The Messiness of Methodism

Photo by Aaron Chavez on Unsplash

The way that a story is told is often as important as the story itself. It’s frequently said that the victor gets to write the history and there is some truth in the claim. But even basic stories have perspectives, whether that of the supposed victor or someone else. The narrator plays a role. What would Brideshead Revisited be if it weren’t told from the perspective of Charles Ryder and his subtle, yet substantive, transformation? Or what would The Great Gatsby be without allowing us into the fawning mind of Nick Carraway? Perspective matters.

As with any story, the story of American Methodism is a story told over and over again from different perspectives. Candidates for ministry in the United Methodist Church are required to take a number of classes during their time in seminary including courses that cover the history, doctrine, and polity of the church. The history section of that triptych defines the other two. If you ask a Methodist what they believe, or what makes Methodism unique, they will often tell you a story and it will usually start with two brothers in England who had warmed hearts and a penchant for hymn writing. 

American Methodist beginnings are told in a similar way. Depending on what part of the country you’re in, you may start with John Street in New York City or the class meeting found in the rural Maryland home of Robert and Elizabeth Strawbridge. Sometimes, the story starts with St. George’s Church in Philadelphia. But when did American Methodism take shape? And when did the movement start to splinter? Anyone who studies American Methodist history – at least for the first two hundred years – can tell you that it is a history of exponential growth and frequent fragmentation. 

When I was in seminary, I came across the remnants of what some describe as the earliest schism in American Methodism, the Republican Methodists. Just south of Durham, NC you can find a white clapboard church – now part of the United Church of Christ – with a plaque out front describing the break in southern Methodism led by the fiery preacher – and republican – James O’Kelly. Fighting about appointments, O’Kelly and Francis Asbury went separate ways in 1792 when the Methodist Episcopal Church was still not a decade old. For a long time, I thought this was the earliest split. 

Other splits would follow. The first racially charged split came in Delaware with the founding of the Union Church of Africans in 1813, a small group that still exists with a handful of congregations. Larger splits led by black Methodists came later with the AME in Philadelphia under Richard Allen in 1816 and the AME Zion in New York City in 1821. The Methodist Protestants split from the MEC in 1830, the Wesleyan Methodists in 1843, and finally the MEC split between northern and southern branches in 1844. The narrative usually tells the story of how each of these groups divided from mainstream Methodism embodied in the MEC. 

But what if the very founding of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1784 was itself the first split? What if the narrative of unity that we’ve told ourselves about the Christmas Conference in Baltimore is not accurate and that the reality of the story is messier – and more revealing of Methodism and its proclivity to divide – than a clean founding might suggest?

I first started to ask these questions when studying both the letters of Charles Wesley and the history of the Episcopal Church. Charles was livid, to put it mildly, when his brother, John, ordained Thomas Vasey and Richard Whatcoat as presbyters and consecrated Thomas Coke as a superintendent in September of 1784 for the Methodist work in America. Of course, John knew that his brother would be upset and that’s why, although Charles was nearby, John didn’t tell his brother what he was doing! For some of Charles’ “spiciest” poetical output, see what he wrote after hearing the news of his brother’s irregularity. Speaking of John taking the role of a bishop without episcopal consecration he wrote: 

So easily are Bishops made
By man’s, or woman’s whim?
W[esley] his hands on C[oke] hath laid,
But who laid hands on him? 

Throughout the period, Charles’s venom was particularly aimed at Coke and Asbury, who he understood to have taken advantage of his aging brother. When he heard that Asbury had been consecrated by Coke wrote:

A Roman emperor, ‘tis said,
His favourite horse a consul made:
But Coke brings greater things to pass-
He makes a bishop of an ass. 

One letter to his brother summarizes his feelings well as he told John that it would have been preferable if John had waited until after his death so that he could avoid the embarrassment of it, thankful that their father and older brother had already died. 

But Charles Wesley didn’t stop there. In Charles, we can see an attachment to the original Wesleyan vision of being a renewal movement within the Church of England. Both of the brothers believed this in the first decades of the revival, but one can see in John a growing openness to an expansive view, even if he never fully admits it. The American context, however, brings out John’s willingness to found something new, at least on this side of the pond. Yet even as John sent ordained clergy, a revised prayer book, and standard sermons to America to create a new church, Charles began a writing campaign to the first Episcopal bishop, Samuel Seabury, to have Methodist lay preachers ordained within the Episcopal Church. 

This wasn’t just a brothers’ squabble. Seabury, with Charles Wesley’s support, would ordain Joseph Pilmore, the pastor of St. George’s, Philadelphia, one of the earliest centers of American Methodist activity. Pilmore would become a fixture of evangelicalism within the Episcopal Church and his imprint can still be seen in evangelical parishes near Philadelphia. Additionally, Thomas Vasey, whom Wesley ordained in 1784, would leave the Methodist Episcopal Church and be ordained an Episcopalian in 1786. 

Even Thomas Coke started conversations with the Episcopalians about uniting the MEC with them. These talks ended in the early 1790s. But had Coke rather than Asbury been the leading voice in American Methodism it’s fascinating to wonder what would have come of these initiatives. It’s obvious that Charles Wesley’s perspective was not unusual. In fact, this perspective – called Church Methodism – was held, as Garth Lloyd has argued, by leading figures in England including Mary Bosanquet Fletcher and most of the trustees of Wesleyan chapels there for decades after the Wesley brothers’ deaths. All of this points to something that Robert Prichard argued in his A History of the Episcopal Church. Pritchard describes the creation of the MEC and the Episcopal Church as the institutional outgrowth of colonial Anglicanism in a post-Revolutionary context. Within the Episcopal Church, one found southern and northern Anglican branches and within the MEC the majority of Wesleyans – just not those who agreed with Charles. 

So the creation of the MEC can be seen as the bringing together of a large portion of American Methodism, and embodying John Wesley’s desire for a sacramental body to care for the souls of Americans after the Revolution. But it can also be seen as a division of both earlier colonial Anglicanism and from the Wesleyans who followed Charles’s vision rather than John’s.         

Alright, you might be wondering, this is good historiographical information and history is worthwhile in and of itself, but what does this knowledge or approach accomplish in our contemporary context? What is the effect of this approach? Arguably, it does a number of things to acknowledge the “messiness” of Methodism. 

Such an approach releases American Methodists from a narrative dominated by a supposed pattern of unity, division, and unity – roughly representative of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. It makes it possible for us to acknowledge that Methodism in this country was never a unified movement, least of all within any institutional form. And it is vital to undermine any guilt that comes from the current difficulties within Methodism related to unity. American Methodists have never been unified, so let’s not pretend that unity is a core identifying marker of the movement. 

This approach makes it possible for what we call mainstream Methodism to see itself once again as both part of a larger English-speaking religious culture (see Anglicanism) on the one hand and then also in partnership with black Methodism, the various Holiness Movement denominations, and even Pentecostalism. The Wesleyan movement in the American context expands exponentially when we’re freed from a supposed institutional unity that never existed, replacing that narrative with a more accurate vision of a para-church and para-institutional movement that overflows the limits of denominationalism. 

I would also argue that this approach frees Methodism from a narrative that demands unity at all cost, or that sees any one expression as itself the defining center of American Methodist identity. The churches that formed the UMC in 1968, for example, may have brought together the largest group of American Methodists, but it remains only one expression within a family whose cousins, aunts, uncles, and even grandparents should not be left out of the family portrait. 

Finally, this approach is a stark reminder that Wesleyanism has always been a movement and only later did it find denominational expression. There is nothing wrong with denominations. But deep down, I hope that Wesleyans view them as necessary organizational entities rather than essential defining structures. Wesleyanism is a movement, even a messy one. And it’s a movement that includes the participants in a holiness camp meeting, the liberal Protestant mainliner, the warm hearted Anglican, the Pentecostal healer, and so many more. The unity we share isn’t institutional. It never has been.   

Ryan Danker is the Director of the John Wesley Institute in Washington, DC and Assistant Editor of Firebrand Magazine.