Mere Believers

How Eight Faithful Lives Changed the Course of History

Baer

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781621899891
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Does God use flawed people despite their shortcomings? Mere Believers tells the stories of eight remarkable men and women living in tumultuous times, revealing surprising and inspirational answers.William Wilberforce defined Christian as a pilgrim travelling on business through a strange country. In Mere Believers, historian Marc Baer examines eight Christian figures from the past, indicating how their conversion not only directed them to new vocations (travelling on business), but also impacted in profoundly positive ways the society and culture of that strange country they called home. The book reveals how faithful lives can have revolutionary consequences, offering poignant models for vocational discernment and spiritual formation. Mere Believers helps readers engage our own times better by bringing them into conversation with courageous Christians of the past.The subjects represent a variety of Christian traditions. They are male and female, black and white, English, Welsh, Scottish, and an African immigrant. Mere Believers reveals how what we believe is the legacy of what they achieved, that some of the best minds and hearts in the past have been committed, culturally wise Christians, and in turn how their lives and worldviews have shaped our own--including, paradoxically, those who reject Christianity.

Chapter 1

Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon

Story: The church—what is it?

I am a poor individual called in faithfulness

to take care of some hundred thousand souls.

Selina Hastings, aged 83

In 1768 seven Oxford students were tried before a university court for “holding Methodistical tenets, and taking upon them to pray, read and expound the Scriptures, and singing hymns in private houses,” or, as one London newspaper stated a week later, “having too much religion.”1 Six of the seven were expelled from Oxford. In the universities, in the Church of England, in politics, and in society “enthusiasm” in the scornful expression of the day was the ruin of many a career or reputation. Into this maelstrom strode one enthusiast, a most unusual woman in that time or any, for few of her gender founded and managed a denomination, established a seminary, and personally lobbied George Washington—and in some ways these were the least of her accomplishments.

You do not need to like those sitting in the pew next to you, which makes the church distinctive. We may never have picked these people as our friends. Rather, they were chosen for us, as we were selected for them—and we are called to love them although we may not like them. Given how fearsome she could be, I would have been intimidated sitting next to Selina Hastings in church or anywhere else for that matter. Nevertheless, as Cardinal Newman once remarked, believers of all times and persuasions have a great deal to learn from her.2 What he had in mind was how the life of the Countess of Huntingdon connected to the passage wherein Jesus says to those who were true to what he taught, the church in the making, “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me” (Matt 25:35–36). Noticing those in his audience were having a hard time applying this to themselves, Jesus clarified what he meant: “whatever you did for those the world overlooks, you did to me” (Matt 25:45).

So let’s investigate her life by asking some questions: What actions should we take when the church is malfunctioning? When the institutional church will not tolerate us, or for that matter Jesus, what might we be called to do? How do we practice perseverance and courage in the face of trials and intimidation? Is multi-tasking rather than a narrower vocational focus harmful to our well-being?

Selina Shirley was born in 1707 into the privileged world of the English aristocracy, to a family able to trace its roots back more than seven centuries. One grandfather was ennobled, the other the Speaker of the Irish House of Commons. She was the middle of three daughters and co-heiresses of Washington Shirley, Earl Ferrers. Disinherited by his father—spawning decades of bitter litigation—the earl separated from his wife when Selina was six. Selina and one sister stayed with their father, living in relative privation in rural Ireland where as a soldier he was stationed. Her mother and another sister moved to France, and she never saw either of them again. After her father died, her mother sued and then disowned her. Frustrations from the promise of wealth coupled with unhappiness from family dynamics may explain her quick, even violent temper. She was a poor little rich girl if ever there was one.

Raised to be a fixture of high society, Selina’s personality was on the earnest side in an age of frivolity and licentiousness. This was after all the Gin Age, when binge drinking was a national pastime. Said one churchman in 1734: “For about twenty years past, the English nation has been . . . so prodigiously debauched that I am almost a foreigner in my own country.”3 Deeply religious from an early age, Selina Shirley naturally became a do-gooder. As was the case with most women of the time, even wealthy ones, she had been poorly educated. Her thousands of letters reveal an individual well-read and thoughtful but far from having mastered the rules of the English language, while her illegible handwriting rivaled that of your doctor.

Just before turning twenty-one she married Theophilus Hastings, the wealthy ninth Earl of Huntingdon. The marriage produced a degree of happiness that had eluded Selina during her painful childhood. She bore her husband seven children in ten years, which may explain why she remained in poor health for the rest of her life.

The couple was well connected politically and socially—both were descended from English kings—part of a circle around the Prince of Wales, heir to the throne. They appeared frequently at the court of the prince’s father, King George II. That her personality displayed fearlessness long before her conversion was evident in an episode in 1739 when with eleven other aristocratic women she stormed the House of Lords to protest the government’s foreign policy.

Selina Hastings was religious, but not yet a believer, still relying on good works and using contemporary standards of living a moral life—in keeping with the values then exhibited by the Anglican Church, with its emphasis on decorum, moral duty, and human merit. The church had become as worldly as the world it had been intended to turn upside down, making it the problem rather than the solution.

Less than 50 percent of Anglican parishes had resident clergy, which denied much of the population access to meaningful worship. To make matters worse its theology was dysfunctional. Many of its best minds had turned their back on the church’s spiritual heritage by privileging human reason against revelation, and as we’ve seen denigrating the joy expressed at the realization of personal assurance of salvation. Much of the preaching in the Church of England and other Protestant sects left many Britons, as it did John Newton, “weary of cold contemplative truths which cannot warm nor amend the heart.”4

Then in the 1730s something unexpected happened. A revival began within the Church of England, famously recalled in John Wesley’s experience: “I felt my heart strangely warmed.”5 Others before and after, not only in England but in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland had remarkably similar conversion experiences, for example George Whitefield and Hwyel (Howell) Harris. Experience of the new birth generated fluidity and ferment, which was to be expected: rules and traditions went out the window; moral reformation was to follow upon spiritual regeneration.

The Wesley brothers, Whitefield, Harris, and others inside and outside the Church of England used new tools—large gatherings, spontaneous prayer, public confession of sin and expression of contrition, upbeat hymns, lay preaching, accountability groups open to anyone and, where relevant, itinerancy. The world was to be their parish rather than the other way round. “Methodist” came to be the label for a habit long before it was a denomination, characterized by a longing for a deeper spiritual life. Methodism began as a reform movement within Church of England and a coalition of the willing—which included Arminian followers of Wesley (emphasis on free will), Calvinist followers of Whitefield (emphasis on predestination), and Moravians (emphasis on personal piety).

Whenever extraordinary events occur, those in authority particularly feel threatened. The Methodist phenomenon was no different. One Anglican vicar termed it “this monstrous madness and religious frenzy,” a “contagion” that he commented in relief was nevertheless confined to the dregs of society.6 A bishop condemned Methodism ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon
• Chapter 2: Olaudah Equiano
• Chapter 3: Hannah More
• Chapter 4: William Wilberforce
• Chapter 5: Oswald and Biddy Chambers
• Chapter 6: G. K. Chesterton
• Chapter 7: Dorothy Sayers
• Conclusion: Did Believers Make a Difference?
• Select Bibliography