Methodism and the Mediating Elite (Part I)

United Methodism comes in several varieties. Presently our “diversity” is so great that we share little basis for unity.

It is more than just issues around human sexuality that we need to address if United Methodism is to have a future. Some of the issues have to do with “the gap”: differences between clergy and laity, local church and the denominational institution, urban and rural, or between the common people and those in authority.

The first three questions asked by my conference Board of Ordained Ministry when I sought deacon’s orders years ago were: Did I smoke? What did I think of the Methodist hymnal? What did I think of Methodist Sunday school material? I gave a clear answer on smoking and then hedged a bit on the next two questions by relating how in my home county-seat Methodist church in Indiana we used both the Methodist hymnal and the Sunday school material.

I probably already had a reputation by the time I served a three-point charge in Indiana while a full-time student. I would comment from time to time, in seminary or to some ministerial colleagues, how I lived in two different worlds. In my churches, we held testimony meetings, prayer meetings, revivals and attended the local Holiness Association meetings. My seminary talked of objective worship, process theology, philosophy, unworthy ditties that were in the hymnal, and the evils of capitalism. The professors characterized “fundamentalism” as a dying, outdated approach to faith practiced by the unenlightened.

Even with that my conference was open-minded when it came to how pastors ran their churches. My superintendents (at least most of them) believed that the lay people were better equipped to know what kind of material served their congregations than bureaucrats from far off places. At least that was my attitude when I became a district superintendent. I was curious enough to do my own survey. Of 75 or so churches, about 30% didn’t use official Methodist Sunday school material. Approximately the same percentage didn’t use the Methodist hymnal.

Early Methodists in America were among the poorest of the poor, among the most uneducated of the uneducated, and among the farthest out on the respectability fringe of those on the respectability fringe. But they took the promises of freedom promised by the Revolution with seriousness. They stood against kings and tyrannies. They believed it was the Spirit of God, not an education nor one’s standing in social circles, that counted with God. And, especially in the west, they were not constrained by an established religious culture which laid on the expectations as to how they were to believe and act. This was articulated quite well by the Methodist evangelist Lorenzo Dow:

…larnin isn’t religion, and eddaication don’t give a man the power of the Spirit. It is grace and gifts that furnish the real live coals from off the altar. St. Peter was a fisherman—do you think he ever went to Yale College? No, no, beloved brethren and sisters. When the Lord wanted to blow down the walls of Jericho, he didn’t take a brass trumpet, or a polished French horn: no such thing; he took a ram’s horn—a plain, natural ram’s horn—just as it grew. And so, when he wants to blow down the walls of the spiritual Jericho…he don’t take on of your smooth, polite, college larnt gentlemen, but a plan, natural ran’s-horn sort of man like me.

What was frightening to the colonial religionists and culture was that it was reported that more Americans had heard Lorenzo Dow preach than any other preacher of that time. Between 1800 and 1835 some of his writings went through seventy editions. When Dow went to England he was banned from preaching but not before he had established a new Methodist body, the Primitive Methodist Church.

Established colonial churches were appalled not only by Dow, but by blacks preaching, illiterate sailors, and by servants, some of whom angered their employers by lecturing them on spiritual matters. The growing religious culture was egalitarian, populist and dominated by common people. Methodists were leading the charge.

The result? By around 1850 there were more Methodists than any other religious group in America. However, by that time it could no longer be claimed the Methodists were among the poorest of the poor, nor among the most uneducated of the uneducated. It was only natural that many Methodists, as they began to dominate the religious culture, would move into the middle class and start colleges and then seminaries and get involved in politics. Helped by persons like Bishop Matthew Simpson, who lobbied for more Methodists in government circles and who preached Abraham Lincoln’s funeral sermon, they moved up the respectability scale. Instead of being scorned by the mediating elite of the nation’s better social classes, Methodists began to be the scorners themselves.

The 1872 Methodist Episcopal Hymnal serves as an example. The hymnal committee included no laity, women, or blacks. They were described by the Methodist Quarterly Review as college presidents, presiding elders, professors of distinct classes of culture, position and experience. The hymnal was not sympathetic to spirituals and revival songs or music loved by persons in the pew. Of 307 authors, 66 were Episcopalians, 22 Congregationalists, 20 Presbyterians, 14 Unitarians, 13 Lutherans, and 13 Catholics. There were only 10 Methodists (including, of course, Wesley). Only 7% of the hymns were of American origin and out of 1,117 hymns only three were linked with anyone west of Rochester, NY, or south of Washington, D.C. That hymnal has been assessed as the least popular of all official denominational hymnals. It was reported that in a number of churches hymnals once in pew racks were stored in the furnace room.

Even then the hymnal was orthodox in theology. The section on Depravity or Lost Condition was not excised from Methodist hymnals until 1905. By then modernism had entered the scene, championed by such persons as Borden Parker Bowne of Boston (from 1876 to 1910). Bowne had done philosophical study in Germany and returned to America to rescue Methodism from “the swamps of ignorance,” with the claim that the church needed scholarly investigators to do its intellectual work and adjust religious thought to the advances of cultivated intelligence.

“The adjusting of religious thought” meant the downplaying, if not complete denial, of such Wesleyan teachings as Original Sin and the Blood Atonement, and Methodism’s continuing reliance on revivalism and conversion. Bowne was tried for heresy but acquitted. If Bowne was not a heretic no one would ever be a heretic. His books appeared on the Course of Study required reading list. He served on the University Senate that approved what could be officially Methodist.

There is perhaps no better example of the tremendous “gap” opening between Methodism’s growing class of educated and mediating elites and the people in the pews than the account of Bowne and ordinary Methodists. Once Bowne had his way with the up and coming intellectual elite, there was no turning back. By the mid-1920s every seminary of the Methodist Episcopal Church and M.E. Church South identified its theological orientation as modernist.

Even as Bowne was hailed as the future of Methodism, Methodist populism was under fire. Both the north and the south church sought to control revivalism with Disciplinary provisions that authorized  district superintendents to “approve” the use of evangelists not on the conference acceptable list. Furthermore, pastors were not to hold services within the bounds of another parish without written consent of the pastor in charge (this prohibition still exists, para. 341.7). H.C. Morrison, founder of Asbury Seminary, was one such person charged (but not convicted). Persons like the evangelist Martin Knapp, who founded Cincinnati School of the Bible, were charged and convicted. It was at this time that Methodism lost a sizable portion of  those who were part of the Holiness Movement.

A much larger area of tension was in Christian education, or, more specifically, in Sunday school material. Throughout most of the 19^th century Methodist Sunday schools were led by lay persons. Under Methodism’s circuit system many pastors were not able to be on site when Sunday schools took place. Emphasis was on Bible memory, Bible knowledge, catechism and winning persons to Christ. In the 1870s under such persons as John Vincent, later a bishop, efforts were made to bring Sunday schools under the control of full-time professionals.

When E.B. Chappell became editor of curriculum materials in the M.E. Church South in the early 1900s, he worked with one assistant. By 1919 he had eight editorial assistants and thirteen administrative assistants. It was Chappell who went public with the new philosophy of the M.E. Church South. Modern educational philosophy, not theology, would guide content. Wesley had put too much emphasis on sin, and would need to be reinterpreted. When Ethel Smither in 1937 wrote about the use of the Bible with children, her comments were clearly labeled not as one person’s opinion but as “official” and “authorized” for the church. Bible stories were to be used sparingly, and very little of the Old Testament was acceptable for children lest they take the stories literally.

When older, I realized why my mother was so upset with my Methodist Sunday school. My Mennonite cousins on occasions when they visited asked why we didn’t tell Bible stories in Sunday school. This would not have been so bad except our churches were told we must use official and approved Methodist material. To put it in stronger language, the mediating elite of the denomination would inform common, ordinary Methodists what could or could not be taught.

This is why I was bemused when among my first questions for deacon’s orders and entrance into the conference was, “What did I think of Methodist Sunday school material?” Methodism, once a bottom-up religion of common and often poor folk, was in danger of becoming a religious institution run by the mediating elite.

(Part II of this article will deal with Methodism’s problem with “mediating elite” in the 20^th and 21^st centuries)

Riley Case is a retired UM clergy member of the Indiana Conference. For years he wrote articles for the Confessing Movement. Since the Confessing Movement is phasing out of existence his articles will now appear with IRD.