Methodist ministers “felt ‘they could pray better, and with more devotion while their eyes were shut,’ than they could with their eyes open. After a few years the prayer book was laid aside, and has never been used since in public worship” (White, 12). The American Methodists’ independent ethos would ultimately prove stronger than their loyalty to Wesley. Though Wesley was profoundly formed by the Church and its prayer book, the detachment of Methodists in America produced increasing alienation from the Church that had birthed it, ultimately making Wesley’s assumption that the Methodists loved the Church of England as he did unrealistic.  

Instead, the American Methodists would set aside more of their connection to their Anglican heritage, leaning more heavily on the irregular nature of Wesley’s ministry and downplaying the prayer-book tradition that had so profoundly formed it. By 1787, Wesley himself was expressing reservations about the increasing independence of the American Methodists, especially after the American Methodists changed the term “superintendent” back to “bishop” and formally named their three-year-old denomination the Methodist Episcopal Church, which seems to have intentionally mirrored the naming convention of the newly-founded Protestant Episcopal Church, the denomination that comprised the other former members of the Church of England in the United States. 

For all of the early American Methodists’ distaste for the forms and trappings of Anglicanism, Methodism is nonetheless profoundly influenced by it. Even the brief booklet of “Sacramental Service &c.” is directly from the Sunday Service, and modern liturgies like the United Methodist Hymnal and Book of Worship are likewise adapted from the Sunday Service. Wesley’s ministry in England had been irregular, but his was ultimately an Anglican ministry. Even where Wesley’s practices or theology deviated from the official teachings of the Church, his positions were uncommon rather than unheard of. For example, though the historical practice of ordination followed the three-fold orders, with the power to ordain resting solely in bishops, there was precedent for elders to have the power to ordain. Timothy himself seems to have been ordained by a group of elders (1 Tim. 4:14), and as late as the time of St Jerome in the late 4th and early 5th centuries, the practice in the Patriarchate of Alexandria was for elders to ordain others as deacon or elder.  

Even the most distinctly Methodist doctrine of all, that of Christian perfection or entire sanctification, is a belief in the fulfillment of the BCP’s Collect for Purity. The collect itself is present in the Sunday Service and later Methodist liturgies. The American Methodists leaned into the irregular nature of Wesley’s own ministry, appropriating those things which they regarded to have “worked,” like the class meeting and field preaching, and setting aside things like the Sunday Service, which they regarded to have been of less use. In the wake of the American Revolution, American Methodists found themselves in a greatly changed context, and while they adapted to that context, they did so in the footsteps of a founder who consciously drew from and adapted the theological resources of the Church of England, and who, though irregular, never did so without precedent. 

 
James Mahoney is a librarian and chaplain. He is an ordained elder in the Global Methodist Church.