The Use of the Old Testament in a Wesleyan Theology of Mission

Snider

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781498201100
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Since the inception of Wesleyan theology, thousands of men and women have engaged in domestic and international missions. But why did they go? Why do they continue to go today? In The Use of the Old Testament in a Wesleyan Theology of Mission, Gordon Snider examines the Wesleyan understanding of mission in light of the Old Testament. What theology from God's Old Covenant gave Wesleyans their drive to impact the nations, and how did it shape their missional strategies? The reader will discover why Wesleyan Christians go into the world and gain a deeper understanding of missions by exploring The Use of the Old Testament in a Wesleyan Theology of Mission.

section i

Toward a Wesleyan Theology of Mission

The Perspective of Founders of the Missionary Society of 1813

chapter 1

The Perspectives of Thomas Coke and Jabez Bunting

Introduction

It has been said that from its beginnings Wesleyanism was a missionary movement. Historically that should not be surprising. Findlay details the missionary interest in the Wesley family back to the grandfather of John and Charles Wesley. The grandfather, also John, made a serious effort to become a missionary in the Dutch East Indies, but this was hindered by family circumstances. His son Samuel had a similar desire but was prevented when a proposal he placed before the Duke of York to involve the British East India Company “to facilitate the spread of Christianity” failed to materialize.35

Susannah Wesley, the mother of John and Charles, had a great interest in mission and made the subject a part of the training of her children. She was delighted when her sons declared their intention to go to America as missionaries to the Indians.36 Geordan Hammond, in his dissertation on “Restoring Primitive Christianity: John Wesley and Georgia, 1735–1737,” in Appendix 1, confirms this connection of the Wesley family with “foreign missions.”37

So in seeking to select spokesmen for foreign missions in the founders’ period, it would seem natural to turn to the most prominent name in Methodism: John Wesley. He is known for his statement that he viewed the world as his parish.38 His followers took up the overseas missionary task.

It is clear that no other voice so exactly expressed the theology of the eighteenth-century Methodist movement as did John Wesley. But it would also be a mistake to consider him a leading voice for “world evangelism” within the movement in that period. Ted Campbell has persuasively argued that Wesley’s “world as my parish” statement was “not a claim to foreign missionary outreach as is commonly represented; it was Wesley’s claim that the existing parish system (within the Church of England) could not function to evangelize a largely pagan nation.”39

The background is that John Wesley returned from Georgia after two frustrating years of labor there with a very different concept of mission than he had when he went. The experience in Georgia had convinced him more of the heathenism of his own (English) society than of the heathenism of the Indians he had gone to Georgia to evangelize. He still believed that the world needed to be evangelized, but he returned believing that his own country was too pagan to undertake the task. Padgett puts it this way: “Wesley’s mission, then, was guided by his radical recognition that his own people, their society and their culture, were not themselves Christian, and thus stood as much in need of the Gospel as any foreign people.”40 His mission was to be a “home missionary.” This view led to what Campbell called “a cautious approach to foreign missionary work”41 It was Wesley’s “cautious” leadership in foreign missions that led the Methodist preachers to limit missionary expansion in line with what they believed to be biblical principles.

The first of these principles was that no proposal to send missionaries should be approved unless there was “a clear indication of a ‘providential opening’ for their work.”42 Defining “providential” was often a very subjective matter, as Coke, the unofficial “foreign minister of Methodism,”43 discovered on various occasions.44

A second “biblical” principle relating to missionary expansion developed from one of the Wesleyan distinctives already mentioned: prevenient grace. Wesley was so convinced that God was already at work in the heathen and that prevenient grace could actually lead to salvation, that there was some doubt as to whether proclamation was necessary.45 If missionary work was to be engaged in, it must come only after inquiry was made into what God was already doing among that people.

The third objection could be said to be based on Acts 1:8. There the command was to allow successive people groups to be evangelized, rather than leaping over one group to reach another that might be deemed to be more responsive. Padgett writes: “Only by such a ‘contiguous’ approach could strong, inter-linked Christian communities to be built.”46

Birtwhistle adds two additional reasons for Wesley “vetoing” the ideas put forward by Coke for missionary enterprise. One was that the societies Coke would have organized to oversee the missions would have taken the authority for that aspect of the Methodist movement out of Wesley’s hands. Second, Wesley was inclined to expand westward rather than eastward.47 It was Coke who ultimately, after John Wesley’s death, took the initiative to motivate the Methodist societies to catch the vision of world ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Abstract
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section One: Toward a Wesleyan Theology of Mission—The Perspective of Founders of the Missionary Society of 1813
• Section Two: Toward a Wesleyan Theology of Mission—The Perspective of the Methodist Episcopal Church
• Section Three: Toward a Wesleyan Theology of Mission—The Perspective of the Wesleyan Holiness Movements
• Conclusion
• Bibliography