Academic literature on the topic 'Methodist Church in the Old Southwest'

It was the Primitive Christians of the “purest ages” who inspired and encouraged the Methodist leader, John Wesley, to create a movement based on his vision of the ancient Church. Wesley was convinced that Methodist doctrine, discipline, and depth of piety came nearer to the Primitive Church than to any other group. Methodism, he argued in his sermon forLaying the Foundation of the New Chapelin 1777, was the “old religion, the religion of the Bible, the religion of the Primitive Church.”

In 1868 Ulysses S. Grant remarked that there were three great parties in the United States: the Republican, the Democratic, and the Methodist Church. This was an understandable tribute, given the active role of leading Methodists in his presidential campaign, but it was also a realistic judgment, when set in the context of the denomination's growing political authority over the previous half century. As early as 1819, when, with a quarter of a million members, “the Methodists were becoming quite numerous in the country,” the young exhorter Alfred Branson noted that “politicians… from policy favoured us, though they might be skeptical as to religion,” and gathered at county seats to listen to the preachers of a denomination whose “votes counted as fast at an election as any others.” Ten years later, the newly elected Andrew Jackson stopped at Washington, Pennsylvania, en route from Tennessee to his presidential inauguration. When both Presbyterians and Methodists invited him to attend their services, Old Hickory sought to avoid the political embarrassment of seeming to favor his own church over the fastest-growing religious movement in the country by attending both—the Presbyterians in the morning and the Methodists at night. In Indiana in the early 1840s the church's growing power led the Democrats to nominate for governor a known Methodist, while tarring their Whig opponents with the brush of sectarian bigotry. Nationally, as the combined membership of the Methodist Episcopal Church [MEC] and Methodist Episcopal Church, South [MECS] grew to over one and a half million by the mid-1850s, denominational leaders could be found complaining that the church was so strong that each political party was “eager to make her its tool.” Thus Elijah H. Pilcher, the influential Michigan preacher, found himself in 1856 nominated simultaneously by state Democratic, Republican, and Abolition conventions.

The history of the Allan Library is here told systematically for the first time. This antiquarian collection of substantially foreign-language books and some manuscripts was formed by barrister Thomas Robinson Allan (1799-1886) during the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s. His stated intention was to create a Methodist rival to Sion College Library (Church of England) and Dr Williamss Library (Old Dissent). Allan donated it to the Wesleyan Methodist Conference in 1884, which funded the erection of purpose-built Allan Library premises opening in London in 1891. However, the Wesleyans struggled to make a success of the enterprise as a subscription library, and the collection was in storage between 1899 and 1920, before being sold by Conference to the London Library (where most of it still remains). The Allan Library Trust was established with the proceeds of the sale. The reasons for the relative failure of Allans great library project are fully explored.

AbstractThe Damnation of Theron Ware is the tale of a young Methodist minister's tragic downfall set in rural upstate New York. The inexperienced Reverend Ware finds himself in an environment which triggers his moral, spiritual, and intellectual degeneration. The novel represents Theron's temptations as a complex and organically connected web, at the center of which is Catholicism. "Unreformed" old world Roman Catholicism subsumes under its metaphorical auspices every specific register of transgressive alterity in Theron's imagination (e.g., ethnicity, aesthetics, the intellectual life, the erotic). Theron's romantic imagination radically misperceives Catholicism; it becomes the abyss of difference against which Theron gives way to "enlightened" agnosticism, pride, lust, avarice, covetousness, and self-loathing. The innocent young Methodist parson eventually loses his faith and becomes a stalker, a gossip, a thief, and a would-be adulterer. This transformation takes place through his experience with the Catholic "other" represented by Celia Madden, Father Vincent Forbes, and Dr. Ledsmar. Theron Ware misinterprets everyone associated with Catholicism, recasting the Catholic as the master trope under which all his desires for exotic transgression find an object. The Catholic becomes a dangerous mirror of Theron's perverse desires which "illumines" the way to his "Damnation."

Abstract Han Jie (韩杰) belonged to the Flower Miao, a sub-group of the Miao in southwest China. When foreign missionaries began to evangelize among the Miao of China in the early twentieth century, they emphasized education and set up numerous schools to teach literacy. Learning literacy was not just an educational achievement, it allowed the Miao to imagine that they could have a better way out and be more than just poor farmers. Han Jie was the first generation of graduates of British Methodist Church schools, and he went on to set up more schools in remote areas, thus spreading literacy among poor Miao. Through contact and communication with different denominations, Han Jie felt that the Miao people needed an independent, self-reliant church；accordingly he poured his energy into increasing the sense of autonomy among the Flower Miao through evangelization and education. This paper examines the influence of Christian introduction to Miao identity and Miao ethnic relations through the biography of Han Jie. I argue that the history of religious proselytization transformed the Miao, their relations with their church ultimately determining their relations with the Chinese state as well. Thus Christian evangelization played a pivotal role in shaping Miao identity under the Nationalist regime of the Republic of China.

AbstractIn the immediate aftermath of defeat for the Anglican-Methodist Unity Scheme in the Church of England's Convocations in July 1969, Archbishop Ramsey famously spoke out in despair: 'Let the minorities, who disagree among themselves, tell us what their scheme is. But they won't, they won't, they wont'. The Scheme's evangelical and catholic opponents had frustrated ecumenical hopes, but without offering a viable alternative. Responding to the archbishop's cri de coeur, four leading dissentients (Colin Buchanan, Graham Leonard, Eric Mascall and J.I. Packer) published Growing into Union (1970), one of the most controversial ecumenical tracts in recent decades. This paper examines the background to their pioneering catholic-evangelical alliance and the reactions which Growing into Union provoked, especially amongst ecumenical thinkers.

In the summer of 1924, townspeople recount, 14-year-old Manuel Chávez built models of colonial New Mexico mission churches in the dirt outside Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in the village of Peña Blanca. He was staying with the Franciscan friars after expressing his desire to enter the seminary, where he would become the first native New Mexico Hispano to be ordained a Franciscan priest in the centuries since the Spanish colonization. Still a boy, but one who was about to embark on a life-changing path, the small missions he playfully constructed in the dirt and staunchly protected foretold the strategy of rematerialization that would characterize his future: he would become a pioneering Franciscan historian who organized and interpreted the vast collection of Catholic Church documents from the colonial period in New Mexico through the twentieth century. The author of two dozen books and over 600 shorter works, Fray Angélico Chávez (1910–1996) was a visual artist, literary figure, historian, genealogist, translator, and church restorer—one of New Mexico's foremost twentieth-century intellectuals.

Methodism … left a stigma on the mind of the eighteenth-century poor whilst helping at the same time to smother the growth of a working-class consciousness. Its doctrines perverted all that was healthy in men’s emotions, its creed was cruel and grim, its view of life bleak and joyless. Its place in society closely resembled that of a malignant tumour.Thus a Sheffield undergraduate essayist, year of 1983. The essayist was Methodist bred. For him liberation lay in bondage to E. P. Thompson, year of 1963. His student vigour is as much to be applauded as his interpretation is to be deplored. For him as for so many much older historians the bold stroke or the broad view has become in fact a sweeping into tunnel vision and the emancipation has become in fact a confirmation of old folk wisdom: Methodism is puritanism is repressive is reprehensible. We come very close to the heart of the present volume’s matter: asceticism, or the attainment of spiritual perfection by means of self-discipline. Or at least we come very close to the heart of the matter as it is vulgarly seen, for although asceticism is not a word which is too frequently applied to English protestant Dissent, its associations with discipline, abstinence and repression are far too frequently so applied.

A study of the so-called zero-forms of the present tense 3rd person singular and plural (without inflectional -tь) in the birch bark manuscripts has once again attracted the attention of researchers to this grammatical phenomenon. Andrey Zaliznyak established the zero-forms usage positions and their range and functions, and he arrived at the conclusion that they are Novgorod dialectisms. Analysis of the Old Slavonic and written sources of the Russian Southwest found similarities with the Novgorod birch bark manuscripts, so the zero-forms should be considered Proto-Slavic dialectisms, inherited by different Old Russian dialects and tracing back to the injunctive and the conjunctive, its later substitute. At the same time, data correlation showed the narrowness of the birch bark manuscripts’ discursive range. A. Zaliznyak discovered several jе ‘is’ word forms in a supposedly enclitic function. He noted, however, that there was a lack of material for drawing final conclusions. The present paper provides evidence of the jе word form usage in the function of Wackernagel enclitics in different sources, especially in the 11th century Sinaiskii Paterik (Pratum spiritual), where, as it turns out, this type of enclitic was closely related with an interrogative sentence type, not always functioning as a link-verb and meaning a non-factive action of supposition. The jе word form is also used widely in a non-enclitic position, where it has a non-actual, primarily gnomic, present tense meaning.

Women were already in ministry in Old and New Testament times, though they were not officially recognised as ministers as they are today. This practice was adopted by the Methodist Church of Southern Africa (MCSA). Despite the profound move of the MCSA to enable women to enter the ministry and serve as ministers in the MCSA, female clergy are still being ostracised. This was affirmed by the Bishop of the Cape of Good Hope District, Reverend Michel Hansrod, in an address to the synod. He conceded the following: “It is with great sadness that we recognise and confess our slowness in affording women the opportunities of leadership and poor stationing.” This statement implies that clergywomen in the MCSA are still regarded as unsuited to be leaders. This article sets out to offer the MCSA insight into the best way to resolve the problem of ostracism and disempowerment of clergywomen in ministry in the MCSA. The article highlights the historical background of women in ministry and from that perspective, brings forth God’s intention in creating humanity. Then it offers a discourse on how the MCSA neglects women in ministry, in contradiction to Scripture. Finally, the article formulates a missional paradigm embedded in the missio Dei that could assist the MCSA in addressing the pleas of women in ministry.