Methodists: The Challenge of Fortune

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Around 1880, when the frontier began turning from a reality to a historical memory, Methodism began to consolidate its gains and became more of an ecclesiastical institution than a moving wind of evangelism. Born in poverty, Methodism gradually matured into a church for the nation's growing middle class—and in so doing became so close a mirror of all that was both strong and weak in America that sometimes the nation and church seemed inseparable. There was, for example, that formidable Methodist amazon, Frances Willard, who helped create the W.C.T.U. and grandmothered the "noble experiment" of Prohibition.

Conservative in personal morals, Methodists were often liberal in social ethics; many of their ministers, such as New York's stormy Bishop Francis J. McConnell, were leading advocates of the "social gospel"—the earnest, pre-World War I movement that attacked child labor and defended the right to unionize by directly applying Jesus' ethics. In the rural areas where they were strongest, Methodists less happily became active in the Ku Klux Klan, and in immigrant-hating native-American movements.

Forgotten Roots? Today, a number of young Methodists detect more weakness than strength in their church, and complain that it has lost much of its spirit in the transition from frontier chapel to the Gothic "fortress church" of middle-class suburbs. "The church is so nondescript that it doesn't carry an ax any more," thunders the Rev. Ralph L. Roy, a leader in a reform-minded group of ministers and laymen called Methodists for Church Renewal. "It lis tens more to the voices of society than to the voice of God." To the rebels, nothing demonstrates this more than the open avowal of segregation by Methodist churches in the South—a stand dramatically proven last Easter when Boston's Bishop James Mathews and Negro Bishop Charles Golden were prevented from attending morning worship at a church in Jackson, Miss.

Methodism's critics-from-within com plain that it ignores all of Wesley's ideals except his passion for detail. "The Methodists began among the so-called 'outs' of England," says the Rev. John Barclay of Boston. "But we have to a degree become fat and prosperous and forgotten the roots from which we sprang." Ministers complain that their churches have become "cults of congeniality" instead of societies for spiritual rebels, and that the old spirit of Christian fellowship has been all but lost in a swamp of "administrivia." Complains the Rev. John Lilly of Boston's Old West Methodist Church: "The local church has an organization that would rival General Motors'. It's ridiculous."