The Global Impact of the Wesleyan Traditions and Their Related Movements.

Williams, William H.

The Global Impact of the Wesleyan Traditions and Their Related Movements. Edited by Charles Yrigoyen, Jr. Pietist and Wesleyan Studies, 14. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2002. xxiv + 301 pp. $75.00 cloth.

In 2000, a conference on the global impact of Methodism was held at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. Two years later, twenty-one of those presentations were published in one volume under the rather ambitious title, The Global Impact of the Wesleyan Traditions and Their Related Movements. In his "introduction," editor Charles Yrigoyen quotes from a journal entry by John Wesley that speaks of the world being his parish and that "I judge it meet, right, and my bounden duty, to declare unto all that are willing to hear the glad tidings of salvation." Although Wesley seemed at times "somewhat reluctant to encourage his Methodist followers to engage [in] far-flung missionary endeavors," and his personal missionary effort to Georgia seemed to be a failure, the global impact of his teachings and the traditions of the Wesleyan movement would have, according to this volume, a considerable impact on the spread of Protestant Christianity around the world (xvii).

The Global Impact is divided into three parts: the first contains four essays that deal with theoretical issues concerning overseas missionary work, the second contains fifteen essays that deal with the Wesleyan influence on specific nations or regions of the world; and the third has only two essays and they deal, respectively, with possible ways in which to extend Wesleyan traditions in Latin America and with the resources for further research in Methodist history located at the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, U.K. The individual essays vary in terms of their academic quality and their ability to focus on the general theme of the global impact of Wesleyan traditions. In the opening essay, Donald Dayton sets the stage for much that is to follow by reminding us that "Wesleyanism has tended to have a theological 'inferiority complex' that has pressed it," in its search for "a wider cultural respectability," to ignore some of the roots of the holiness and pentecostal movements because they might lead back to Wesley. However, according to Dayton, the conference from which this collection of essays is drawn was willing to look into the roots of these and other contemporary Protestant traditions to locate the Methodist influence. Moreover, as Dayton points out, "by examining the Methodist influence beyond traditional Methodist institutions, we can better understand Wesley and the Methodist tradition" (5-7).

But, as Andrew Walls reminds us, the job of finding distinctly Wesleyan traditions in overseas missionary activities is not easy. After all, Methodist missionary theory and activity "was part of a wider movement among evangelical Protestants, and it is hard to discern what in those practices was distinctly Wesleyan" (27). The fifteen essays dealing with the Wesleyan influence in specific areas of the world undertake a variety of approaches varying from discussions of purely Methodist missionary endeavors to searching out Methodist influences in a wide variety of Protestant groups. The essay by Chongnahm (John) Cho does not even focus on the past, but rather talks of the potential of the Wesleyan tradition to bring renewal to Protestant churches in Korea. While most of the fourteen essays deal with the impact of Wesley's teachings and Wesleyan organizational patterns on the global spread of Christianity, the essay by Laura Bartels goes beyond that to begin an examination of the impact of Methodist teachings on the social and economic lives of Christian converts in a specific time and place. In 1917, the Women's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church founded Hwa Nan College in Foochow, China to train females for Christian leadership. Until the communist government took it over in 1952, it was clear that graduates of Hwa Nan College were expected to "unselfishly use the gift of education to serve others" (133).

This reviewer suggests that future studies of the global impact of Methodism go beyond simply describing the geographic movement of missionaries and the setting up of hierarchical churches and move into the very important realm of social history. That is, show how the Wesleyan influence not only contributed to the conversions of large numbers of people but also caused a significant change in their social behavior. What, for example, does it mean to the social fabric of South Korean society in specific terms that Wesleyan traditions broadly influence its 11.3 million Protestants (157)? What does it mean to the social patterns of Latin America that perhaps as many as one half of the continent's 75 million Protestant evangelicals (277) have had some brush with Wesley through their holiness and pentecostal churches? In England the social dimensions of the Wesleyan movement were very important in avoiding violent revolution and encouraging economic mobility and social stability in the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century. On the Delmarva Peninsula (Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia), the large number of Methodist conversions caused a dramatic social revolution by the early nineteenth century. What then can be said about the rest of the world?

There are some things to quibble about in The Global Impact. A few of the essays seem to deal only with describing specific events without serious analysis. Moreover, in a volume that deals with so many unfamiliar geographic locations around the globe, the lack of even one map is inexcusable. However this reader found much here to commend and hopes that this volume is only the first of many to examine both the direct and indirect global impact of Methodism.

William H. Williams

University of Delaware