A Methodist church and its work

Front matter

TRAINING COURSES FOR LEADERSHIP

Learning and Teaching. Harold J. Sheridan and G. C. White.

The Training of the Devotional Life. Minnie E. Kennedy and Minna M. Meyer.

Contents

Chapter Pagb

Foreword 7

I. Our Heritage 9

Foreword

A Methodist Church and Its Work is one of the textbooks in the Training for Leadership Series. Those that have preceded it in the series are Life in the Making, Learning and Teaching, The Program of the Christian Religion, and the Training of the Devotional Life. With the specialization textbooks that will follow, the series as a whole will offer to the young people of Methodism a training course which for breadth and comprehensiveness will far surpass any that has hitherto been available for their use.

In this series the present volume occupies an important place. It has been provided because of the conviction that the young people who in the future are to be called upon to become teachers in the school of the church require to be given as a fundamental element in their training intelligent conceptions and high ideals of what a Methodist church ought to be, not merely in organization and methods of work, but even more in spirit and purpose. The Sunday school is the church school. Those who are to teach in the church school, who are to have a large place in forming the spiritual ideals and in determining the character of the future members of the church — that is, who are to make the church of to-morrow — require a vision of what the church ought to be.

The task prescribed for the authors, to provide within the limits of twelve brief chapters, a textbook that would accomplish this purpose, was not an

T

FOKEWORD

easy one. That they have perfectly succeeded they themselves would be the last to claim. That they have produced an exceptionally useful book, one that is well fitted both to inform and inspire young people, the editors believe that those who read it sympathetically will agree.

With the prayer that the book may be used with satisfaction by many groups of earnest young people seeking to fit themselves to build the church of the future, we send it forth upon its mission.

The Editors.

Chapter I

The beginning of the Methodist movement. — A group of students awake to spiritual and social needs. Their life in Oxford. — The inheritances of Methodism from its past : (1) Learning joined to spiritual fervor. Study of Greek New Testament. (2) Preaching to masses outside the church. (3) A gospel of personal salvation. (4) Religious instruction of children. (5) Social spirit and vision. The wide range of services inaugurated by Wesley. Interest in public questions. (6) Organization and discipline. The genius of Wesley. Getting a church organized. Our lack of discipline. (7) Missionary Spirit. — America the field of early missions. Francis Asbury, the pioneer. Foreign Missions for American Methodism. Our heritage and our response.

Methodism began in a way that must appeal to all young people — as an adventure for God and humanity by a company of young men at the greatest and oldest of England's universities.

Wesley writes: "In November, 1729, four young gentlemen of Oxford — Mr. John Wesley, fellow of Lincoln College; Mr. Charles Wesley, student of Christ Church; Mr. Morgan, Commoner of Christ Church; and Mr. Kirkham of Merton College — began to spend some evenings in a week together in reading, chiefly, the Greek Testament."

Three of these students, the two Wesleys and Kirkham, were sons of ministers. Morgan was the son of an Irish gentleman resident in Dublin. Wesley had

A METHODIST CHUKCH AND ITS WORK

graduated from Christ Church College and had been honored with a fellowship at Lincoln College, which brought him an abundant income. The others were undergraduates. Their numbers were increased by students who joined the circle until they became a company that attracted the attention of the university.

A Spiritual Awakening. Their study of the Greek Testament had the most interesting and important consequences. They had started out to follow Christ and to do the things, in their own time and place, which they found him doing. When they first came together they had determined to abandon the follies of university life and to be faithful and regular in their religious duties. They spent time every morning and evening in private prayer, went to the holy communion at Christ Church once every week, persuaded all they could to attend prayers, sermons, and the sacrament.

But in the New Testament they were impressed by something additional. What it was is best shown by what they did. They went to the Bishop of Oxford and requested permission to visit the inmates of the parish workhouse and the prisoners in the Castle. They began to economize and to use all the money they received above expenses, and all they could get from people who became interested in their work, to provide for the necessities of prisoners, to free those who were imprisoned for small debts, to provide food, clothing, and shelter for poor people whom they discovered, and to provide for the religious education of their children. They preached in the Castle and workhouse and prayed with prisoners who were condemned to die. It is evident that they had read the parable of the good Samaritan and the twenty-fifth chapter of Saint Matthew.

In the midst of all this work and the discussion that it precipitated among the students they were true collegians, proud of the academic traditions of their colleges and of Oxford. Their correspondence with each other during vacation periods reveals how human they were in their enthusiasms, their wholesome love affairs, and their devoted friendships.

Here we have the first inheritance of Methodism — above all an inheritance for her young people — a religious awakening beginning in the oldest, the noblest, the most beautiful of English universities, with the charm of the best English life about it; a movement originated by young men of character and breeding, inspired by the most generous impulses, and manifesting courage of the highest order; a religious accomplishment of the first order, directly inspired by the study of the Greek New Testament.

Little did they know what would come of their club and their earnest efforts. They simply did their best and left the results with God. Some of them died early; others lost their first enthusiasm after leaving college, as many another young person has done. John Wesley spent a brief period in America, at Savannah, Georgia, where he has left an indelible memory. But from the members of this club came the leaders of the Great Awakening, and the character of that awakening and the genius of world-wide Methodism which arose from it were determined by them at Oxford.

It is not within the province of this chapter to

IX relate the thrilling story of their labors when they left the university and began to go up and down through England, Scotland, and Ireland, preaching and working with amazing zeal and power. Every young Methodist should read the story as he reads other fascinating narratives of high adventure for the good of the world.

But certain things stand out in what was said and done by them and in what was said and done by those who came after them in England and America, which are the true glory of historic Methodism and which remain to inspire the church to great endeavor.

The first is that they went boldly to the masses of the people and to those, high and low, who would not come to the churches. They did this everywhere over Great Britain and Ireland so rapidly, so powerfully, so determinedly, that they became in the best sense the sustained sensation of their generation.

The same spirit that had made them brave the criticism and ridicule of their fellow students at Oxford led them soon to face the scorn and ostracism of religious people and, in the early days of the great revival, the violence of mobs. They allowed nothing to hinder them. They stood on the platforms of the market crosses in villages. They hastened to executions, cockpits, and fairs, and preached to assembled thousands. They gathered the people together in open spaces outside the towns. They preached in the cottages of the poor, in barns, in great houses. They sought out miners, farm laborers, and fisher folk, and found their way everywhere into the crowded parts of the cities. They numbered also among their supporters the wealthy, the educated, and the titled. It was a magnificent manifestation of Christian courage, strikingly like the work of the early Christians. The church can never get far unless it is willing in each generation to pay just such a price for victory.

In the second place Wesley and his associates went to the people with a most powerful and passionate preaching of the gospel of personal salvation. They denounced unsparingly the sins of their countrymen and called them to repentance and a godly life. They spoke with peculiar authority because of their own knowledge of the spiritual life and because of their own consecration and determination. They had found Christ themselves, and through Christ they would not stop until they had brought the people of England face to face with him. And with those who accepted Christ they would not stop until they too had felt their hearts "strangely warmed," nor until their hearts had been purified and filled with gladness by the presence of the Spirit of God. Under Wesley this evangelism was a constant effort, not a brief period of special meetings once every year. It was kept up week by week by his preachers and class leaders.

Religious Instruction of Children. While the early Methodist movement impresses one most by its revival effort and its great meetings, Wesley was equally careful about the religious instruction and Christian nurture of the children. He was no mere revivalist, but a transcendent evangel like Saint Paul, calling to men day and night to turn to God, visiting from house to house, conversing with multitudes personally, speaking to the children in the households he visited, and gathering them together in his churches for instruction and care. This was their greatest work, and it is the finest tradition of Methodism. Above every other influence it accounts for the amazing growth of the church throughout the earth and for the fact that to-day twenty million people count themselves followers of Christ under the leadership of John Wesley. And while methods change with each new age, yet in ways just as effective and by an evangelism just as spiritual and just as uncompromising the work of redemption must be accomplished to-day and to-morrow.

Social Spirit and Vision. But as one thinks about the work of the Wesleys one is impressed also by the social spirit and vision that accompanied this evangelism. The group at Oxford which Wesley gathered about him learned this, as has been said, by their studies in the Greek New Testament. They saw Christ moving among the poor, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, defending the oppressed, befriending the outcast, patiently teaching the people, and sharing his life with them.

They proceeded to do the same to the best of their wisdom and strength, going first, as has been said, to the poor in and around Oxford, to the unfortunates in the Castle and the parish workhouse, and later everywhere over Great Britain and Ireland. It is not generally known that Wesley undertook medical work— physic, as it was called in his day— among the poor while at Oxford. This later came to be an important feature of his service to his generation.

Wesley built schools, orphanages, old folks' homes, and dispensaries for the care of the sick. In periods of unemployment he even went the length of establishing factories in which to give the people work. He set up a remarkably modern system of poor relief based on investigation, case work, visitation, medical care, care of children, and employment. It is related in his "Journal" that as an old man he came near to death by a cold contracted when tramping through the snow in London seeking funds for the relief of the needy during a period of unemployment. He also devised a significant method of sending his leaders two by two into stricken homes, with instructions to carry relief and to encourage and pray with those they helped.

Wesley and his associates were also keenly alive to public social questions. They joined in the agitation against slavery and were among the originators of the temperance movement. Wesley spoke out on grave public questions, like the war with the American colonies, he being a contemporary of George Washington. One of his pamphlets, which is still extant, is on the cause of the high cost of living in England at that time — a strangely modern treatise, in which he proposes to stop the brewing of beer and the distilling of spirits so as to economize the nation's store of grain.

In brief, it is well known that Wesley undertook and initiated almost every form of modern social work. His preeminence lay in the fact that he saw social service as a part of religion and made it such in his labors. He was easily the greatest social worker of his time, not even excepting Wilberforce.

What a heritage is that to the Methodism of to-day! It must be startling to one who believes that ministers and churches should save souls only, and that social service is not a part of the gospel, to know that the founder of Methodism gave social service a place secondary only to evangelism, and that he learned this at Oxford when he studied the methods of Christ in the New Testament.

Organization and Discipline. It has been said that John Wesley possessed a genius for administration equal to that of the great religious statesmen of the Church of Rome. Those who opposed him in his own day called him Pope John. Certain it is that he created a religious force which came to be like the army of Cromwell in its spirit and power.

He gathered together a company of people for the most part uneducated, instructed them, got them to reading, put them in training under leaders, and set them to work for Christ. He was obliged to use many insufficiently trained men for the ministry of his chapels, but he set about their better education with the greatest determination. He founded a profitable Book Concern, raised large amounts of money, undertook the erection of hundreds of chapels, orphanages, parsonages, schoolhouses, and administrative buildings, and established such a system that the work proceeded with economy and without scandal.

This is another of our heritages. The world cannot be saved by noble sentiments nor by men who have neither learned to discipline themselves nor to work together. When Francis Asbury came to America fresh from his experience with English

Methodism, he noted in his "Journal" the absence of discipline in the religious life of the New World and proceeded to establish and enforce it in his churches with all bis power.

Modern Methodism has inherited the ecclesiastical machinery of generations of effort, improved upon and enlarged until it has become an imposing, world-wide organization. Our present weakness is our lack of discipline. Under modern conditions such control as Wesley exercised is impossible in any church. The spirit of the age is for freedom, so that the very great authority which the church exercises and will always exercise must be reenforced by a strong voluntary discipline of our members over themselves.

We face here the gravest weakness of democracy — a weakness tested out in the fiery ordeal of the great war: Is democracy able to create disciplined effort as does an autocracy? The war has shown that it can, and a discipline that is even more powerful than that of absolutism.

So, likewise, the young people of Methodism will have to demonstrate that under freedom they can be depended on to be loyal to the church, regular in attendance upon the services of public worship, faithful in Christian work and in their personal religious habits and, above all, resolutely Christian in their daily lives.

The Missionary Spirit. One more heritage from the glorious past of the church remains to be mentioned, and it is mainly a heritage from American Methodism, although it was the genius of the church from the beginning. It is the missionary spirit that has made Methodism one splendid adventure for God and humanity.

The Wesleyan revival reached America less than ten years before the opening of the Revolutionary War. The church was thus a century and a half late on the American continent as compared with its sister denominations ; yet it has outstripped them all in numerical strength. The causes of this are manifold, but among them missionary zeal stands out most prominently. American Methodism has been a fiery missionary movement, based on evangelism and religious education.

It would be difficult to discover a more thrilling story of adventure in any land than that of the itinerants who kept abreast of the great wave of pioneers who from the time of the Revolutionary War moved westward over the Allegheny Mountains into the Mississippi Valley, westward after the Civil War over the great plains beyond the Mississippi, westward over the Rocky Mountains until they stopped at the shores of the Pacific Ocean.

Francis Asbury, who led this movement during the early years of the last century and put his stamp upon it, lacked the social vision and the broad education of John Wesley, but he was by nature a missionary as well as an intense worker, a capable administrator, and a friend of education. He and his itinerants and the two generations who followed them, preceding the present generation, planted Methodism deep and strong in the heart of the South and West and made the church preponderant in many States. They accomplished this by incessant labors of evangelism, by the instruction of children and by founding everywhere seminaries and institutions of higher education.

The missionary zeal that gave Methodism such a preeminence in American life caused the church a hundred years ago, when it was poor, to establish the first of its foreign missions. These now girdle the globe and constitute a vast and amazingly successful enterprise for the salvation of the non-Christian world as well as for Christian work in South America and on the continent of Europe. American Methodism has made Methodism a world movement. As this book is being written, the missionary societies are preparing to celebrate this century of missionary triumph by a period of unparalleled missionary education and giving.

This, then, is our heritage, bequeathed to us from the labors of the Wesleys and the work of our fathers. It is a great and noble legacy of high endeavor and uncompromising devotion to Christ. Sometimes young people are deceived by the show of things and are led by the very plainness and earnestness of the church and by the fact that it is such a church of the people to fail to realize that these are the qualities which most commend it and which show that it is after the mind of Christ. May the young people of American Methodism, North and South, be worthy the possession of such a heritage. May they carry the banners forward and upward in their own generation.

1. Why do the beginnings of Methodism appeal to young people?

2. What were the main characteristics of Wesley's work?

3. What place did he give to social service in the great awakening?

4. Do you think the church can depend on the loyalty of its young people if it leaves them free to think and free to act? Why?

5. Why did Methodism grow so rapidly when it came to America?

6. Is your church alive? Is it doing the two kinds of work which Wesley did? What should it do that it is not doing?

Chapter II The Purpose And Program Of The Modern Church

No statement of purpose in New Testament. — The Great Commission of Jesus. — Is the church needed to-day?— The answer. — The purposes of the church: to develop Christian character and to bring in Christian social order. — The two great commandments of Jesus: First, to love God supremely. — To inspire, to instruct, and to train individuals. Second, to redeem society. — Social service. Cooperation with social agencies. — These two purposes one. — Application to local church. — Its relation to its neighborhood and community. — The program of a local church. — Its necessity. — A survey of the field. — Cooperation with other agencies at work.

Nowhere in the New Testament is there a definite and authoritative statement of just what the church is to do and what it is not to do. Christ left it to work out its own program. It may be free to do at any given time what manifestly needs to be done, to use those methods which promise to be most effective, and to adjust itself to the spirit of different ages and different peoples. The result has been that the church, while continuous and permanent beyond the stability of the governments of the earth, has yet been ever changing, ever broadening, everadvancing; and the freer it has been to adjust itself to the conditions of the world to which it has been sent, the greater has been its redemptive power.

Christ himself gave to the church its eternal chal-

n lenge in his own last commission to the disciples: "Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I commanded you: and lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." This commission has been the watchword of the church during all the Christian centuries and has guided its great endeavors in every land and age.

But it has been a long time since this command of Jesus was spoken. The world of to-day is much larger than the world of the first century. Society is more complex, and the relationships of life very much more intricate than in the days of our Lord. Many persons are asking if society has not outgrown the institution of the church and no longer needs to give it an important place in its life. These critics profess to believe in religion — yea, even in Christianity — but for the church they do not seem to find a worthy place in their thinking. The answer to this doubt, to which we must give the credit of being honest, is the fact of the church itself. It is here at work in human society marshaling the loyalty of millions of people and constantly extending the range of its influence to the remotest parts of the earth. And it has back of it more than nineteen centuries of noble history.

The church, however, is not an end in itself. It is a divine human agency for the bringing about of a certain goal in human life. It is concerned not with its own development as an institution but witji the development of persons, the creation of

PURPOSE AND PROGRAM

Christian character. The church can be best judged by the kind of people it makes. However wildly or earnestly men may talk to the contrary, the world has never yet discovered a better means of saving human lives for service and leavening the social order than the Church of Jesus Christ. It may and will change with the changing centuries, but in its nobler forms it will abide as the center of the world's hope of a better day.

We are now prepared to ask more definitely, What is the purpose of the church? Without attempting a technical definition we may say that the church exists to develop Christian character in individual men and women and to bring about a Christianized social order both in our local communities and throughout the world. Jesus himself summarized the gospel and the mission of his church in the two great commandments, to love God supremely and to love one's neighbor as one's self (Mark 12.28-33).

The first and great commandment, as Jesus called it, leads the church straight into its wonderful spiritual mission. It means worship and prayer and the culture of the inner life of humanity. It means the winning of men to Christ, and the religious nurture of children. To take the individual people of the world, beginning in earliest childhood; to single them out so that the church sees not a mass of people but George and Mary, James and Alice, and knows them intimately ; to see that these, one by one, are instructed and awakened until each makes his or her own consecration to Christ and comes to know God each in his own soul — that is the first and supreme purpose of the church in the modern world.

I do not hesitate to say that the church's ministry to the inner life is the most vital factor in the progress of humanity.

Let every young disciple of Christ take that great commandment to himself. Not only is it his duty to love God himself, to keep his own windows of prayer open toward heaven, to take his place in divine worship Sunday after Sunday, but it is his larger duty to carry that gospel to the whole world. A true disciple of Christ is a missionary to the depth of his soul.

When I say this I think of the words of Isaiah, "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace !" And I say of the young people whose hearts respond to the Master's call, and who work for him at home or overseas, How beautiful are the lives of those who catch Christ's vision of the kingdom of heaven, and join in its great purposes !

The second commandment, said Christ, is like unto the first — that is, it stands up beside it in importance: "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." This he immediately interpreted by the parable of the good Samaritan. He also explained the saying at a later time by the parable of the sheep and the goats, which is recorded in the latter part of the twenty-fifth chapter of Saint Matthew. Most wonderful of all, he made plain what it all meant by his compassionate life. When our Lord made untrained Galilsean fishermen his companions, when he stood up for those who were shamed and outcast, when he fed the multitudes and healed the sick, when he arraigned the tyranny of those who were leaders

PURPOSE AND PROGRAM

of the people, when he preached the gospel to the poor, he was carrying out the second great commandment.

The second commandment leads straight into social service, as the first leads into worship and soul-winning. It means right relations among men and organizations created by men, and among races and governments. It means a righteousness based upon love as distinguished from that which is merely legal and customary ; which does not ask first, What are my rights? What can I get? but, What will advance the general good ?

The second commandment takes the church into the new great cooperation which is forming for a Christian social order — into public health ; into equal rights and opportunities for women with men; into the abolition of alcoholism, poverty, and disease; into the new internationalism from which racial hatred, armament, and wars are banished; into honest and efficient government and the enlarged use of governmental machinery for the welfare of the masses; into the spread of democracy and its increasing application to the internal affairs of nations.

These are immensely important problems. The politics of the future will center about them, and the strength of the nation will depend on what is done. It would be unpardonable for young people who are soon to become citizens to have no interest in them or to be uninformed. No ardent knight of the Middle Ages embarking upon one of the crusades had such a thrilling call to chivalric devotion as the call that sounds to the youth of America in this hour.

The world is deeply sunk in the commonplace. It hopes but dimly for the better day of the kingdom of God. It is confused, blinded by selfishness and indulgence, and half dumbly lives from day to day. It struggles and suffers and sees no shining way out of its miseries.

These Two Purposes Are One. The church has a divine message for this world. In the first commandment it has a message of a spiritual world, of immortal life, of the eternity of goodness, of God's infinite love, power, and righteousness, of daily help from heaven for life's commonest tasks. In the second commandment it has a glorious social vision with which to inspire the world and an imperative call to duty.

These two commandments are really one. They are a divine love, going up to God like fragrant incense and reaching out to humanity like a mother's arms. Christ never distinguished between spiritual ministry and social service, and a day will come when the church will put them together. It will then understand the "glad tidings," which is what the word "gospel" means. The real gospel is the two commandments fused together by a love like the love of Christ. Nothing short of this is the gospel of the kingdom of God, and the bringing in of this kingdom is the supreme purpose of the church.

These principles apply with peculiar force to the local churches of Methodism. It is in the local church that the great problems of personal religion and of social transformation are to be worked out. Fortunately, it is here that we all get a chance to do something. Young people are brought up in the