Methodist Pilgrimage

on August 31, 2015

Yesterday I fulfilled a longtime dream of pilgrimage to the oldest Methodist church in America, Saint George United Methodist in Philadelphia, dating to 1767. Everybody in early American Methodism was there at some point, including Bishops Asbury and Coke. Several of the first annual conferences convened there.

There were fewer than 20 there on a warm August Sunday, but the worship was vibrant, although straining to be heard over the elevated highway just outside the ancient windows. The current pastor has been there only a year and is enthusiastic. Alongside the sanctuary is an old house with a wonderful museum of early Methodism.

In the early days sometimes several thousand worshipped at St. George’s, so it was a megachurch and a hive of revivalism in the young republic. The network of Methodist itineracy that so thoroughly penetrated frontier America was ultimately plugged into St. George Church as its temporal and spiritual energy source.

Sadly, early St. George Church of course had its sins and lost its large black membership when attempting to confine them to the balcony. James Allen led black Methodists of Philadelphia into what became the African Methodist Episcopal Church. If early Methodism had stood against racial distinctions, could it possibly have helped America avoid two centuries of slavery, civil war, and segregation?

Like all human history, Methodism is full of triumph and tragedy. Methodism across decades simultaneously abetted racial injustice while also warming the embers of human equality. Mainline Protestantism, according to Jody Bottum’s thesis, created the language and culture of American statecraft, facilitating social consensus and political reform, including civil rights. That Mainline, including Methodism, is now culturally passé, and America has few avenues through which social consensus can now emerge, hence chronic polarization.

We should recall and learn from history while not obsessing over it. Mainline Protestant hegemony will not return, and long divided, theologically confused Methodism is unlikely to lead America to revival. U.S. United Methodism is losing nearly 100,000 members annually and likely will lose another 2 million across 20 years before any reversal. That reversal depends on the church’s new emerging majority in Africa steering the global denomination, including its U.S. structures, back to emphasis on evangelism, salvation, sanctification and holiness.

There are of course many vibrant congregations in American United Methodism. But typically they operate almost autonomously, apart from and even despite their denomination. There are few if any congregations like old St. George Church, which was the hub and mother ship of a dynamic national network of Methodist revivalism.

Methodism originally was a vision for church and nationwide spiritual renewal. United Methodism in the U.S. is institutionally sclerotic, its palsied bureaucracy wanting to join the accelerated decline of the rest of Mainline Protestantism. Renewalists in Methodism rightly and commendably work hard in their local churches. But true renewal will need a national and global focus, conceiving Methodism as a collaborative network for ongoing spiritual revolution.

Which United Methodist congregation is prepared to be like St. George Church of old?

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