methodism

methodism began as a religious revival in the 18th cent. and grew to become the largest of the nonconformist churches. Under the leadership of John Wesley, societies for cultivating religious fellowship were set up, intended originally as auxiliary to the established church, but soon forced into independence by the hostility of the clergy. The movement grew rapidly from the 1740s and developed distinctive institutions, notably the weekly class meeting of 10–12 members and an itinerant body of lay preachers, who visited the societies, preaching in the homes of members and in the open air. At Wesley's death in 1791, there were 72,000 members of methodist societies and perhaps nearly half a million adherents. By 1850 membership was about half a million and an estimated 2 million persons (one-tenth of the total population) were under direct methodist influence. In Yorkshire one-sixth and in Cornwall one-third of the total population attended methodist services in 1851. During Wesley's lifetime there was no open breach with the Church of England, but after his death the methodists became a separate denomination with their own chapels. Schismatic tendencies led to the establishment of a number of different methodist churches (‘connexions’). Later in the 19th cent. a process of reunion began and was completed in 1932.

Theologically, methodism differed little from the evangelical wing of the Church of England, stressing personal conversion and salvation by faith in the atoning death of Christ. But socially methodism was a transforming force. Most of the 18th-cent. ‘people called methodists’ were of humble origin without advantages of education, wealth, or social position. However, their puritan virtues brought them worldly prosperity and, by the 1830s and 1840s, the big Wesleyan chapels in northern towns were dominated by wealthy mill-owners and businessmen. Official methodism in the 19th cent. was middle class and socially conservative. Yet underneath there was a more liberal and democratic spirit. Methodism in the 18th cent. was a popular movement, and most of the schisms which rent the central Wesleyan body until 1849 were attempts in one form or another to reassert this basic characteristic. The breakaway churches (such as the methodist New Connexion, primitive methodists, Bible Christians, protestant methodists, Barkerites, Wesleyan reformers) were characterized by differences of organization and personalities, not doctrine. Methodism, unlike the Church of England, was essentially a layman's religion. In addition to the full-time ministers (who had the superintendence of a number of chapels in a circuit), there was an army of active lay helpers, numbering in 1850 some 20,000 local preachers, over 50,000 class leaders, together with trustees, stewards, prayer leaders, and Sunday school teachers. Around the chapel there developed an intense world of personal and social relationships, which lasted into modern times. Friendship, marriage partners, help and support in time of need, a sense of security and personal worth were assured to methodists, who were exhorted to ‘watch over one another in love’.

Methodism made an important contribution to the leadership of working-class movements like trade unionism and chartism by providing opportunities for self-education and training in leadership and organization in running the chapel. The general culture of methodism was toward respectability through living a temperate, thrifty, hard-working life; and early government fears that methodism was potentially disruptive gave place to the realization that it was more a force for stability than conflict in a working-class community. Indeed, historians have argued (somewhat exaggeratedly) that it was methodism that prevented revolution in Britain during the revolutionary decades 1789–1848.

Methodism has been criticized as providing a useful work-discipline for Victorian employers, and also as a religion which encouraged pessimism, repression, guilt feelings, and psychic inhibitions. Certainly some of its manifestations were crude, emotional, narrow, and self-righteous. But to thousands of ordinary men and women, methodism offered a view of human nature which harmonized with and interpreted their own experiences. In a world full of disease, early death, injustice, and all kinds of insecurity, methodism brought joy and hope. When a miner or farm labourer or domestic servant ‘found Jesus’, their life was transformed. Methodism gave them a cheerful conviction that in God's providence there was a place for everyone, however humble.

John F. C. Harrison