One Family Under God - Anna M. Lawrence Early American Studies

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He continued to have regular contact with the Moravians, and considered them to be his spiritual family, even after setting up an independent house as a minister. Soon after landing, John Wesley met August Spangenberg, a well-educated and devout Moravian, who was the founder of American Moravianism. After talking with Spangenberg, he realized that his trials at sea had not been enough to prompt a real conversion, but merely an awakening to his sinfulness. When Spangenberg asked if Wesley had a personal feeling of salvation, Wesley realized he was unsure how thoroughly he believed he had this assurance.25 He sought this sensibility of God’s forgiveness of sins, which many Moravians possessed. Following his experience with American Moravians, Wesley also began a lifelong study of the works of German pietistic theology.26

      As impressed as Wesley was with the Moravian community, the religiosity among Georgia’s English population disappointed him. During his mission in Savannah, John Wesley discovered some of the difficulties of establishing regular religious worship in the colonies. The colonial leadership made it clear that his first duty was to the English settlers and that preaching to Native Americans took him too far away from his English flock. He admitted that organizing religious worship for white people in Georgia alone was a steep task, stating, “Even this work [Savannah’s parish] is indeed too great for me.”27

      In Wesley’s summary of the failures and successes of the Georgia mission, he counted spreading the gospel to “African and American Heathen” as one of his successes.28 In reality, his mission to Native Americans was by every measure unsuccessful, but the goals of mission work had an important effect on Wesley’s activities in Georgia. With the aim of converting Native Americans in mind, he developed his method of evangelizing, a process he would calibrate for many years. In addition, the goals of his mission established that the Methodist ideal was to have an inclusive fellowship of different peoples in the same religious family. Not evangelizing Native Americans was a missed opportunity, according to Wesley, who wrote that Indians were the ideal converts, like “little children, humble, willing to learn, and eager to do the will of God.”29 Wesley confirmed a common misperception of Native Americans, that they were open, passive, and ready to be religiously inscribed.30 Closer to the end of his time in Georgia, he wrote in September of 1737 that his mission among Native Americas was pretty hopeless. There was “no possibility of instructing the Indians; neither had I as yet found or heard of any Indians on the continent of America who had the least desire of being instructed.”31 He had a little more success with meeting and having spiritual conversations with some African Americans. He had planned to travel to different plantations in order to reach slaves, after he identified the planters who would allow him to preach.32 Yet, there is no evidence in his journal of any sustained contact with African Americans. Moravians likewise sought to establish a mission that included the conversion of non-Christians and crossed racial boundaries. Though Moravians also ultimately failed in their Georgia mission, they succeeded in expanding their community and fellowship to African Americans in the West Indies and in North Carolina during the eighteenth century.33

      Figure 1. Wesley Conversing with a Young Negress, artist unknown, ca. 1890. Courtesy of the Drew University Methodist Collection.

      If John Wesley did not succeed in fulfilling his desire to convert Indians and African Americans in America, he did succeed in other ways; his American mission established the foundation of Methodist practices, such as individual assurance of faith, lay preaching and participation, hymn singing, and extemporaneous prayer.34 The primary goal of Methodist spirituality became a personal experience of the promise of salvation, the assurance that he witnessed among the Moravians in America. Wesley also began to establish some of the touchstones of Methodist practice, especially the matrix of domestic meetings that would later become the basis for class and band meetings. Classes and bands were groups of Methodists who gathered in members’ homes for the purpose of buttressing their spiritual commitment. Wesley’s early Methodist organizations laid out a kind of compromise between church adherence and dissent. He advocated being a member of the Church of England, while attending extra-institutional meetings.35

      While Wesley fairly strictly followed the Anglican Common Book of Prayer in Savannah, he was conducting meetings in individual homes as well by April of 1736. Wesley wrote about the purpose of these first religious meetings in Savannah: “(1) to advise the more serious among them to form themselves into a sort of little society, and to meet once or twice a week in order to reprove, instruct and exhort one another. (2) To select out of these a smaller number for a more intimate union with each other, which might be forwarded, partly by our conversing singly with each, and partly by inviting them all together to our house.”36

      This duality of early Methodists was fairly common throughout the first decades of the group’s existence. Many held official membership in a standing church, but Methodism offered them the community of a spiritually dedicated fellowship. Like John Wesley himself, many were officially members of the Church of England and depended upon the Anglican Church for the rites of communion, along with the conferrals of baptism and marriage. The vast majority of eighteenth-century Methodist preachers were not ordained, but if they were ordained in the first decades of the group’s existence, they were ordained in the Church of England. Thus, the Church of England offered a level of respectability and the necessary rites of sacraments, but Methodism offered something outside of those formal requirements.

      What Methodism offered was an intimate union with other like-minded Christians. The idea of reinforcing religious practice through a social form, such as band and class meetings, defined Methodism and early evangelicalism, more generally. By designating bands as a central feature, Wesley wrote in A Short History of the People Called Methodists that this was a formative chapter in instituting bands and class meetings.37 The “band” was a small group of Methodists, segregated by sex, and members were encouraged to provide mutual support and criticism. The band was a forum for complete openness and intimacy; in the band meeting, “we should come as close as possible, that we should cut to the quick and search your heart to the bottom.”38 These meetings were significant in establishing later Methodist practice, formulating the voluntary, lay-driven nature of Methodism, and particularly stressing the importance of forming a spiritually supportive, elective family.

       Organized Women

      Women were at the center of this nascent Methodist practice in colonial Georgia, becoming active as laity and as leaders. John Wesley appointed at least three female lay leaders in Georgia: Margaret Burnside, Mrs. Robert Gilbert, and Mary Vanderplank.39 Yet, the impetus for Wesley’s formation of the band structure and supporting female authority was planted well before his mission in America.

      As a child, Wesley witnessed household religious meetings, and in these meetings he also observed his mother, Susanna Wesley, exercising domestic religious power. When her husband, Samuel Wesley Sr., was absent from the house on extended business, Susanna Wesley pulled her children together for religious meetings, consisting of prayers and reading sermons. When members of their parish began to attend as well and she preached to them, Samuel objected, saying it was improper for a woman to lead a congregation.40 Susanna defended her right to lead them, arguing that, “as I am a woman, so I am also mistress of a large family. And though the superior charge of the souls contained in it lies upon you, as head of the family, and as their minister yet in your absence I cannot but look upon every soul you leave under my care as a talent committed to me, under a trust, by the great Lord of all the families of heaven and earth.”41 Susanna Wesley drew the ideas of home meetings from the missionary pamphlet Propagation of the Gospel in the East.42 She saw herself as head evangelical of her family and thus instituted weekly meetings with her children to interview them about their spiritual well-being.43 There is no doubt that John and Charles Wesley absorbed this strong, elemental example of women’s religious authority being rooted in the family, particularly as they began to formulate social groups at the basis of Methodist practice. It is particularly striking that Susanna Wesley’s basis for authority combined the religious inspiration of mission work with the mother’s duties in the household. Through

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