2.2 Founding Perspectives of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection

The series continues: "A History of Wesleyan Ideology." What ideological and cultural forces have converged to shape The Wesleyan Church as we know it today. The picture to the left is Orange Scott, one of the founders of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection.

The previous posts have been:

Preface to Wesleyan Ideological History
1.1 Wesley and High Protestantism
1.2 An Archaeology of Wesley's Thinking 

2.1 Methodist Ideology in the Early 1800s

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1. It is difficult to know what you would have done or thought if you had lived at another point in time. I know that if the current me was transported back to the 1840s, I would leave the Methodist Episcopal Church to be part of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection (WMC) in 1843. Taking one step back, if you took my current values and transported them back to the 1840s in America, I would support the abolition of slavery. I'm not sure what I would have thought was the best method to go about it.

But so much of who we are is a product of our specific history that I'm not sure how much we can say about what we would do or be in a different time and place. If you were born in India 200 years ago, you would very likely be a Hindu, right? If I were born 180 years ago in Georgia, I would likely be pro-slavery. The bottom line is that, if I were born with the same body in a different time and place, I would just very likely be a significantly different person in terms of what I believed. 

I do think that Orange Scott, Luther Lee, LaRoy Sunderland, Jotham Horton, and Lucius Matlock were perfectly reasonable to withdraw from the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) in 1843.

2. Wesley had urged the abolition of slavery in England, although he didn't live to see it. He called American slavery "the vilest that ever saw the sun." The original MEC in the U.S. had opposed slavery. But in the intervening years, the leadership of the MEC had tried to keep the peace by softening its stance toward slaveholding. They also didn't want to put anything in the way of the phenomenal growth they were experiencing.

We've already mentioned that the MEC would split in 1844 into north and south when a southern bishop who owned slaves was asked to step down. Perhaps the WMC would not have happened if that event had happened sooner. In fact, Horton would quickly rejoin the northern MEC. After the Civil War, Lee and Matlock would too, feeling that the WMC had achieved its mission. 

But the 1840 General Conference was particularly offensive to these abolitionists. They were censured for sowing seeds of disunity in the church by speaking out against slavery (while conferences that explicitly stated that slavery was not a moral evil were not addressed). A gag rule was passed forbidding the topic from being discussed at any Annual Conference or General Conference. Black people were prohibited from testifying in church trials in states where they could not testify in state courts. The church officially supported the relocation of slaves to Africa.

There seemed little choice for these men who saw this as the moral issue of the moment but to withdraw and continue the movement elsewhere. One of the mottos of the new WMC was "first pure, then peaceable," and the paper they started was the True Wesleyan (as opposed to the "fake" ones in the MEC). Them's fighting words. This is familiar rhetoric from any group that separates over what they see as a matter of principle to be faithful to the essential values of their tradition. The same language could be used by the Global Methodist Church today.

Indeed, Kevin Watson (Doctrine, Spirit & Discipline 185) points out that the very name "Wesleyan Methodist" was a slam at the MEC. Up to that point, the name Methodist was equivalent to Wesleyan. By taking the name Wesleyan Methodists, they were suggesting that the mainstream Methodists were no longer Wesleyan because of their appeasement on the issue of slavery. 

3. I don't blame them for leaving. The 1840 General Conference more or less said, "If this is a concern to you, shut up or leave the church." By temperament, I think I would have leaned gradualist if I were transported back in time to the north. These were those who wanted to abolish slavery step by step over time. I would have wanted to keep the peace until it just wasn't feasible. 

Lincoln started off that way, but the situation forced his hand. Similarly, the MEC ended up splitting anyway. Sometimes an opposing side is never going to change its mind. Sometimes that ends up in war. Sometimes your opposition wins and you lose. Sometimes you have to make a decision and face whatever the fallout is. If your position is the one with the wind of history behind it, eventually the other side dies off (see Thomas Kuhn).

Gradualism failed. The South just wasn't going to budge on this issue, ever.

4. Orange Scott and later Luther Lee were the key leaders of the new "connection." (The best source of course for the founding of the Wesleyan Methodist Church is Bob Black and Keith Drury's, The Story of the Wesleyan Church.) It was called a "connection" at this point rather than a "church," although for all intents and purposes, it was a church. (It would not be called a church officially until 1891.) 

There were two main issues in its founding. We've already touched extensively on the main one -- opposition to slavery. The other was the Methodist episcopacy. The new church would neither have bishops nor be a purely congregational church. It would use a "middle" structure -- a presbyterian one.

Notice how all three of these structures fit variously well in different cultures. An episcopal structure mirrors cultures with kings and queens, where the leader is there for life and wields immense power. A congregational structure fits American individualism well, where each local church is its own king. The presbyterian model fits the US and Western democracies well, where we have elections for leaders and leaders have significant but not absolute power. 

From a philosophical standpoint, I would argue that this "representational democracy" pattern, with a Constitution to set up the system and appropriate boundaries, has been the most successful in all of history. It has the most checks and balances. It is most likely to play out and preserve Judeo-Christian values in my opinion. 

Those who say, "It's not mentioned in the Bible" are usually unreflective of how biblical structures also were incarnated for their times as well. The Bible gives us principles. It doesn't ever say, "And if you ever get to decide on a governmental or church structure in the 21st century, here's what it should look like." We have to take the principles and play them out in different times and places.

There is a generally unnoticed section in the Wesleyan Discipline called "Elementary Principles." They are an artifact of the founding of the WMC, borrowed directly from the Methodist Protestant Church that split off in 1830. I have never heard anyone refer to them in any significant way. In terms of usage, they are like an appendix or a coccyx that is there but doesn't really do anything. Historical documents sometimes have things like these in them that can suddenly become very important if they somehow come into play in a political moment. They were of great meaning at the time when these individuals were protesting the abuses of power in the MEC.

So the new church would have no bishops. Offices would be elected but would not be held for life. A local church would also vote on whether they wanted a proposed pastor. Church bodies would have a parity between ministerial and lay delegation. There would be the equivalent of a trust clause.

5. The late Donald Dayton wrote a book called, Rediscovering an Evangelical Heritage that should probably be required reading for anyone becoming a Wesleyan pastor. The title has a story of its own. In the mid-twentieth century, the word evangelical was largely taken over by a movement involving Billy Graham and forces like Christianity Today. It was and remains a heavily Calvinist-centered movement. More on that in three posts down the line.

When Dayton first wrote the book in 1976, he wanted to point out that the line of evangelicalism in the 1800s largely did not run through the academics of Princeton that I call the "Princeton Calvinists." These were individuals like Archibald Alexander, Charles Hodge, and B. B. Warfield. In fact, these individuals never referred to themselves as evangelicals.

The original "evangelicals" in anything like the modern sense were people like John Wesley, George Whitefield, and Jonathan Edwards in the 1700s. Two of these were Calvinists, but what made them evangelicals was the way that they preached widely that individuals needed to have conversion experiences. Wesley used the term in reference to individuals who believed you could have an experience of justification by faith. Bebbington's four-fold definition fails because he doesn't take into account the fact that the referents of language change over time (see earlier post).

In short, the line of evangelicalism ran through people like Asbury, Peter Cartwright, Charles Finney, and D. L. Moody -- the revivalists of the 1800s. In the late 1800s, many of them were holiness folk. The "respectable" founders of neo-evangelicalism in the mid-twentieth century weren't so keen on these "emotional" types. Indeed, George Marsden and Mark Noll basically snubbed them in their treatments, calling them "fundamentalists" rather than true evangelicals. I'll unravel that skew in a few posts.

6. The individuals that Dayton covers in his book -- including the early Wesleyan Methodists -- were radicals for the time. They were abolitionists and champions of women's rights. If they were transported back in time, many Wesleyans today would consider them "woke liberals." They were social activists, "social justice warriors," if you would. Orange Scott and Luther Lee would have supported the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s if they were brought forward in time. 

They were post-millennials. That is, they believed that the church age more or less was the millennium. They were optimistic about changing the world to become more and more like the kingdom before Christ returned. The idea of a rapture or a Tribulation as things get worse and worse didn't really exist yet. That comes onto the scene in the late 1800s in the next post.

Some of these Wesleyan Methodists went into the south before the Civil War and preached abolition. Adam Crooks responded to a call to pastor a church in North Carolina in the 1840s, a perilous time. His church was called "Freedom's Hill," which is currently on the campus of Southern Wesleyan University. What a privilege and responsibility SWU has to steward that heritage.

The story of Micajah McPherson is often told. During the Civil War he was lynched and left for dead. But those who lynched him wanted to lynch more people, so they came back for the rope before he was truly dead. He would survive and serve in that church for another thirty years. Daniel Worth would spend the winter of 1859 in a cold cell in North Carolina for preaching abolition. Talk about counter-cultural! Black and Drury point out that Lincoln was too gradualist for these radicals (63-64).

Mark Noll wrote a book on the hermeneutics of this period (Civil War as a Theological Crisis). It is very relevant to debates over complementarianism today. The Princeton Calvinists of this period argued from the household codes that slaves were to obey their masters. They argued that it was unbiblical to be an abolitionist, much as contemporary complementarians are arguing that it is unbiblical to be an egalitarian. 

The Wesleyan Methodists in effect argued that one had to consider first what the overarching principles of Scripture were. Meanwhile, you had to consider the historical context of passages like the household codes and weigh them in the light of the unchanging, overarching core principles of Scripture. The Wesleyan Methodists strongly argued that in Christ there was "neither slave nor free." They saw the trajectory of Philemon as pointing toward the liberation of Onesimus.  

This is an important point. It is common for the person arguing from a clobber verse to accuse others of being unbiblical. In reality, the conflict may be between a verse-oriented hermeneutic versus a whole-Bible hermeneutic. It may be an argument of the letter versus the Spirit. In the end, these are hard debates that various communities of faith just have to wrestle through.

7. Luther Lee would famously preach the sermon at the first official ordination of a woman in the United States in 1853 (although Richard Allen of the AME church had given permission to Jarina Lee to preach in 1819). Lee's sermon is just as relevant today as it was then. Wesleyans also remember that the organizing meeting of the women's rights movement in America took place in a Wesleyan Methodist Church in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848.

The rights in question were primarily the right to vote, something that wouldn't happen until 1920. What was counter-cultural then at the time? The movement for women to be able to vote clearly went strongly against the culture of the time. 

Did all Wesleyan Methodists agree? Almost certainly not. For example, the WM pastor at Seneca Falls did not unlock the church. Oversight? They had to crawl in a window to open it up.

But Lee and others saw the Pentecostal principle. Whether you are a slave or a free person, black or white, a woman or a man, the Holy Spirit fills each person equally. Each person has equal value in God's sight. Experience demonstrates that the Spirit can speak and lead equally through all types of individuals. Doesn't it quench the Spirit to box people in based on such externals? Why not let God decide whom he calls?

8. A couple other tidbits from these early days. Few people know that Wheaton College was actually founded by the Wesleyan Methodists, as was Adrian College. However, the WMs did not succeed with the financial aspects of those schools and so they were sold to other groups.

Another issue of some controversy had to do with membership in secret societies. This was a big deal in the mid-1800s. Such organizations had a strong cult-like flavor to them and expected a person's primary loyalty. It looked very fishy and seemed to conflict with the church being a person's primary allegiance. One of the founders of the WMC would leave (Sunderland) over this issue. I believe he eventually left the faith.