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Citation: Van Die, Marguerite. “Canadian Methodist Spirituality in the Late Nineteenth 
Century: Revisiting the Past, Renewing the Future.” April 30, 2019, Tyndale University 
College & Seminary, Toronto, Ontario: MPEG-3, 39:20 min.

***** Begin Content ******


Thank you very much. It is amazing to see such a crowd of people who are interested in Methodism. In the world in which I live, that just doesn't happen. 
And I was staying with a friend last night who looks rather agance at my ongoing interest in Methodism, and she said, Be sure you've got some jokes to 
put in every now and then to make sure they're still all awake. I don't have any jokes. I don't think John Wesley went for jokes either. You, who are preachers,
will probably have quite a share of those, because I gather, at least in my tradition, a joke sometimes begins a sermon. But my address is quite earnest. But
like the traditional sermon, I'd like to cover three points. And first of all, why I chose this topic and some of the challenges that are part of the topic.
Secondly, some misunderstandings that people have had, maybe some of you as well, about Methodism in Canada during the latter part of the 19th century. And 
then I want to present some contrary evidence through the experience of a few individuals, and I want to set them in their wider social, political, cultural 
context. And finally, and this may be a bit controversial, but controversy is good for Methodists. I'd like to give a few thoughts how awareness of spirituality 
and its changing context might offer us some insights and opportunities for our own time. And I'm especially interested in your feedback, since you are clergy, 
unlike an academic like myself. So why this topic? Well, spirituality is a topic that's hard to examine at any time and certainly so in the past. And I've got a 
definition up there for it. It's a very simple one. More often than not, spirituality gets forgotten when historians do a quick sweep of Christian history.
It's easier to focus on the writings of great preachers and theologians, and then we look at the past through their eyes, through the eyes of the preacher, the 
theologian. Spirituality can't be quantified at institutions. You can't analyze it the way you analyze doctrine, and those who practice it in the past can't be 
interviewed, and you certainly can't poll them. So we have to study spirituality through the few accounts that we do have of people's experience, the way they've 
written about it in diaries, letters, biographies, and other published works. When Dr. Pedler asked me for a topic entitled I happened to be reading, a recent 
work by one of my favorite cultural historians. His name is Robert Orsi, and he studies religion as lived experience. So not so much as belief, but as experience. 
And Orsi's interest is largely in Roman Catholics. And in his latest book, the one I Was reading, he looks at the many ways in which Roman Catholics in the 19th and 
20th centuries experience the presence of the divine. Some of his examples are appearances by the Virgin Mary. She seemed to appear quite frequently in the 19th 
century visits to shrines, veneration of saints, and, of course, the belief of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. All the examples he lists were precisely 
those areas where Roman Catholics and Protestants strongly differed. Protestants would have nothing to do with the doctrine of transubstantiation. They saw the 
veneration  of Mary and the saints as idolatry.They dismissed the sacred nature of the priesthood and the papacy, and they were strongly critical of the Church's 
control over the reading of the Bible. It's not surprising, therefore, that given such dismissal of their valued spiritual practices, Roman Catholics saw Protestants 
as totally lacking any experience at all of sacred presence. As Robert Orsi succinctly summarizes the difference between the two to be Catholic equals sacred presence. 
To be Protestant equals sacred absence. We know, of course, that such a stereotype was and is quite misinformed. And you who are in the Wesleyan Holiness tradition, 
will have no trouble in providing examples of sacred presence in revivals and in the lives of preachers and laypeople. And the same can be said for Wesley's followers 
in early 19th century Canada. And I'd like to give you a description of one of those experiences. The first Mass camp meeting held in five in central Canada on 
at Hay Bay, on the Bay of Quinte. And it's written you may be familiar with this already, but it's written by Methodist Episcopal, Itinerant Nathan Banks, and 
this is how he described it. "It might be said of a truth that the God of the Hebrews has come into the camp. For the noise was heard far off. The groans of the 
wounded, the shouts of the delivered, the prayers of the faithful, the exhortations of the courageous penetrated the very heavens and reverberated through the 
neighborhood." End of quote. Preacher's accounts of the early 19th century, whether it was an upper or lower Canada, the Maritimes or Newfoundland, are filled with 
such stories of divine presence. Possibly some of those stories are more exuberant than John Wesley would even have been comfortable with.
And you'll find similar accounts almost a century later by Holiness preachers in eastern Ontario and Western Canada. And you may still I'd love to talk to you 
afterwards, you may still be experiencing this. But what about Nathan Bank's successors, the mainline Methodists in the years after 1850? Historians who have 
written about the period have argued that by the 1850s and 60s, methodists were no longer looking for divine presence. The argument that the historians put 
forward is that in their desire to become respectable and accepted, Methodists lost their experience of the sacred.
They abandoned the old exuberant religion of the heart in favor of college trained ministers and orderly services in impressive Gothic and Romanesque style 
churches, churches which we still see throughout the landscape. What mattered now was Methodist influence at the center of political power and the newly formed 
Canadian nation. Now, my own research and writing has been on Methodism in the second half of the 19th century, right up until the time that the mainline Methodist 
joined the United Church of Canada in 1925. I've looked at family papers, accounts of Methodist practices, doctrinal emphasis, and theological training, and 
I disagree strongly with the view that the denomination had lost its spiritual core in the process. I've also become more aware of the complexity and tensions that are 
part of trying to understand spirituality in a changing context.
And on this last topic, I'd like to offer a few reflections at the end of the talk. So are you still awake? All right. No joke. But we continue
We today know something of the speed of change caused by the Internet, social media, and advanced technology. We know how it's made our lives so very different 
from that of previous generations, even the generation of our parents, in a different way. But just as comprehensively life changed for 19th century Canadians and 
Methodists after mid century, this is my main theme. When people's everyday experience changes, their spirituality or experience of the sacred also expresses itself 
in new forms that reflect their changed communal and self identity. Our world changes, and our spirituality, which is our experience of God in the world, also changes.
So what was the new context? By the 1850s, the relatively humble status of Methodists, especially in the villages and towns, had really changed a lot. It now included 
a number of professionals, well to do entrepreneurs, tradesmen and farmers. Most now listed Canada as their country of birth. This shift in membership status was part 
of a wider socioeconomic restructuring, which was brought about by canal and railway construction, large scale immigration after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and 
rising farm input. So the frontier became much more settled. In Ontario between 1851 and 1871, the number of people living in places of 1000 or more almost tripled. 
New Brunswick's  Methodists became the fastest growing religious group in that colony, and most were respectable tradesmen. And their prosperity was beginning to 
find expressions  in new places of worship. Constructed in the impressive Romanesque and Gothic styles. In central Canada, methodists were becoming the province's 
most prolific builder  of churches, increasing the number of churches by fivefold. So you can imagine what an impact that would have on the community to see 
themselves growing so quickly.  The perception that these changes were accompanied by spiritual decline comes largely from the warnings and reminiscences of an 
older generation of preachers. They look back with nostalgia on what came to be seen as Methodism's heroic period the years of camp meetings in frontiersettlements, 
dramatic conversions and self  sacrificing itinerant preachers. Such lamentations are familiar in times of change.
David Hempton, who is a historian of Irish Methodism lovingly, labels these men the Old Croakers, and some of us have become Old Crokers, old Croakers preachers 
trained in an earlier period who have lost influence and find themselves out of step with the times. In actual fact, far from losing spiritual vitality, the 1850s 
were a period of intense revival in central Canada. Between 1849 and 1859, the membership of the Wesleyan Methodist Church more than doubled, from roughly 24,000 to 
roughly 51,000. And that of the Methodist new connections almost doubled as well, from 3389 to 5708. In the Maritimes, Methodism grew little during this decade, but 
suddenly in 159, over 300, over 3000 new members came in largely through revivals, not in the country, but in such major urban centers as Halifax, St.
John and and Charlottetown and Methodist Connectional Funds. Funds for the entire denomination, not counting local funds, doubled during the decade. Now, one reason 
why some of the Old Croakers may have looked with nostalgia to the to the primitive simplicity of the past was that lay influence had also increased. Lay influence 
increases influence of the clergy tends to decrease. Lay people demanded a better educated ministry, more reflective, less emotional preaching, and some wanted a 
reform of the class meeting.
Some saw the class meeting's reliance on personal testimonies as becoming stale. Same old, same old repetition of my conversion story. And they saw that as a 
deterrent to drawing in new members. In 1874, laymen for the first time were granted seats in the General Conference as an inducement to try to get the New 
Connection Methodists to unite with the Wesleyans to form the Methodist Church of Canada. The denomination's well to do, male members took on prominent roles 
nationally and also at the local level.
The denomination was expanding, and so they played a vital role as church trustees, members of building committees, fundraisers and stewards. Their wives and 
daughters served in providing poor relief, sunday school teaching and other forms of outreach. As a result, the 1850s brought profound changes among ministry and 
laity. As self conscious modernizers. A new generation of laity and clergy went about building churches, founding colleges, establishing periodicals and newspapers, 
constructing new disciplines and forming committees.
In this process, especially in urban centers, ministers wanted to ensure that material progress did not happen at the expense of spiritual growth. That's always the 
danger, right? We become rich and we lose our spiritual core. And so ministers realize this would require a renewal of lay spirituality in a form more fitting for 
the Times. How did this happen?
Very simply and very much in keeping with Methodist identity, the 1850s saw a revitalization of John Wesley's teaching on Christian perfection. This would have a 
profound impact on denominational leaders such as theologian and Victoria College Chancellor Nathaniel Burwash and Albert Carmen, who after 1883 became the general 
superintendent of the Methodist Church of Canada. And you can tell by their dates of death as well, that they had an extensive influence because they died in old age. 
And in those days, you didn't retire, you died in harness, and they held on. So it shaped the leaders, the doctrine of Christian perfection.
It also shaped many lay leaders, clergy leaders. In earlier accounts, there are references to Christian perfection entire sanctification or holiness, but they're 
really few and far between because most of the emphasis is on conversion and the accompanying experience of the witness of the Spirit. But it was especially the 
efforts of two American revivalists, James Caughty and Phoebe Palmer, who instilled in Methodist audiences a new interest in Christian perfection. In 1857, Palmer 
came to Hamilton, Ontario, and it was the first of a series of Canadian visits. Religion was big news in those days and the press always covered it.
And revivalists made very good use of always contacting the press. And the way Palmer billed her revival method in the Hamilton Spectator was as a laity for the 
Times. And as she explained to the newspaper, two things made her revival a success the practical nature of revival and the role of organization and discipline 
among church members. And the way she describes that. She came to a regular weekly prayer meeting in the evening.
There were about 50 to 75 people there and in the course of her talking, somehow the spirit started to move and quite a number of businessmen stood up and they 
said, we are going to tithe and we are going to bring one new member to next night to tomorrow night's prayer meeting. So it was quite disciplined, quite well 
organized. And as a result, the next night this happened. And as a result, 18 days of meeting, afternoon and evening, took place in the church apparently was 
overflowing with people. And similar accounts emerged from her impact and other urban centers and also the preaching of James Caughthy.
Their methods were part of a shift that matched the world of the laity. I think that's important revivals were sober in style. They called on the cooperation of 
wives and sisters, the importance of the family, and in these ways, they targeted a middle class who was active in the new commercial and industrializing marketplace, 
starting in New York City and also involving Palmer. A number of American large urban centers experienced similar revivals in the late 1850s, and the press describes 
these as the businessmen's revivals. Holiness was now experienced as a heightened sense of the sacred and abiding experience of God's love that went beyond the emotional 
moment of conversion. It expressed itself in a daily structuring of one's time in ways that were practical and service oriented. Earlier accounts of revivals by ministers 
had emphasized the  emotional experience of the witness of the spirit in conversion, but they hadn't talked very much about what happened to the convert's life 
after conversion. Accounts  now took pains to note the absence of emotional manifestations and revivals, the disciplined involvement of the late, and the consistent 
practice of piety as the test of conversion.
Thanks to an interest in biography, especially among laylives men and women, for this period, a number of converts have left behind a rich description of their 
experience and subsequent religious practice, and I'd like to talk about three of these very briefly. Most of the new converts had already, since childhood, been 
socialized in evangelical Christianity. And so there are no vivid accounts the way there are of the earlier period of a misspent youth. Once I was a sinner, they 
realized they were sinners, but it was a different kind of sense of sinfulness. So here's the first one, and it's Charles Colby.
In the village of Stanstead in Quebec and Eastern Townships, Charles Colby, an 1858 young lawyer, fell in love with a young Methodist woman from Vermont. And shortly 
after that he experienced he had profound experience of divine love. And as he wrote to his new mother in law, although he'd been raised in a Christian home, he 
confessed that his knowledge of God had always been intellectual rather than experiential. Suddenly, as he experienced God's goodness and love, his relationship 
with the divine had changed. In his words, all the barriers which had previously separated me from the Savior had come down, and for the first time in my life, 
I was able to enter into prayer as an intimate dialogue with God. He realized that God's nature was love and that religion was primarily a matter of the heart 
rather than the head. And of course, this intersected with the experience  that he had also had of recently falling in love and planning to marry and start a family. 
He did marry. He did start a family. He was a devoted husband and father,  and like so many others in this period, it was a really turbulent economic time, and Charles 
Colby lost his house at one point in time, he became insolvent. He was often away on business, he entered politics, and he served his country's federal parliament from 
1867 to 1891. And even though he was often away from home, he maintained an active interest in the welfare of Stanstead's Methodist congregation. He was a member of the 
management committee. He kept an eye on the Stationing  Committee's selection of preachers to ensure that they always met his congregation's needs. You weren't supposed 
to do that, but they all did it. And with a view to the education of his four children. He was also an enthusiastic supporter and trustee of Stanstead Wesleyan College 
when it opened its doors in  1874, moving then to Halifax james Bain Morrow. He was raised in a devout Methodist family. At age 16, he started to work for the Samuel 
Cunard Steamship Company.  And he worked for there in a number of very influential positions for the rest of his life. After attending a series of revivals at a 
Sunday school at Argyle Street Methodist Church, he came home and he wrote in his diary in 1851, I find the service of Christ to be perfect freedom, and I have to 
rejoice in what I experience of the love of God. And shortly after that he took the leadership of a young boys class  and he began a long career of active church 
involvement which included lay preaching, teaching a sunday saturday evening band meeting, leading a sunday evening band meeting assistance and church extension 
leadership in the local and national YMCA and on the executive of the book and track society. So there were all  these organizations which had been grown up during 
this period. They needed leaders, and many of those who had experienced Christian perfection became very  involved in them. In Belleville Jane Clement Jones 
unfortunately, it's hard to get pictures of women. So what we have of Jane Clement Jones is a window that was dedicated to her memory after she died. It's in Bridge 
Street United Church in Belleville. Jane Clement Jones, during one of James caught his revivalist campaigns in 1856, jane attended. She was 30 years old, pregnant 
with her fifth child, and she also experienced a new sense of consecration. And what a sense of consecration it was. In the next 38 years, she became a tireless and 
highly conscientious class leader, first to a group of young women. And after 1869, she took on a senior boys  class, which over its 14 year existence had a total of 
770 young men. Young men often came to Belville. They studied at a school of business. Jane would meet them at the train station.She would bring them to her home. She had 
specialties which would attract them. In that way, they became members of her young men's class as well. She was active in poor relief. She helped establish the 
Belleville Hospital, a home for the needy, and the Women's Christian Association. And along with this. She was a faithful attendee at Methodist prayer and class 
meetings, love feasts and Sunday worships. And of course, she was also a wife to a local businessman and a mother to eventually eight children. Like so many of her
generation, I think this is important. She owed a great deal to a meticulous organizational ability and an overly developed conscience.
I would feel guilty if I did not go, she would say, because she spent so much time at her church, which was her second home. In their work on behalf of young people, 
Colby, Jones and Morrow exemplified the concern of Methodist clergy and laity to extend the faith to the next generation. This was so important to make sure the 
faith was transmitted, and the key institution in this was the Sunday School. Here, prominent local men and women assumed active leadership as teachers and 
superintendents, although it was the men who were the superintendents. William Pearson, for example, an Anglican in 152, was converted to Methodism in one of James 
caught his revivals in Toronto's Richmond Street Methodist Church.
He was he. He worked days in the Toronto Post Office, but he also served 30 years as the church's Sunday School superintendent. When his church closed in 1888, he 
joined Metropolitan Methodist Church, where he taught a Bible class for another 24 years, resigning in 1912 after 60 years of continuous Sunday School service. 
I'm not sure what it would have been like to have been a young child in William Pearson's Sunday School class at the 60th year of his superintendency, but he hung 
in there like other Protestant evangelical denominations, method of spirituality began in the home with family devotions, and the results of this are evident in the 
1870s. As in the 1850s, there was another series of revivals, and Methodist membership in Canada increased from 15.4% in 1871 to 17.2% ten years later.
So more than 2% increase, making Methodists the country's largest Protestant denomination. And samples of congregation showed that the majority of converts were 
children of parents who had been converted in the 1850s revivals. And again, when describing the revivals, the emphasis was on the orderly atmosphere of the 
revival and on expressions of dedication on the part of the converts. In place of the old fashioned Methodist class meeting, young men and women were enrolled in 
Bible classes, which were led by lay female and male members for the spiritual needs of young people. There was the Epworth League, which was organized in Canada 
in 1889.
Its purpose was to put into active service the knowledge the children had obtained in the Sunday School. For example, the League's Department of Citizenship
looked at social and political questions stressing as the best means of creating a strong and vigorous nation. Patriotism and moral reform. And how did you get 
moral reform? Well, through such means as sabotarian and temperance activity. Keeping the Sabbath, which was a very hard we took it for granted many years, but it was 
very hard to bring that in. What do you do with the trains on Saturday night? Do they all stop and people will explain, well, if they stop, then the crew is 
simply going to get drunk on the weekend and the train will have trouble get starting on Monday. So these practical issues that idealistic evangelicals like the 
Methodist had to deal with and the Epworth League also emphasized a study of Canadian history and politics. Late 19th century Canadians, as elsewhere in the English 
speaking world, strongly believed that theirs was a progressive age, not just in the material sense, but also in the area of religious knowledge.
In 1910, the Methodist Church of Canada accepted in a moderate form the new historical approach to the Scriptures known as the Higher Criticism. This had not 
happened without controversy, but in the end it was concluded that both the new and the old readings of Scriptures were in keeping with Wesley's evangelistic 
approach. One of the strongest supporters, theologian and university chancellor Nathan Nathaniel Berwash, argued that questions of biblical scholarship were 
largely irrelevant for those who concentrated only on the conversion of sinners, such as Methodism's offshoot. The Salvation Army and Berwash had a lot of respect 
for the Salvation Army. However, as he sought the task of contemporary Methodists went beyond the salvation of the soul to include shaping Canadian culture with 
the moral and spiritual truths of Scripture.
He was convinced that faith in Christ was no longer only a matter of saying, christ died for me or Christ paid my debt. Such phrases could easily become ritualized 
and empty. Rather, faith in Christ meant, said Burwash, the far deeper and broader act of taking him as the Lord and Master, the example and guide of my life. 
Holiness was not just a personal matter. Those whose lives had been sanctified had a communal responsibility to create a Christian country in every aspect of life, 
be it politics, education, temperance, Sunday observance, or urban social reform, I'm going to just dig a Henry Rack with whom some of you may be familiar.
John Wesley's biographer has noted that over time, John Wesley's legacy of perfectionism resulted in two opposing views. Quote the two elements held in balance in 
Wesley an instant gift and experience and a steady progress through pious cultivation tended to split apart into two different versions of holiness. Later, 
perfectionists and pentecostals concentrated on the gift as an experience with little specific moral content. Others concentrated on the element of gradual progress. 
Some, such as Burwash's former student Ralph Horner, and the holiness tradition, which emerged after the 1870s, emphasized the first version.
Mainline Methodist generally highlighted the moral dimension of gradual progress, of sanctification or perfect love. So you see this distinction right between the 
two, and I'm sure you've probably looked at it before in your lectures in this in emphasizing gradual progress of sanctification, they were part of a Protestant 
evangelical moral order that was intent on building a godfearing nation. Since the 1840s and 50s, Methodists had joined other committed Evangelicals Presbyterians, 
Congregationalists, Baptists and some Anglicans in moral crusades in favor of prison reform, antislavery temperance and prohibition and Sabbath reform. In the 
decades after Confederation in 1867, their combined forces and growing political and social influence saw them increasingly seeking parliamentary legislation in 
support of prohibition and Sabbath observance. In their eyes, the one obstacle to success in making Canada a Christian country by Evangelical Protestant standards 
were the Roman Catholics, who counted for 41.5% of the Canadian population.
But during the same time, Roman Catholics had also established a parallel moral order or public religion, especially in Quebec. So you've got this huge public moral 
order, protestant, Evangelical, but in Quebec and amongst some Roman Catholics elsewhere, you've got the same thing, but it's Roman Catholic anticatholicism had 
been a feature of British North America from the start. With Confederation, it took on a more nationalistic expression as Protestants and Catholics both started to 
compete for influence in the new nation. Shaping Protestant fear of Roman Catholic expansion were the wealth worn criticisms which I mentioned at the beginning of 
the talk. And you may remember the central to this was their understanding of sacred presence.
Protestants dismissed the exuberant ways Roman Catholics practiced sacred presence. They dismissed it as superstition. Roman Catholics saw Protestant religion as a 
total denial of a sacred experience and of tradition.
What became lost in these verbal wars, except among a few spokespersons, was the reality that during these years, roman Catholics and Protestants had both drawn on 
the experience of the sacred. But they had done that in different ways. But they'd both drawn it to build their parallel moral orders. Roman Catholics, like 
Protestants, held a patriarchal view of the family that rested on the sanctity of marriage and on male authority. Their priests were just as concerned as Methodist 
clergy to educate the young and the faith.
Where Methodists used the Bible to train the child's conscience, Roman Catholics used the Little Catechism. 15% of the Little Catechism was devoted to the sacrament 
of Penance, which was seen as the best way to train the child's conscience. So training of the child's conscience was taking place on both sides of the Christian 
divide. Internal discipline, social welfare, and the conviction that religion was not only a private but also a public matter were as important to Roman Catholics 
as to Methodists and Evangelicals generally. Roman Catholic laypeople were as actively involved in Methodists as Methodists were in poor relief.
And they shared a concern to inculcate sound habits like self discipline, temperance and frugality. And when it came to helping the state carry out its politics of 
assimilating native children by teaching them Canadian habits, R oman Catholics shared with Methodists and other mainline Protestants aperternalism, which led them 
to decide the future of native peoples with good intentions, but without representation and openness to aboriginal experience of the sacred.
Now I'm starting to wind down, but it's a slow winding down. The two faith groups were able to build a parallel moral order in the latter half of the 19th century 
that lasted well beyond 1925, the year when a number of evangelical denominations formed the United Church of Canada. Observers even in the 1950s and 1960s would 
be struck by the country's high rate of church attendance and religious involvement. Looking back, however, from our vantage point of the early 21st century, we 
realized that the close fit between spirituality and public life also helped lay the groundwork for the rapid secularization of society that began in the 1960s. 
There are many reasons for secularization that are far beyond the control of the churches.
However, the need to revitalize people's lives with new forms of sacred presence is as real today as it was in the 19th century, when the experience of perfect 
love flourished in Canadian methodism. But I believe it must happen. It must happen in a vastly changed world. The second half of the 20th century, a century that 
was torn by two world wars, has proven to be a major turning point in bringing Protestants and Roman Catholics to both acknowledge the importance of a shared 
Christian experience. And it should be another pointing out to the need for a personal experience.
Carl Ronald, the German Jesuit theologian who left such a strong imprint on Vatican II, wrote in 1972, it's up there where men and women have not begun to have 
the experience of God and of God's Spirit, who liberates us from the most profound anxieties of life and from our endless guilt. There really is no point in 
proclaiming to them the ethical norms of Christianity. What he's saying is Christianity can continue to be ethical, it can continue to be moral, but if it's not 
based on the experience of the love of Christ, it really is empty. His words echo John Wesley's emphasis on experience. They're also in keeping with Wesley's own 
openness to Roman Catholic spiritual and mystical writings, for which and of course, there was little interest in that in the late 19th century among Methodists.
They were not interested in whatever positive Wesley found in Roman Catholicism. Today, Roman Catholics such as Thomas Merton, Joan Chittister and Richard Rohr have 
become valued guides to many Protestants looking for an authentic Christian experience of God's abiding love. That experience of love now happens in a world vastly 
different from that of the late 19th and early 20th century globalization and official multiculturalism in Canada, the advent of the Internet and social media have 
not only changed the way we identify ourselves, but also the way we experience God. There are those who point to new developments, such as climate change, contact 
with other world religions, and aboriginal respect towards nature as evidence that God's love exists far beyond our earlier imagination. The imagination, for example, 
of the 19th century.
One contemporary writer who addresses this is Brian McLaren in The Great Spiritual Migration how the world's largest religion is seeking a better way to be Christian. 
And McLaren says, must we stay where we are, forever defining ourselves as a system of beliefs? Or may we migrate to a new understanding of Christian faith as a way of 
life, a practice of ongoing personal growth and cultural evolution? Wesley and 19th century Methodists would agree with his emphasis on Christian faith as a way of 
life in the 21st century. We also know that we can't revert to 19th century understandings of dominion over the Earth and violent conflict with those with whom we 
differ on matters of religion.
And so McLaren and others remind us that it is again time for Christians to migrate to an identity that reflects the needs of our time to move away from the 
extractive, consumptive, and unsustainable way of life that is destroying our planet and civilization. To look instead to the common good, as do the Roman Catholic 
writers I've just mentioned. McLaren invites Christians to experience God's perfect love in ways that focus not only on the individual, on a denomination or a country, 
but on the entire universe and on everything that's in it, on people of different faith or of no faith, animals, the environment, and so forth. He does not say that 
this revitalization of Christianity will be easy. But then neither were the challenges that Wesley faced in industrializing England, nor those that 19th century 
Canadian Methodist faced when they tried to live their faith in their time. So thank you very much for listening.


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