Fifth Wednesday of Lent
Lectionary Texts:
Acts 9:32-43
John 16:4-11
The 1770's were an extremely difficult time for Methodists in America. After three decades of successful and growing mission throughout the colonial countryside with Methodist traveling lay preachers commissioned by John Wesley in England, things began to change suddenly and rapidly. Revolutionary sentiments surged through the sympathies of more and more Americans. Methodists were caught in the middle. John Wesley and the entire Methodist movement in England was staunchly opposed to the American Revolution. 1776 was not a good year for Methodists in America. Methodist loyalty to England was taken as disloyalty to America. Life for the Methodist lay preachers became extremely dangerous. Wesley encouraged them to leave America and come back to the mother country. All of them did--all, that is--except one, Francis Asbury. In his years in the colonies Asbury had become the quintessential American. He braved much danger but would never return to England.
Peace came in 1783. Methodist lay preachers began to return to America. Wesley commissioned many more. He also began to ordain some, even though by Anglican Church law, he could not legally do so, since he was not a bishop. He ordained Thomas Coke and appointed him to be Superintendent over the Methodist preachers in what had now become the United States.
The powerful influence of Francis Asbury soon took American Methodism on a different course from anything John Wesley had ever wanted. On Christmas of 1784 in Baltimore, Maryland, Asbury, Coke, and as many Methodist preachers as could get there, came to meet for the first Methodist Annual Conference. They founded the Methodist Episcopal Church, a new denomination totally separate from the Anglican Church (which was becoming the Episcopal Church in the U.S.). The ever bold Asbury got Thomas Coke to ordain him deacon on the first day of the conference. On the second day Coke ordained Asbury an elder. On the third day Coke consecrated Asbury bishop. No Methodist clergy career would ever again advance so rapidly.
The Conference assigned Coke to be bishop of the Northern states; Asbury, of the Southern states. Just a few years later their names were combined as the name of a new Methodist college in Baltimore, Cokesbury College. Cokesbury College is long gone but the name has remained as the company that supplies United Methodist books and curriculum to local churches.
I might end our story here, but one more controversy needs mention. Asbury was a powerful and autocratic bishop. He appointed his pastors to their circuits (we call them charges now) without consultation with either them or their churches. He moved pastors often, and often arbitrarily. One of his pastors, James O'Kelly started a rebellion. He thought that churches should "call" their own pastors, an unacceptable idea to Methodists to this day.
O'Kelly started his own denomintion in protest in 1794, He called it the Republian Methodist Church. It had no bishops and had congregational polity, i.e. each congregation makes its own decisions about personnel and many other issues. The name of his denomination soon changed to simply The Christian Church.
When I was learning Methodist history back in the 60's and 70's I learned about O'Kelly and what an anti-Methodist villain he was. In 1986 I went to teach at Elon University, which is nominally connected with the United Church of Christ, a union of several denominations including some churches of The Christian Church, which O'Kelly had founded. To my shock there in the middle of campus was a statue of that villain O'Kelly and a plaque describing him in glowing terms. One group's villain is another group's hero.
O'Kelly established the Republican Methodist Church in 1793. In 1797 Damascus Church was founded in southern Orange County, south of Chapel Hill, near the Chatham County line. O'Kelly was its first pastor and served from 1797 to 1810. Damascus Church is still going. It's on Damascus Church Road. The churches of the three point charge I served from 1976 to 1979 are all within a couple of miles of Damascus Church. In fact they almost surround it. I never knew the connection with O'Kelly when I lived there.
God of all Christian denominations,
We thank you for the faith and the courage of our clergy forbears in early America, for Asbury, for Coke, and even for O'Kelly. Amen.
Faithfully,
Christian
2 comments:
Is the Christian Church the Disciples of Christ Church today? They have no bishops and call their own pastors.
It's part of the United Church of Christ, right Dad? One of the denominations along with the Congregational Christian and Evangelical and Reformed that joined together to form the UCC? Hence the statue at Elon, a historically UCC church. For those of you who are (unsurprisingly) Methodists, we UCC folks openly affirmed the ordination of gays and lesbians, later LGBT, starting in 1992. I was a youth steward at the General Synod where this resolution was passed. Women were welcomed with open arms into the UCC as clergy at a time when things were much different from how they are now, when my mother left the Methodist church to be ordained UCC in 1984. Many people don't remember what it was like back when women were discriminated against so much in mainline Protestant churches, but I do, even though I was very young. Up here in PA we are surrounded by women pastors. My mom heard one child in a church that a friend of hers pastors say, when he heard that his pastor's husband was a pastor too, "Daddies can be pastors too???" The child was quite shocked.
Post a Comment