3: Methodist lay preaching in the Victoria-Tasmania Conference 1902-1977 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Early Pentecostal Stirrings in Tasmania, 1910-1933, Part I
This article explores the emergence of Pentecostalism in Tasmania. It identifies the challenges of isolation that hampered some of the earliest church planting efforts, but notes that the eventual growth of the movement resulted from the efforts of local people rather than external missionaries. It identifies the seminal role of women in the rise of Tasmanian Pentecostalism, and the importance of the relationship between Tasmanian Pentecostals and leaders of the movement in mainland Australia, especially Janet Lancaster. It also shows that the movement had its roots in Methodist streams of spirituality.
Methodist Missionary Responses to the Religions of the Southern World
Methodist work began in ‘the Southern World’ in 1811 with the preaching ministry of Edward Eagar in the colony of New South Wales and was reinforced in 1815 by the arrival of the first Wesleyan missionary Samuel Leigh. Early attempts to reach the Australian Aborigines by William Walker between 1821 and 1825 met with little success. The Maori people of New Zealand and the Pacific Islanders of Fiji, Tonga and Samoa proved much more open to Methodist missionary work so that a relatively strong Methodist work was established throughout many parts of the Pacific by the late nineteenth century. Wesleyans also established a successful mission to the Chinese people of the Victorian goldfields in the 1850s. This paper will explicitly address Methodist missionary responses to the religious beliefs encountered in ‘the Southern World’ of the nineteenth century. It will seek to discover to what extent these religious beliefs were dismissed as pagan and superstitious and to what extent there was any attempt to understand these beliefs on their own terms. It is hoped that this paper will contribute to the Wesley and Methodist Historical Studies Working Group in its attempt to understand how ‘Methodist missionary enterprises represented and communicated with persons from other religious traditions and other cultures.’ It will also assist the broader project in which I am engaged, along with Professor Hilary Carey of the University of Newcastle (NSW) of publishing a new scholarly history of Methodism in Australia.
Studies in Church History, 2021
The Connexion established by John Wesley (1703–91) experienced many outbreaks of local revival in the late eighteenth century. These were examples of the tension between reason and emotion, spontaneity and regularity, which characterized the movement. This article discusses how, amidst concerns from within Methodism and beyond, the leadership sought to manage but not suppress what was perceived to be this work of the Holy Spirit. Its challenge to the connexional polity was especially acute in the 1790s, during the Great Yorkshire Revival. In 1800, a Methodist-inspired publication sought to present good practice on validating and encouraging local revivals while maximizing their effectiveness and minimizing any disruption to the connexional order or wider civil society. However, despite fears that institutional concerns were dampening the Spirit's work, around 1800 Wesley's successors acted to reassert the control of the Preachers’ Conference over Methodist practice and premi...
In this paper and in a number of earlier publications 1 , I have sought to answer a number of charges levelled at Wesley's discourse which represent it, if not as an instrument in the conversion of the factory proletariat to the industrial work ethic, at least as symptomatic of an emerging ideological paradigm heavily conditioned by the demands of increasing industrialisation. While the data adopted as evidence by the critics were authentic, it soon became apparent not only that the instances of Methodist discourse had been selected and combined to tie in with a particular reading of reality -religion as the opiate of the peoplebut also that the value judgment fostered by this partial representation was applied indiscriminately to Methodism as a whole, with blatant disregard for the positive transforming power it exerted both on individuals and on society. My aim in highlighting this bias is not to pose as a revisionist seeking to gloss over criticism with smug hagiography, but to seek to complete the data with insights gained from a corpus of primary and secondary documents which may still be far from exhaustive and limited in its temporal scope, but which covers an area large enough to redress the balance, i.e. to compensate for the inadequacies and inaccuracies of the critics' accounts, and to redeem the Wesleys and the other early Methodists from indictments of deliberate manoeuvering.
Church History, 91/2, 2022
The fourteen essays in Women, Preachers, Methodists were first presented at two conferences in the UK in 2019 that marked the 350th anniversary of Susanna Wesley’s birth in 1669. The first conference, organized by the British Methodist Heritage Committee, focused on the mother of the Wesleys, while the second, held at the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History, explored Methodist women preachers in Britain. Part I of the collection contains four essays on Susanna Wesley; the seven essays in Part II consider Methodist women preachers from the 1740s to the beginning of the twentieth century; in Part III, the volume concludes with personal reflections of three ordained Methodist women preachers active from the 1970s to the present.