Bishop Ryle: "Christ is all"

Never lacking mordant expressions, Ryle diffused them throughout his denunciations of sinful folly and naïve self-delusion, but also throughout his depictions of the glories and joys of the Christian life and the unutterable grandeur of heaven. For instance, few things upset him as much as clergy, entrusted with the spiritual shepherding of their people, who started off redolent with promise only to make their peace, here a little and there a little, with church and world as conviction and nerve gradually failed them until – until “…at the last the man (sic) who at one time seemed likely to be a real successor to the apostles and a good soldier of Christ, settles down on his lees as a clerical gardener, farmer, or diner out, by whom nobody is offended and nobody is saved”.

Yet he didn’t target the clergy. Zealously urging all to embrace the Saviour, he solemnly warned all alike of the peril of spiritual neglect or somnolence – as when he told hearers of Lot ’s wife and the spiritual disaster coming upon her: “The world was in her heart, and her heart was in the world.”

Collapsing the imaginary refuge of those who think their privilege (of any sort) will see them past the just Judge, Ryle recalled, “Joab was David’s captain; Demas was Paul’s companion; Judas Iscariot was Christ’s disciple. These all died in their sins.”

So reads Ryle’s landmark book Holiness. First published as a collection of addresses and essays in 1879, it has been reprinted seven times, and continues to stiffen the spines of Christians in danger of becoming spiritually amorphous, even as it lends encouragement and hope to Christians who are on the point of giving up.

J.I. Packer, recently retired professor of theology at Regent College , UBC, was near despair as a young man concerning his seeming failure to “move into the space” that popular holiness teachers counselled. Packer found their “Let go [of what?] and let God [do what?]” – and similar exhortations — too vague to help and too condemnatory to console. He was ready to write himself off as spiritually hopeless when Ryle’s Holiness came into his hands. Ryle showed him that holiness, so far from a passive “surrender” or self-wrought “consecration”, is simultaneously God’s gift, God’s command, and the believer’s pursuit. Holiness is to be done. And since such “doing” occurs in the world, the Christian is involved in a fight. Packer’s life turned around and he stepped ahead.

Fight? “The saddest symptom about many so-called Christians is the utter absence of anything like conflict and fight in their Christianity”, Ryle lamented. Unwilling to deny the obvious in scripture, he reminded his people, “There are no promises in the Lord Jesus Christ’s epistles to the seven churches, except to those who ‘overcome’”.

Ryle was born to a wealthy family and to the prerogatives that wealth brings. Sent to Eton , England ’s most prestigious private school, he distinguished himself in Greek and Latin before moving on to Oxford University , where he excelled in football and rowing even as he gained academic honours. Through it all he was never exposed to anything but spiritual tepidity and torpor. Later he was to speak of the sermons offered weekly at Eton as “a perfect farce and a disgrace to the Church of England.”

Confined to bed for several weeks at age 21, he began reading scripture. As its truth and force fermented within him, he was brought to that moment when, several months later, he happened upon a church service whose text-for-the-day was the ringing evangelical declaration of Ephesians 2: “By grace are you saved through faith….it is the gift of God.” In the wake of the gospel’s luminosity he grasped several implications: the deplorable condition of the sinner, the sufficiency of the atonement, the need for Spirit-wrought new birth, the believer’s holiness as the only authentic sign of faith, and (a point he would make tirelessly thereafter) the utter speciousness of baptismal regeneration or any hint of it.

Immediately he found no shortage of people who looked at him askance. The joy of his new beginning was matched by the grief of finding his friends uncomprehending and himself unable to remove the impasse.

Disaster overtook the family in 1841. His father had loaned a brother-in-law 200,000 pounds to finance a new business in cotton manufacturing. The business failed. His father had had lands and houses whose rents kept the family awash in money. The family had lived on a 1000-acre estate. The family foreparents had to come to England as “Royle” during the Norman Conquest, 1066. Ryle’s annual allowance had been 15,000 pounds. Everything vanished overnight. In his first appointment following ordination (1841), Ryle’s stipend was 84 pounds.
The year 1844 saw him immersed in the work for which he would remain known long after his preaching voice was silent; namely, his intense study and practical renderings of the English Reformers, the Puritans who followed them, and the leaders of the Evangelical Awakening after that, together with numerous histories and accessible expositions of the Gospels.

The days were not easy. Ryle’s first wife became psychotic following the birth of their first child. Only a few years later she died of a pulmonary aneurysm. His second wife lived ten years, leaving him with five children under fourteen.

Amidst it all he pastored and preached, attracting huge crowds. He conducted open-air services. He emerged as the spokesperson for the Evangelical party within the Church of England, resisting Anglo-Catholicism’s attempt at undoing the Reformation and introducing ritual that lacked scriptural warrant.

As retirement age approached, he published two seminal works (perhaps his best-known), Old Paths and Knots Untied, expositions of doctrine he deemed essential.

Then retirement receded in 1880 when he was appointed bishop of the new Diocese of Liverpool. Noting that only 10% of Liverpool attended church, he intensified evangelistic efforts. Deploring the poverty of the clergy, he initiated the first clergy pension plan in England . Release from his ardours was granted in June 1890.

His epitaph could have been taken from the last chapter of his Holiness. “‘Christ is all.’ These words are the essence and substance of Christianity.”

Thomas Webb: The Methodist Captain

The recently converted man in full military dress, unforgettable in the green patch over his sightless eye-socket, dramatically laid his sword alongside an open bible and announced to the small congregation that he was a soldier of the cross and a true spiritual descendant of John Wesley.

Born in either Bath or Salisbury in the west of England, Thomas planned on a career as a Redcoat and was commissioned a quartermaster in the 48th Regiment of Foot. One year later he was promoted to lieutenant. In 1758 he was transferred, together with his regiment, to North America where the French forces were gaining in the Seven Years’ War. In July of the same year Webb was serving with Amherst and Wolfe, famous British generals, when Louisburg was captured in Nova Scotia. It was a turning point in the war. Not even the French victory at Montmorency in July, 1759 (where Webb lost an eye to musket-fire) could stem the military disaster coming upon Montcalm one month later at Quebec.

In the momentous summer of 1759 Webb had published A Military Treatise on the Appointments of the Army, his reflections on the science of waging war. In it he indicated how warfare in the new world differed from that in the old, and why less cumbersome weapons were needed in terrain that demanded mobility. (Fifteen years later a soon-to-be-famous general, foreseeing a revolution, was to read and distribute the book and turn it tellingly against the British. George Washington’s copy of Webb’s treatise is currently housed in a Boston museum.)
Subsequently recommended for a captaincy, Webb declined the promotion, wanting neither to return to Britain nor to submit his new wife to the rootlessness of military life. When his wife died shortly, however, he crossed the Atlantic in order to sell his commission.

The winter of 1764 found Webb depressed, convinced that he was a sinner whose sinnership was irremediable and he himself hopeless. He was directed to a Moravian preacher whose Passion Sunday sermon (March 24, 1765) persuaded the forty year-old that the crucified had borne his guilt and shame and had borne them away. His hopelessness cancelled, Webb found the assurance of his salvation swelling as he testified for the rest of his life of his certainty of seeing his Lord in glory. The Moravian preacher introduced him to Rev. James Rouquet, who in turn had come to faith under Rev. George Whitefield. Immediately Webb found a spiritual home among the Methodists, enjoying a “fit” so fine that he always regarded them and him to be made for each other.

When the scheduled preacher failed to appear at Bath, one Sunday, Webb was asked to speak. Knowing nothing of sermon-technique, and lacking formal training in theology, he could only relate simply, unselfconsciously, the unvarnished account of his conversion. The Spirit-quickened story-telling of the battle-scarred veteran thawed frozen hearts and confirmed his vocation among the Methodists.

Having sold his commission in 1766, Webb returned to New York as a civilian. As befitted someone whose book on military science had enhanced the deployment of troops and materiel, he was soon to prove hugely fruitful in consolidating the diffuse personnel and resources of early American Methodism. In addition, his public utterances now included not only the retelling of his own awakening but also “the whole counsel of God.”(Acts 20:27), never neglecting the Wesleyan emphasis for which he was unapologetic because unashamed; namely, Christian perfection.
Possessed of immense patience, six months’ intense evangelistic work around greater New York City found him not complaining but rejoicing as twenty-four people newly declared their faith in Jesus Christ, half of them black and half white. A tireless worker on behalf of any Methodist concern, he didn’t consider it beneath him to peddle books in the metropolis in order to raise the purchase price of a church-site. Always keen, like the apostle Paul before him, to announce the gospel (of Methodism) where it had never been heard before, he inaugurated Methodist work in New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and many areas of Pennsylvania. (In Philadelphia he fuelled the evangelical flame that had sprung from Whitefield’s fire.)

August, 1772 found Webb back in England, a delegate to the Methodist Conference at Leeds. Recognizing his administrative talents, John Wesley sent him to Ireland to remedy long-standing difficulties in the Methodist Societies of Limerick and Dublin.

In April, 1773 Webb returned to America, accompanied by his new wife, Grace. An American spy, Samuel Purviance, accused him of being a spy in the service of the British forces. (Although Webb was a civilian he had continued to draw a military pension.) Webb was arrested and confined to a Prisoner of War camp in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he ministered to the internees. In 1778 he was given a passport that allowed him to travel the few miles to Philadelphia. There he hoped to have himself exchanged for an American Prisoner of War. The authorities, however, disdained his passport and reinterned him. Undaunted, his wife pleaded with George Washington and was granted the sought-after exchange.

In Britain once more in 1778, Webb pursued his non-stop work on behalf of the Methodists, preaching and encouraging, always raising money for chapels to house the burgeoning crowds. He was singularly instrumental in securing funds for a second chapel in Bristol on Portland Heights. On Christmas Eve, 1796 his remains were buried there. When Portland Chapel was closed in 1972, one hundred and seventy-five years later, and his remains were disinterred, the identifying green patch was found almost intact. His remains, including those of his wife, were reburied at the New Room, Bristol, long the site of brave Methodist forays into the new world in Wesley’s era.

What the old soldier lacked in formal education and social sophistication he more than made up for in singlemindedness, always exemplifying the apostle’s reminder, “Share in suffering as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. No soldier on service gets entangled in civilian pursuits….”(2 Tim. 2:3f) Certainly John Wesley had appreciated Webb’s undeflected resolve. When Charles Wesley had written from Bristol, “Webb has much life and zeal, though far from being a clear or good preacher”, John had replied from London, “He has been long enough with you; send him to us.”

Athanasius: The Current Issues that the Church Faces

What’s the difference between asking friends to run your business for you and asking them to ruin it? The survival of your business is “only” the difference of the smallest letter of the alphabet! The survival of the gospel hinges on the “iota”, the smallest letter of the Greek alphabet. Athanasius knew that the difference between “homoousios” and “homoiousios” is as unbridgeable as the difference between “run” and “ruin”.

“Homo” is Greek for “same” or “one” or “identical”; “ousios” for “nature” or “being” or “substance” or “essence”. Is the Son identical with the Father, possessed of the same substance as the Father? Or is the Son merely similar to the Father, only like Him? (And if only like the Father, how like: a little bit like or a lot like? And if even a lot like, is a “miss” here “as good as a mile”?)

In his lifetime Athanasius was known as “The Father of Orthodoxy”. Aware that orthodoxy (”right praise”) presupposes “right understanding” or truth, Athanasius tirelessly championed the doctrine of the Incarnation. Recognized as brilliant, courageous and persistent in the early days of his vocation as clergyman, the mature Athanasius was appointed Bishop of Alexandria (Egypt). His gospel-discernment, genius and skill with language triumphed at the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 as the Nicene Creed affirmed unambiguously that the son is “of one substance” with the Father.

Athanasius’s creed had preserved the New Testament confession of Jesus Christ. Still, his ecclesiastical opponents, smarting from their defeat, sought to crush him. Soon a rival bishop accused him of gross misconduct. All such charges were refuted, the rival bishop and his supporters exposed as shameless slanderers. Still, Athanasius was deemed a troublemaker, anything but a politically correct “team player”. Not surprisingly, he was exiled to Treves in February, 331, and lived there for two and one-half years. Subsequently his detractors in the church co-opted political authorities and together they had him exiled three more times. (All told, Athanasius was exiled five times at the hands of four different emperors.) In between his bouts of enforced absence he returned home and worked in his diocese, the longest “return” being 346 to 356.

In 373 he was finally released from his decades-long struggle, dying in his bishopric of Alexandria, loved by those who had long hailed him as the advocate for the faith “once for all delivered to the saints.” (Jude 3)

To apprehend the glory of Athanasius’s faithfulness we must understand the two heresies he refuted. Ebionitism insisted that Jesus Christ is certainly human but only seemingly divine; docetism, that Jesus Christ is certainly divine but only seemingly human. Since the former denied Jesus to be divine, it insisted that Jesus couldn’t be the focus of faith (as he plainly is in the New Testament); instead faith is focused on a God to whom Jesus points. (That is, Jesus points away from himself to God rather than pointing to himself as God). The docetists, on the other hand, regarded the human nature of Jesus as unreal; naturally, then, they looked upon his suffering as unreal too. In denying that the Word had become flesh they reduced the saving truth and reality of the gospel to a religious idea.

Oddly, the church in Athanasius’s day blended both ebionite and docetic heresies. The resultant heretical hodge-podge did what the New Testament does not: it contrasted Jesus Christ with God and placed him alongside God, whereas the apostles had always affirmed Jesus Christ to be God-with-us.

Immediately Athanasius knew what truths he had to uphold; namely, if Jesus Christ isn’t God then he can’t reveal God to us, since only through God may we know God — while if Jesus Christ isn’t human then he can’t be our Saviour, since only as one with us can God be savingly at work in our actual human existence. To say the same thing: if Jesus Christ isn’t true God then there is no divine reality to all he said and did — while if he isn’t genuinely human then what God did in him has no saving relevance for human beings. Athanasius, grasping all the implications of what the church’s defectors were saying, wrote that the Son was “begotten of the Father, true God of true God, begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father…”. In other words, faith in Jesus Christ coincides perfectly with faith in God (as the New Testament everywhere insists.) To be sure, “homoousios” (”of one substance”) was not itself a biblical term. Nonetheless, said Athanasius, “It breathes the spirit of scripture.” What mattered for him was the biblical meaning it conveyed and the biblical reality to which it pointed.

The gospel-significance of “one substance” is crucial. For consider what would occur if Father and Son weren’t of the same nature:

* God would be unknowable, since there would then be no oneness between what the gospel presents to us as the revelation of God and God himself. * God would be unknowable, since there would then be no oneness between what the gospel presents to us as the revelation of God and God himself.

* the gospel would not be the self-communication of God and the self-bestowal of God; rather, God would communicate and bestow “something” but not himself. * the gospel would not be the self-communication of God and the self-bestowal of God; rather, God would communicate and bestow “something” but not himself.

* God’s love for us, however great, would yet be tragically deficient. His love (so-called) would stop short, never condescending to becoming one with us. * God’s love for us, however great, would yet be tragically deficient. His love (so-called) would stop short, never condescending to becoming one with us.

* God would mock us, in that God is said to love us in Jesus Christ without being (”homoousios” again!) that love in himself. * God would mock us, in that God is said to love us in Jesus Christ without being (”homoousios” again!) that love in himself.

* on the cross Jesus would be neither representative human (suffering the penalty for humankind’s sin) nor really divine (absorbing that penalty into God’s own heart). On the cross Jesus would be merely one more of many martyrs. Athanasius, on the other hand, insisted that “the whole Christ — God and man — became a curse for us”; i.e., to save us God condemned our fallen humanity and condemned himself in condemning it. Athanasius commented most pithily in this regard, “Our resurrection is stored up in the cross of Christ.” * on the cross Jesus would be neither representative human (suffering the penalty for humankind’s sin) nor really divine (absorbing that penalty into God’s own heart). On the cross Jesus would be merely one more of many martyrs. Athanasius, on the other hand, insisted that “the whole Christ — God and man — became a curse for us”; i.e., to save us God condemned our fallen humanity and condemned himself in condemning it. Athanasius commented most pithily in this regard, “Our resurrection is stored up in the cross of Christ.”

* on the last day we should find ourselves judged by a God who is arbitrary in that he bears no essential relation to Jesus Christ and all that the latter stood for.* on the last day we should find ourselves judged by a God who is arbitrary in that he bears no essential relation to Jesus Christ and all that the latter stood for.

Yet Athanasius knew that none of the foregoing is true; all of it is contradicted by the glorious reality of Jesus Christ — for he is of the same nature or substance or essence as the Father. The Father has absorbed in his own heart all that the Son did and suffered for us. Atonement has been made, pardon secured, invitation issued — all of which means the church has a gospel worthy of the name!

With his customary insight Karl Barth insisted that Athanasius’s “of one substance” was the most significant theological statement since the time of the apostles.

Yet those who dismiss it abound. In the late 500s Gregory the Great travelled to Constantinople and found all one hundred congregations espousing the heresy that Athanasius had struggled to refute 200 years earlier. In the face of it Gregory neither quit nor conformed. Instead he whispered resolutely, “I have work to do.”

Oden Speaks for the Earnest Canadian Christians

The renewal movements of The United Church of Canada would be hard pressed to find a better friend and a more helpful ally. Unashamedly he has nailed his colours to the mast: “As a former sixties radical, I am now out of the closet as an orthodox evangelical.” A speaker at an early meeting of “Faithfulness Today” (jointly sponsored by The Community of Concern Within The United Church of Canada, Church Alive and The Alliance of Covenanting Congregations,) Oden has continued to hover our denomination’s theological ventures and pronouncements, living in hope for the day when it would recover its birthright and boldly declare itself “on the Lord’s side.” Raised in the United Methodist Church (USA), a denomination that has long appeared blissfully indifferent to “the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3),” Oden himself sashayed into the “far country” in the early days of his career as academic theologian. At that time there was virtually no cause, however tangentially related to the church’s mission or however “far out”, that he didn’t endorse as he roamed the entire spectrum of bizarre theology and avant-garde ethics. Just as he was discovering that far-country fare was non-nourishing and even toxic, the One he had been decrying in the cause of “relevance” and “modernity” overtook him and redirected the course of his living and thinking. And just as Paul, temporarily stunned on the Damascus road, needed another’s help for a while, those whom God’s providence mysteriously appointed to assist Oden came to his rescue. It was a Jew, Ananias, who helped a shocked and staggering Paul; another Jew, Will Herberg, providence assigned to be the one who brought him to see that the path out of the theological morass ran past the homes of the classical exponents of Christian truth. John Henry Newman, for instance, although dead for 80 years, convinced him that the substance of the historic faith was a goldmine whose treasure could be quarried inexhaustibly. Oden’s only responsibility, Newman persuaded him, was to listen. Abandoning his preoccupation with theological invention, Oden now listened “as if my whole life depended on hearing.” As the arbitrariness and anaemia of his theological shallowness sobered him, his earlier support of the abortion platform horrified him. He abandoned the situation ethics he had touted as a cure-all and simultaneously renounced the entire liberal world-view. Courageously announcing his “about face” (also known as repentance) to the academic guild, he came to cherish the “ecumenical consensus”: what Christians of East and West, Protestant, Roman Catholic and Orthodox, have held in common, and still do. Whereas he had previously regarded such consensus no more than baggage that had to be shed if the church were to move ahead unencumbered, he now realized this consensus to be the ballast in the church-ship’s keel without which the church could never sail against the prevailing wind and would capsize in any storm.

An intellectual whose brilliance has been evident in his lectureships at such prestigious institutions as Edinburgh, Duke, Emory, Princeton, Claremont, and Moscow State universities, in all his work Oden has kept in mind the needs of the local congregation and the working pastor. His major work, the 1500-page tome on systematic theology, is explicitly addressed to the latter, while he has published several works on the pastoral disciplines. In all of this he has claimed to want only to equip those who are called and commissioned to “teach you the elementary truth of God’s word all over again. (Hebrew 5:12)” For this reason the global intention of his work is to develop afresh the “building blocks” of the faith. Only as this task is completed will he turn his attention to more detailed matters such as anthropology and liturgy. True to Scripture, to his native Wesleyanism, and to the Fathers, he regards God’s holiness as the linchpin of the entire theological enterprise.

Waggishly reminding others that “the apostles were testy with clever revisionists”, Oden cites Paul’s rebuke, angry and anguished in equal measure, of the congregation in Galatia: “But even if an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be anathema (Galatians 1:8.)” Yet he must never be thought to be a “nostalgia freak,” someone who hankers after “good old days” that in fact were as evil-ridden as all days. Instead he remains profoundly aware that Christians, theologians, congregations or denominations that jettison memory plunge themselves into amnesia. And the problem with amnesiacs isn’t that they can’t remember where they left umbrella or automobile; the problem, rather, is that lacking memory, they lack identity; and lacking identity, they frequently behave erratically.

Unfailingly possessed of gospel hope (hope, in Scripture, is never wishful thinking but is instead a future certainty grounded in a past reality; namely, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and his bestowal of the Spirit) Oden knows that revival is needed in the North American churches above everything else. And in view of the place that the mainline denominations occupy still in the psyche of the North American people, revival cannot occur without the “mainliners.” Then the prophet’s word to a people in exile — “Behold I [the Lord] am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? (Isaiah 43:19)” — must entail a renewal of denominations that appear at present to be sidelined. To this end Oden has been a leader in the formation of the Association for Church Renewal. Single-handedly he has convened the Confessing Theologians Commission, a group consisting of mainline academics who extol Jesus Christ, love his people, and have remained at their post in their respective denominations. (The Confessing Theologians Commission has one member from Canada, Victor Shepherd, as a representative of the renewal movements within The United Church.)

Long a lover of Kierkegaard, Oden likes to refer to the Dane’s insistence that faith disrupts, and where disruption isn’t observable faith hasn’t occurred. If as “believers” we nevertheless protest that we have faith, we are theologians; if we know how to describe faith, we are poets; if we weep in describing faith, we are actors. But only as we witness for the truth and against untruth are we actually possessed of faith.

Barbara Heck: The Mother of Canadian Methodism

Two brass candlesticks sit on two small tables flanking the pulpit chair in John Street Methodist Church, New York City. The candlesticks belonged to Barbara Heck. She brought them every Sunday to the early service of worship. They are lighted at every service in the church today. The lamp which she herself was has not been hidden under a bushel. Barbara von Ruckle was born in County Limerick, Ireland, to parents whose Protestant forebears had fled persecution in Germany. French soldiers under King Louis XIV pillaged the southern part of Germany, harassing all who clung to the truths of the Reformation. The beleaguered people scattered. In 1709 a group of 110 families fled together, getting as far as Rotterdam where it seemed the ocean would frustrate them forever. Pitying their plight, Queen Anne of England dispatched British ships to the Dutch seaport to salvage the refugees. The grateful people were set down in County Limerick, while the government eased them into their new life by paying rent on the land which they farmed for the next two decades.

In no time the recently-arrived German refugees demonstrated their superiority to the wild native Irish peasants in all aspects of agriculture. Resentment mounted. Rents were raised 600%. John Wesley (who made 22 trips to Ireland) was aghast when he visited the German-speaking colony and witnessed the manner in which they had been penalized for their industry. He wrote in his journal, “I stand amazed! Have landlords no common sense (whether they have common humanity or no) that they will suffer such as these to be starved away from them?”
Wesley noted too that these people were starving for the bread of life as well. He had observed that in the fifty years since they had left Germany these people had become “eminent for drunkenness, cursing, swearing and utter neglect of religion.” He attributed their downward slide to the fact that for fifty years they had been without a German-speaking pastor. Wesley himself, however, was fluent in German. He was overjoyed to see the Methodist articulation of the gospel seize the people and change them profoundly.

At age eighteen Barbara had publicly professed her faith in Jesus Christ. When Wesley visited the emerald isle several years later the two of them resonated. The distinctive emphases of Methodism, rooted in Barbara, would eventually be transplanted into the soil of the new world.
By now the gentry in Ireland were confiscating the pastureland which the German refugees held in common. Deprived of land and afflicted with unpayable taxes, many of them decided to emigrate to America. Barbara married Paul Hescht (the name was anglicized to “Heck”), and together they braved a sixty-three day trip to New York City. New York City, in 1760, was populated with 14,000 Dutch, English, German, Spanish and Afro-Americans. The city’s spiritual carelessness startled Barbara, as did a similar degeneration in those of the extended family (cousins, in-laws, more distant relatives) which had emigrated with her. She pleaded with her cousin, Philip Embury, to preach. He maintained he couldn’t inasmuch as he had neither church nor congregation. “Preach in your own home, and I will gather a congregation”, Barbara replied. The mustard seed beginning consisted of four people: Barbara, her husband, a labourer, and a black female servant. They persevered. Just when it seemed that the mustard seed would never germinate and multiply, Captain Thomas Webb appeared. He was regimental commander of the British forces at Albany. Standing erect in his military bearing, attired in the famous redcoat, Webb preached and the congregation grew. (In addition to his redcoat Webb wore a green patch over one eye. He had been wounded at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, when Quebec fell to the British.) Soon the congregation had outgrown the private home where it was meeting. A church-building would have to be built, and Barbara herself designed it, the first Methodist church-building in the new world. At the service of dedication the preacher expounded Hosea 10:12: Sow for yourselves righteousness,reap the fruit of steadfast love;break up your fallow ground,for it is time to seek the Lord.

This building was soon outgrown, and in 1768 another was raised in New York City. The seats had no backs and the gallery was reached by means of a ladder. Hundreds thronged it every Sunday. When the American War of Independence loomed, Barbara and her husband, together with their five children, left New York City for a farm in Camden, near Lake Champlain. Angry neighbours who supported the coming revolution burned them out, destroying all their livestock and forcing them off the land. Once again the Heck family moved, this time to the Montreal area. A few years later they settled in the region of what would become Brockville. Compared to New York City their habitat was a wilderness. Undaunted, however, Barbara commenced her mustard seed sowing all over again. It took her years to gather enough people to form the first Methodist class in Canada. The people she had brought together ministered out of their own resources for five years; only then did a circuit-riding saddlebag preacher arrive to lead them.
When she was seventy years old one of her three sons found Barbara sitting in her chair, her German bible open on her lap. The woman who had never spoken English well, yet who was the mother of English Methodism in Canada, had gone home.

Egerton Ryerson: The Pope of Canadian Methodism

Ryerson’s father was as unyielding as he was uncharitable: “Egerton, I hear that you have joined the Methodists; you must either leave them or leave my house.” The eighteen year-old chose to leave home.

One of nine children (including five sons who became Methodist ministers) Egerton was born near Vittoria, a village close to present-day Port Dover. His Dutch foreparents had been in the new world since the early 1600s. When New Amsterdam fell to the British in 1664 and was renamed New York, they anglicized the spelling of “Reyerzoon.” Upon the outbreak of the American Revolution their descendants declared their loyalty to the crown and, together with thousands of other United Empire Loyalists, migrated to what remained of British North America.

The farm boy found his way to a school in Vittoria where James Mitchell, his teacher, fostered in him a love of learning and a facility with the English language. He also exposed Ryerson to the surge of world-occurrence and all it boded for actors and spectators alike.

The educational vista soon complemented a religious vision, for the teenager had apprehended Jesus approaching him. Eager to refute the scornful who sneered at religion as an excuse for laziness, Ryerson prepared himself for the ministry by arising daily at 3:00 a.m. in order to study until 6:00, when he commenced the 14-hour day’s work required of all farm labour.
His father, undeflectably Anglican, viewed Methodists as near-American (the first Methodist Circuit in Upper Canada, established by the American Methodist Episcopal Church in 1791, was part of the District of Genesee, New York State) and near-anarchic, assuming republicanism and revolution to imply each other.

Undiscouraged by his father’s intransigence, Ryerson became the itinerant preacher on the Yonge Street Circuit. Its boundaries were Pickering, Weston and Lake Simcoe. He needed a month to visit the people in his charge, delivering scores of sermons in scattered settlements. Always concerned to enhance human well-being, he ministered in the First Nation community on the Credit River where Peter Jones, an aboriginal Methodist, had evangelized the Mississauga natives. Here he slept in a wigwam, learned the language and set about erecting a multi-purpose building to serve as church and school. He supplemented the natives’ gifts with monies garnered from friends and former members of his Yonge Street circuit — none of whom was affluent. He had the structure paid for in six weeks.

The challenge in this regard, however, was nothing compared to that posed by his most formidable foe. Bishop John Strachan, of Scottish Presbyterian background, had emigrated to Canada in 1799. Rejected as a candidate for the Presbyterian ministry, he had joined the Anglicans, soon becoming the episcopal power-broker and the implacable foe of all who threatened the grip of the wealthy, oligarchic “Family Compact.” The latter was a handful of rich families whose stranglehold on business, finance and education sought to petrify the social stratification it exploited. Newly admitted to the Compact, Strachan spoke for it and speared any who opposed it.

Twenty-five years older than Ryerson, Strachan denounced Methodists as poorly-educated, irresponsible and traitorous (conveniently forgetting that they were descendants of United Empire Loyalists.) Already denied the right to own land for churches and parsonages, as well as the right to baptize and solemnize marriages, Methodist people were outraged. It fell to the 23-year old “David” to confront “Goliath.” Ryerson penned a riposte brilliant and effective in equal measure. In four years the Methodists were granted what they had long been refused.
Notorious now, Ryerson was appointed editor of a brand new Christian Guardian, soon the most widely read newspaper in the province, superseding many times over the official Upper Canada Gazette. The Guardian followed up with a bookstore, and this in turn metamorphosed into Ryerson Press, at one point the largest printing and publishing enterprise in Canada. Operating until 1970, it did much to shape the Canadian identity through the novelists, poets, biographers and historians whose works it disseminated.

In 1836 the Methodists built Upper Canada College at Cobourg, Ontario, expanding it into Victoria College (1841) and Victoria University (1865, when faculties of law and medicine were added.) Named its first principal, Ryerson announced a curriculum as broad as it was deep. In addition to Classics (a mainstay at any university at this time), he added a science department offering courses in chemistry, mineralogy and geography, as well as new departments of philosophy, rhetoric and modern languages (French and German.) Always eschewing one-sidedness anywhere in life, he insisted that each student pursue a balanced programme of the arts and the sciences.

Yet Ryerson’s monumental victory soon eclipsed the achievements that had already made him a household name. Dismayed to see one-half of school-aged children with no formal education and the remaining half averaging only a year’s, he knew himself handed unparalleled opportunity the day he was appointed Chief Superintendent of Common Schools for Canada West in 1844. (A “common” school was the social opposite of the elitist private schools.) Only forty-three, Ryerson persuaded the provincial government to assume responsibility for education. Soon common schools, aided by government grants, appeared wherever twenty students could be gathered. The arrangement was a quantitative leap over the log cabin schoolhouses whose instructors were frequently minimally literate themselves.

Thinking ill of a British school system that perpetuated the worst class divisiveness in Europe, Ryerson visited Continental common schools in Holland, Italy and France, “bookending” his trip with visits to Germany where he could observe the education system that Philip Melanchthon had implemented 300 years earlier. Upon his return to Canada he wooed the provincial government into marrying education and tax revenues, thereby providing free education for all. Of course the rich objected, arguing that they shouldn’t have to support the schooling of their social inferiors. Ryerson triumphed. His free education was soon compulsory as well. In it all he elevated teaching from a miserable job to a calling akin to that of the ordained ministry.
George Brown, editor of Toronto’s Globe newspaper, ranted that Ryerson had imported “Prussian” education into Ontario. Ryerson, cultured where Brown was crude, quietly immersed himself in French literature, having taught himself the language so well that he and the pope had conversed in it during his visit to Italy.

His educational programme quickly spread to other provinces, thereby magnifying his contribution to public life in Canada. The Methodist people, who for several decades hadn’t always appreciated what he was coaxing into place for all Canadians, realized his accomplishment. In 1874 they honoured the seventy-four year old giant by electing him the first president of the General Conference of the newly-amalgamated Methodist Church of Canada.

William Black, Untrained Methodist evangelist for Canada.

In 1779, William Black experienced a revolutionary change in his life at a Methodist meeting. “The tears began to gush out of my eyes and my heart to throb within me; so that in a little time, most of the company did so too.” Ten or eleven people joined him in mourning for their sins.

Getting right with God generally makes a man want to share the Gospel with others. That was true for William Black. He wanted to carry the Gospel throughout Nova Scotia. Three years after his conversion, on this day, June 11, 1782, William Black preached his first sermon. He began his evangelistic travels in the company of Henry Alline, a notable “New Light” evangelist. However, Henry Alline opposed all organized denominations. He soon quarreled with William, and did not respond warmly to William’s efforts to patch up their relationship.

William persevered on his own. Before his death, he would be known as “The Apostle of Methodism in the Maritimes.” He is sometimes described as the first ordained Methodist clergyman in Canada, but that is misleading. Although he performed the work of a minister in spreading the Gospel, he remained a layman until 1989. However, he brought the first ordained Methodists to Nova Scotia.

It happened this way: In 1784, United States Methodists gathered in Baltimore. William was the only Methodist representing Canada. He pleaded with the assembled Methodists to send workers to Nova Scotia. The conference sent two ordained ministers back with him: Freeborn Garrettson (first superintendent, appointed by Wesley over BNA) and James Cromwell. He humbly submitted himself to these ordained ministers.

To overcome his lack of training, he studied hard on his own. To build the church, he traveled constantly throughout Nova Scotia and neighboring provinces, preaching wherever he could get a hearing. He corresponded with John Wesley and other Methodist leaders. A man of tact and administrative ability, he kept good friendship with other evangelicals; for example, if there was no local Methodist group, he even sent his converts to the Baptists who held a doctrine quite different from his own. All he asked of a church was that it demonstrate the life of Christ in it. In 1789, the conference ordained William as a deacon and elder. At that point, he became the first Canadian citizen ordained in the Methodist church.

As the presiding elder of Eastern Canada, William Black was the most influential Canadian Methodist of his period. His many years of hard work resulted in a solid Methodist organization in Nova Scotia. It was considered the most conservative wing of the Canadian Methodists.

The Methodist Tradition in Canada: Part 6

Publishing:

Concern for education and social transformation naturally gave rise to a commitment to publishing. Books, magazines and pamphlets were produced in ever-greater numbers; even by 1884 the circulation of Methodist-backed publications stood at 160,000, excluding the materials produced for overseas missions. Under William Briggs and Lorne Pierce, Methodists became instrumental in promoting a Canadian literary tradition, producing vast quantities of Canadian fiction, poetry, history and textbooks for schools.

Influence Today:

Since 1925 much smaller denominations such as the Wesleyan Church, the Free Methodist Church, the Standard Church, the Church of the Nazarene (extensions of American bodies), and The Salvation Army have endeavoured to maintain the spiritual tradition of Wesley. Collectively, however, these groups do not have the influence in public life that the Methodists exerted prior to church union.

The Methodist Tradition in Canada: Part 5

Ministering to the poor and to those that are imprisoned:

Aware of John Wesley’s legacy, Canadian Methodists dedicated themselves to the alleviation of human distress on any front, their vision here being no less than social transformation. They exerted themselves on behalf of convicts and ex-convicts, prostitutes and impoverished immigrants, all the while campaigning for better housing, improved public health, unemployment insurance, pensions, compensation for injured workers, the eight-hour work day, humane working conditions and homemaking skills. Salem Bland and James Woodsworth were the most visible exponents of the Social Gospel movement in Methodism, the latter eventually leaving the ministry in order to co-found the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. The prosecution of social justice, it was thought, would largely eliminate the sources of social disharmony. At the same time leaders such as Samuel Chown continued to uphold the necessity of personal regeneration.

The Methodist Tradition in Canada: Part 4

Canadian Methodists and Education:

From this position Methodism was able to make its unparalleled contribution to the public good, a system of high-quality public education. Insisting that education subserved not only the evangelical cause in particular but also the human good in general and the social good more widely still, Methodism’s educational architect, Egerton Ryerson, undid the Anglican Church’s exclusive control over education. Ryerson implemented the system operative in Canada today: high quality education available to all, without a religious or doctrinal means test.

In addition the Methodists built Victoria College, offering instruction in arts and sciences, later expanding it under principal Samuel Nelles to a full-fledged university by adding faculties of law, medicine and theology, eventually moving the institution from Cobourg to Toronto in order to federate it with the University of Toronto.