Samuel Leigh in Australasia (original) (raw)
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2015 will see the bicentenary of the arrival to the colony of New South Wales, at the age of twenty-nine, of the first Wesleyan Methodist minister, the Rev. Samuel Leigh. Of course, Leigh was not the first Methodist to arrive, lay preachers and class leaders such as Edward Eagar and Thomas Bowden already being active in their own ministries. Nonetheless, in spite of its opportunities for lay ministry, early nineteenth century Wesleyan Methodism was a movement dominated by clerical authority, so it is appropriate that Leigh’s arrival be seen as the beginnings of formal British-Conference-approved Methodism in the colony. Methodist ministers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century were primarily missionaries, both at home and abroad. By almost every measure Leigh was a failure as a missionary. He made few converts, failed to establish thriving circuits, and his relationships with his fellow missionaries were strained all around. This paper will provide an introduction to Leigh and his work through discussing three sets of relationships - with Governor Lachlan Macquarie, with the clergy of the Established Church, and with his fellow workers.
'Not Radically a Dissenter': Samuel Leigh in the Colony of New South Wales
2015 will see the bicentenary of the arrival to the colony of New South Wales, at the age of twenty-nine, of the first Wesleyan Methodist minister, the Rev. Samuel Leigh. Of course, Leigh was not the first Methodist to arrive, lay preachers and class leaders such as Edward Eagar and Thomas Bowden already being active in their own ministries. Nonetheless, in spite of its opportunities for lay ministry, early nineteenth century Wesleyan Methodism was a movement dominated by clerical authority, so it is appropriate that Leigh’s arrival be seen as the beginnings of formal British-Conference-approved Methodism in the colony. Methodist ministers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century were primarily missionaries, both at home and abroad. By almost every measure Leigh was a failure as a missionary. He made few converts, failed to establish thriving circuits, and his relationships with his fellow missionaries were strained all around. This paper will provide an introduction to Leigh and his work through discussing three sets of relationships - with Governor Lachlan Macquarie, with the clergy of the Established Church, and with his fellow workers.
Methodism in the Pacific and Wesleyan-Holiness Resurgence
This paper gives a brief overview of the beginnings of Methodism in the Pacific region, examines the rise of Wesleyan-Holiness Churches in Australia in the post-second world war period, and makes a few observations about the current resurgence of the Wesleyan-Holiness movement in Aotearoa-New Zealand.
The Connection between Mission and Religious Experience in Australasian Methodism
Throughout the twentieth century, Methodist religious experience shifted from a focus on radical disjunctions such as conversion and entire sanctification to a focus on members being nurtured through the agencies of the Church and the application of the Gospel to society. Revivalism was a widely adopted means during the nineteenth century but became less popular from the early twentieth century when it was replaced by a focus on more tightly controlled denominational agencies. The older revivalism was increasingly seen as a relic of the past unsuited to the newer status that Methodism had achieved as a modern and progressive Church. Though some mid-century Methodists were drawn to the Charismatic movement, the average churchgoer settled for a life of moral and civic uprightness, and the more activist Methodist was drawn to social engagement rather than a focus on revivals or intense personal devotion. This shift led to a lack of certainty about the mission of Methodism. When it was thought there was a “heaven to gain and a hell to shun” the mission of Methodists was clear – to rescue as many from the latter as possible. When such certainties were questioned or rejected altogether the mission of the Methodist Church became less clear and competing ideas of mission began to emerge leading to a lack of clarity about Methodism’s mission. In light of declining membership in Methodist and Uniting Churches the recovery of missional clarity is crucial to the survival of this ecclesial tradition.
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.
Primitive Methodism in the Australian Colonies
The first Primitive Methodist ministers came to Australia and New Zealand in the 1840s and the Church saw its greatest success in the 1860s. Primitive Methodist members who migrated were mostly from English mining and agricultural communities in the Midlands and the North, with a few also from Wales and Scotland. Cornish miners were also highly represented. The place of origin was mapped onto the new country as those from mining communities in Britain usually settled in the coalfields north, west and south of Sydney, as well as in Victoria and South Australia. Those from the countryside found homes in rural areas. The early suggestion of ‘the Tunstall Non-Mission Law,’ confining Primitive Methodism to the single circuit of Tunstall while the rest of England was left to the Wesleyans, was well and truly transcended by its effective reach into the far flung Antipodes. This paper was given in an online seminar on 19th February 2022, as part of a series seminars run by Englesea Brook Museum of Primitive Methodism to mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Hugh Bourne (1772-1852)
North American Wesleyan-Holiness Churches in Australia, PhD thesis, La Trobe University, 2005
This thesis examines the emergence of a number of North American Wesleyan-Holiness denominations in Australia, beginning in the years following the Second World War. They are the Church of God (Anderson), the Church of God (Cleveland), the Church of the Nazarene, and the Wesleyan Methodist Church. It will trace the manner in which some of these churches moved from being despised and marginalised sects to established denominations while others remained small and isolated, experiencing little growth. The thesis demonstrates that the movement along the church-sect continuum is by no means a smooth and inevitable one. Immigrant dislocation may lead to a slowing down of change to preserve a sense of identity. A particular group may be found to be positioned toward the church end of the continuum in its place of origin and be positioned toward the sect end in its mission areas, or the reverse may be true. A particular movement may be seen as a ‘sect’ when compared to one group and a ‘church’ when compared to another. The theme of Americanisation and anti-Americanism will be examined, as the explicitly American origins of these churches was both the cause of their exclusion and at the same time a mechanism for their survival. The emergence of the Wesleyan-Holiness denominations in Australia is not an example of American cultural and religious imperialism. Rather it has been a creative partnership between like-minded evangelical Christians from two modern nations sharing a general cultural and social similarity and a common set of religious convictions. The Wesleyan-Holiness churches saw increased growth from the late 1970s by welcoming into their membership a new wave of refugees from more liberal Protestant denominations. They are shown to be both a new religious movement, emerging out of the post-war context of greater engagement between Australians and Americans and at the same time a continuation of the long-standing ‘holiness’ and ‘revivalist’ strain within Australian evangelicalism.