Methodists and their Missionary Societies 1760-1900

John Pritchard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317097051
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Methodism played an important part in the spread of Christianity from its European heartlands to the Americas, Asia, Africa and the Pacific. From John Wesley's initial reluctance, via haphazard ventures and over-ambitious targets, a well-organized and supported Wesleyan Society developed. Smaller branches of British Methodism undertook their own foreign missions. This book, together with a companion volume on the 20th century, offers an account of the overseas mission activity of British and Irish Methodists, its roots and fruits. John Pritchard explores many aspects of mission, ranging from Labrador to New Zealand and from Sierra Leone to Sri Lanka, from open air preaching to political engagement, from the isolation of early pioneers to the creation of self-governing churches. Tracing the nineteenth-century missionary work of the Churches with Wesleyan roots which went on to unite in 1932, Pritchard explores the shifting theologies and attitudes of missionaries who crossed cultural and geographical frontiers as well as those at home who sent and supported them. Necessarily selective in the personalities and events it describes, this book offers a comprehensive overview of a world-changing movement - a story packed with heroism, mistakes, achievements, frustrations, arguments, personalities, rascals and saints.

Chapter 1 Beginning with Wesley

DOI: 10.4324/9781315595092-1

The first Methodist missionaries were the Wesley brothers.¹ The narrative dear to later Methodists tells how the ‘great flame’² of Methodism was kindled in Epworth, nurtured at Oxford, all but dowsed in Georgia, but rekindled by the grace of God and the Moravian influence they first encountered at sea. From May 1738 it began to blaze as they shared their intense personal experience of God’s love. The possibility and promise of God’s love for all – all is one of the key words in Charles Wesley’s hymnody – was the motivation that drove them for the next half-century and drove hundreds of thousands inspired by them in the ensuing two centuries of Methodist participation in world mission.

2 C. Wesley’s hymn ‘See how great a flame aspires’ (Hymns and Sacred Poems, 1749) was a favourite at missionary meetings. 1 pace J.A. Vickers, Myths of Methodism, (Oxford, Wesley Historical Society, 2008), p. 34, who regards such statements as among the myths and rightly points out ‘that the Methodist movement, as part of the much wider “Evangelical Revival”, had already begun before the Wesley brothers had their hearts “strangely warmed”’.

Antecedents and Influences

The first decade of the eighteenth century saw not only the birth of John and Charles Wesley but the beginning of the Protestant missionary era. Catholic missions to peoples beyond Europe began to be established earlier, as Spain and Portugal in particular embarked on the colonial enterprise. Indeed, it was the Jesuits of the sixteenth century who began to use the word missio to denote bringing the unbaptized to faith. The predominantly Protestant countries, on the other hand, had very little contact with non-Christian peoples until the end of the seventeenth century, nor did the theology of the early Reformers inspire them to extend their activity beyond their borders. Cuius regio eius religio (the ‘follow-my-leader’ principle that the ruler’s religion is the people’s religion) was the rule of the times – religion followed the flag. But then the flag of Denmark was hoisted over Tranquebar in South India and in 1705 King Frederick IV recruited two Lutheran missionaries to work in Tranquebar.

Bartholomew Ziegenbald and Henry Plutshau came from Halle in Germany. They were products of the pietist movement, the first flowering of religious renewal which proved the forerunner of the evangelical revival of the eighteenth century. It ‘reacted against the official stress on formal theological correctness and merely conventional churchgoing … to create a more personalized and inward type of piety and stressed the importance of good works’.³ Reaching India in 1706, Ziegenbald, a gifted linguist, applied himself to learning the Tamil language and then to translating the Bible. The New Testament in Tamil was published within a decade, in 1714. It was printed on a press which had been supplied by the recently founded Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) in England, where the Royal Danish Mission and Ziegenbald’s prolific letters home had attracted much interest. Susanna Wesley was one who was enthused by the letters and she set about imparting to her children her enthusiasm for missions to the heathen.⁴

3 H.D. Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast (London, Epworth Press, 1989), p. 162. 4 S. Neill, A History of Christian Missions (London, Penguin Books, 1964), pp. 228–31.

When the German missionaries began to extend their activity beyond the confines of Tranquebar and King Frederick insisted that the resources he supplied were not to be employed outside Danish territory, the SPCK again took an interest and funded their work in British territory. The SPCK had been founded in 1699 to promote Christian knowledge both in England and in the Church of England’s colonial parishes, mainly by providing books, libraries and schools. It was swiftly followed by another voluntary society: the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) was founded in 1701 by royal charter, with a seal that bore the text ‘Come over and help us’.⁵ The charter referred to the lack of provision for the Church of England’s ministry in ‘the Plantations, Colonies and Factories [that is, trading stations] beyond the Seas’. The SPG’s objective was to send personnel, especially to the American colonies; Thomas Bray, the instigator of both these High Church societies, had seen for himself the situation in Maryland. The colonies were regarded as parts of the home country established overseas, subject to English law and the care of English souls was the prime concern. Although the SPG charter’s reference to ‘such other Provision … as may be necessary for the Propagation of the Gospel in those Parts’ was intended to promote the conversion of indigenous peoples, it was a concern that took a distant second place behind establishing a less erratic and inadequate supply of ministers to the colonists.⁶

5 Acts 16:9. 6 H.P. Thompson, Into All Lands, (London, SPCK, 1951), p. 17.

1738, Before and After

It was under the auspices of the SPG that John and Charles Wesley, the former in his early thirties and the latter in his late twenties, worked briefly in Georgia. Their motives were mixed. Two months before he sailed, John (whose heart had not yet been ‘strangely warmed’) wrote: ‘My chief motive, to which all the rest are subordinate, is the hope of saving my own soul.’ He went on: ‘I hope to learn the true sense of the gospel of Christ by preaching it to the heathen. They have no comments to construe away the text; no vain philosophy to corrupt it; no luxurious, sensual, covetous expounders to soften its unpleasing truths …’. And then: ‘it is commonly objected that there are heathens enough in practice, if not in theory, at home; why, then, should you go to America? Why? For a very plain reason: because these heathens at home have Moses and the Prophets, and those have not; because those who have the gospel trample upon it, and those who have it not earnestly call for it’.⁷ His intention, plainly, was to work among the native peoples. That was not how it worked out. In the words of the SPG historian, ‘His dearest hope, to convert the Indians, proved unattainable: the authorities discouraged it, his time was over-full, and his illusions as to their simple and noble qualities did not stand the light of experience.’⁸ The colonial community was just as big a disappointment. In his eyes they lived up to all the prejudice with which he set out, having the gospel but trampling on it. John Wesley the pioneer missionary was a disaster, while Charles Wesley’s stay in Georgia was even more short-lived.

7 Letter to Dr John Burton, 10 October 1735, in J. Telford (ed.), The Letters of John Wesley, (8 vols, London, Epworth Press, 1931), vol. 1, pp. 188–91. 8 Thompson, Into All Lands, pp. 53–4.

The story of the Georgia experience and its aftermath, their intensely personal experience of God’s grace and their whole-hearted, warmed-hearted immersion in the burgeoning evangelical revival, has been told and retold. In a reversal of his letter to Dr Burton, John Wesley chose to preach to the heathen in Britain. Many years were to pass before new ventures abroad were contemplated, let alone begun.

Allen Birtwhistle, in his contribution to A History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain, discussed some of the Wesley hymns which have inspired generations of Methodists.⁹ Yet they were not the launch-pad for missionary activity among ‘the fullness of the Gentiles’. In a hymn published as early as 1742 John Wesley wrote

9 N.A. Birtwhistle, ‘Methodist Missions’ in R.E. Davies, A.R. George, G. Rupp (eds), A History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain, vol. 3, (London, Epworth Press 1983), pp. 38–9.

Let all earth’s sons thy mercy prove,

Let all thy saving grace adore…

Abroad thy healing influence shower,

O’er all the nations let it flow…¹⁰

But he took a lot of persuading that the time was ripe for matching action to his prayer.

Charles Wesley is renowned for such lines as

The world he suffered to redeem

For all he has the atonement paid…

And all shall own thou dieds’t for all

and

for all my Lord was crucified,

for all, for all my Saviour died.¹¹

Less familiar, because the hymn was not included in the 1779 hymn-book, are the lines

Master, be thou my might, my mouth,

And send me forth to North or South,

To farthest East or West…¹²

10 From ‘Son of thy Sire’s eternal Love’ (headed ‘The Lord’s Prayer paraphrased’) in Hymns and Sacred Poems (Bristol, Felix Farley, 1742). 11 From ‘Father, whose everlasting love’ in Hymns on God’s Everlasting Love (London, W. Strahan, 1741). 12 C. Wesley, Hymns for the Use of Families, (Bristol, William Pike, 1767), no. 151; quoted by Birtwhistle, p. 49.

Charles Wesley’s verses expound the scriptures in which he was steeped, but he was not issuing a call to world evangelization. The emphasis on ‘all’ was in deliberate contrast to that Calvinism which limited the possibility of salvation to the elect: a theological rather than a geographical point.

Nor did John Wesley’s oft-quoted statement ‘I look upon all the world as my parish’ indicate any enthusiasm to get involved in foreign missions. It must be understood in the light of the rest of the sentence he wrote to James Hervey in 1739: ‘thus far I mean, that, in whatever part of it I am, I judge it meet, right, and my bounden duty to declare unto all that are willing to hear the glad tidings of salvation’.¹³ It was then over a year since John Wesley had found peace with God; eighteen months since his brief spell of service in Georgia had come to an abrupt end. The energy and enthusiasm with which he had sailed for America and which had subsequently fallen victim to his failures and doubts, were again evident. For the last few months he had been based in Bristol where he had, at first with severe misgivings, begun to preach in the open air. John Wesley would not accept the normal limits placed on the activity of an Anglican priest. Parish boundaries could not confine him. But his travels over the next half-century were confined to Britain and Ireland, apart from a couple of visits late in life to Holland. His youthful ambition to preach the gospel to the American Indians was of the past.

13 Letter to James Hervey, 20 March 1739, in Telford (ed.), Letters, vol. 1, pp. 284–7.

It took a long time for John Wesley to shed his reluctance to contemplate any venture in mission ‘among the heathen’. He was a cautious conservative and shunned such a rash enterprise. His reputation as a radical innovator is only part of t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Maps
• Abbreviations
• Brief Glossary of Methodist Terms
• Place-Names
• Preface
• 1 Beginning with Wesley
• 2 Coke’s World Parish
• 3 1813
• 4 Colonies and Dominions
• 5 Pioneers
• 6 Gospel and Justice
• 7 The WMMS: The First Fifty Years
• 8 Into India
• 9 The Challenge of China
• 10 Advance in Africa
• 11 Islands in the Sun
• 12 Parallel Missions
• 13 The Century in Retrospect
• 14 The Life of the Missionary
• 15 Women Workers
• 16 Missionary Martyrs of the Nineteenth Century
• Conclusion A New Century
• Bibliography
• Index