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May/June 2004 |
Indiana minister writes history of church's evangelical movement
Published to be released at General Conference, a nationally known Hoosier shares a history of evangelical faith within The United Methodist Church.
Evangelical and Methodist: a Popular History by the Rev. Riley Case, a retired United Methodist pastor living in Kokomo, Ind., is the story of the populist, grassroots movements that came together to form the evangelical wing of Methodism in America.
Case told Together, "I have put about seven years of work into this book. The book traces a strand of Methodism - that I call 'evangelical populism' - from the days of Francis Asbury to the present. It picks up on a thesis that I first heard expressed by Nathan Hatch of Notre Dame in Democratization of American Christianity and also in some of the work of Roger Finke, a sociologist formerly of Purdue University.
"The book gives emphasis to such things as gospel music, revivalism, the Holiness Movement and then picks up with Good News and the evangelical renewal movements. It covers Sunday school material, missions, seminary education, doctrine and General Conferences, and it draws a lot of material from North Indiana," he said.
In the book, Case says in addition to the official Methodism that established itself as an institution at the center of American culture, there is an unofficial Methodism. This one was not mediated through annual conferences and an educated clergy, one more concerned with gospel fervor than with social respectability. It was from this "grassroots" Methodism that the various movements calling for evangelical renewal in the denomination arose during the twentieth century.
Case tells the story of the populist wing of the Methodist movement in America, culminating in the work of those who have sought in recent years to return Methodism to its Wesleyan roots.
The spread of Methodism in nineteenth-century America was accompanied, says Case, by a slow, yet certain, division of the tradition into at least two branches. One strand might be called establishment Methodism. This is the Methodism usually described in denominational histories. It was the Methodism of tall steeples, rented pews, robed choirs, denominational journals, colleges and seminaries. It was Methodism becoming institutionalized, with authority focusing more and more in bishops, presiding elders, conferences, and (later) committees and agencies.
Case contends that this focused authority, later identified simply as "the hierarchy," offered a "mediated" faith, one best filtered and controlled by those with education and experience. The other strand of Methodism might be called populist Methodism. It, for the most part, was "unofficial" Methodism.
It was the Methodism of log cabins, moral crusades, circuit preachers, revivals, camp meetings, prayer bands and indigenous Methodist gospel music, including African American spirituals, says Case. It was an "unmediated" Christianity, one that did not need to be filtered through educated clergy or annual conferences. It was democracy in religion. It is often referred to as "grass-roots" Methodism. It was Methodism not as an institution but as a movement.
Evangelical and Methodist by Riley Case is a paperback ISBN: 0687044448 and sells retail from Cokesbury for $25. To order log on to www.abingdonpress.com.
Last updated on May 17, 2004