Very well written, well researched and readable book about a very important person in American history.
Quotes:
Asbury had spent most of the past two years lying low at a friend’s in Delaware, fearing for his life because of his association with John Wesley, the founder of Methodism in England and no friend of the revolution.
He led a wanderer’s life of voluntary poverty and intense introspection. The church and the nation ultimately disappointed him, but his faith never did. Asbury embodies Methodism’s greatest successes and its most wrenching failures.
Of John Wesley’s licensed missionaries to the colonies, Asbury was the only one who stayed through the American Revolution as a Methodist preacher.
Asbury is seldom remembered as an important American religious leader because he didn’t exert influence in ways that we expect. Key figures in American religious history are generally lumped into three camps: charismatic communicators, such as George Whitefield, Charles Finney, or Billy Graham; intellectuals, such as Jonathan Edwards or Reinhold Niebuhr; and domineering autocrats—the way in which Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormons, is often depicted.
Asbury communicated his vision for Methodism in four enduring ways that came to define much of evangelical culture in America. The first was through his legendary piety and perseverance, rooted in a classically evangelical conversion experience.
The second way that Asbury communicated his vision was through his ability to connect with ordinary people.
The third conduit of Asbury’s vision was the way that he understood and used popular culture.
Yet cultural accommodation exacted a price, the clearest example of which was the presence of slavery in the church, a reality that he tacitly accepted, but which haunted him for the last thirty years of his life.
As long as they were poor, most Methodists agreed with Asbury that wealth was a snare. But as Methodists became generally more prosperous, they became less concerned about the dangers of wealth, much to Asbury’s dismay.
By the end of his career he was largely out of step with the church that he was so instrumental in creating. This, in the end, seemed to him a great tragedy.
The fourth way that Asbury communicated his message was through his organization of the Methodist church.
Under Asbury, the typical American itinerant rode a predominantly rural circuit 200 to 500 miles in circumference, typically with twenty-five to thirty preaching appointments per round. He completed the circuit every two to six weeks, with the standard being a four weeks’ circuit of 400 miles.
He once told Boehm “that the equipment of a Methodist minister consisted of a horse, saddle and bridle, one suit of clothes, a watch, a pocket Bible, and a hymn book. Anything else would be an encumbrance.”
Asbury was a transitional figure in the development of American religion, promoting the separation of religious leadership from wealth and formal education.
Asbury wasn’t an intellectual, charismatic performer or autocrat, but his understanding of what it meant to be pious, connected, culturally aware, and effectively organized redefined religious leadership in America.
The bands were intended for those seeking a higher level of commitment. While all Methodists were required to attend a class meeting, joining a band was voluntary. The only qualification for joining a class meeting on probation (which usually lasted three to six months) was a desire to seek salvation. To remain in a class, one only had to profess a continued desire for holiness. Bands demanded something more. They assumed that members were already converted (justified) and were seeking sanctification.
Over time, the distinction between the two meetings became imprecise and classes largely replaced bands.
Methodists realized that only by replacing one community with another could they bring about lasting change. They couldn’t simply demand that believers give up popular recreations and pastimes. Bands and class meetings replaced the alehouse (like the one Asbury grew up next to) while public preaching and eventually (in America) camp meetings took the place of fairs and dances.
“Scream no more, at the peril of your soul,” John Wesley wrote to King in July 1775. “Speak as earnestly as you can, but do not scream. Speak with your heart, but with a moderate voice.”
Under Rankin’s direction, the conference called on all Methodists to attend an Anglican Church to receive the sacraments, and urged the preachers “in a particular manner to press the people in Maryland and Virginia to the observance of this minute.” Asbury didn’t even bother to include this rule in his journal account, realizing that it was only wishful thinking.
“I let you loose, George, on the great continent of America,” Wesley wrote to Shadford just before he embarked for the colonies. “Publish your message in the open face of the sun, and do all the good you can.”42
He had little access to doctors in the South, which is just as good considering what they often did to their patients.
The southern revival of 1773 to 1776 is important for two reasons. First, it created a model of Methodist expansion that Asbury and others followed for nearly forty years. Second, it hastened a transition in Asbury’s thinking, defining his willingness to accept a more interactive, American version of Methodism, even if it bordered on enthusiasm.
At the outset, it wasn’t obvious that John Wesley would take a strong stand on the war. He had long advised his preachers to avoid meddling in politics. “It is your part to be peace-makers, to be loving and tender to all, but to addict yourselves to no party,” he wrote to Thomas Rankin in March 1775. It also wasn’t obvious early on that Wesley would oppose the American position.
The American patriots, according to Charles, were guilty of conducting the war By burnings, ravages, and rapes,And villainy in a thousand shapes
Wesley was an Oxford-educated clergyman and gentleman who saw it as his duty to uphold church and king. For Wesley, republicanism undercut the essential social hierarchy that supported the moral order of the universe. Asbury had come to the more American view that the old order was inherently flawed, a human invention, and not a very good one at that.
For Asbury, faith and politics were never connected in the way they were for Wesley. All human governments were corrupt, and none deserved absolute allegiance.
Despite these distractions, he settled into a routine that included reading about a hundred pages a day, praying five times a day in public, preaching in the open air every other day, and lecturing in prayer meetings every evening.
By 1779, Asbury’s opposition to slavery had become so strident that when his journals were first published in their entirety in 1821, the editors removed some of his more vivid denunciations.
Methodists weren’t part of the earliest protests against slavery, either in America or England. By the war years this began to change as Methodists joined a growing number of Americans and Britons in the belief that slavery was a great moral evil, radically at odds with the word of God.
A few weeks later, in North Carolina, he reflected that “there are many things that are painful to me, but cannot yet be removed, especially slave-keeping, and its attendant circumstances. The Lord will certainly hear the cries of the oppressed, naked, starving creatures. O! my God, think on this land.”
“We must suffer with, if we labour for the poor,” he wrote to Wesley
The end of the war and Wesley’s own advancing years (he turned eighty in 1783) led him finally in 1784 to take a decisive step. In that year, he legally incorporated Methodism and began ordaining preachers with his own hands. He hoped by these measures to maintain some kind of direct control over American Methodism and keep the American movement broadly within the Anglican tradition.
Wesley designed the Deed of Declaration to protect Methodist property and insure that the movement would go on by legally incorporating a conference of one hundred preachers to take over after he and his brother Charles were gone.
More important from the American perspective was Wesley’s decision to ordain Methodist preachers.
Early in his career, Wesley was so horrified at the prospect of lay preachers administering the sacraments that he told the 1760 Conference “He himself would rather commit murder than administer the Lord’s Supper without ordination.”
American Methodists were now “totally disentangled both from the State and from the English hierarchy,
The preachers gathered in Baltimore voted unanimously to form an independent church, free of all ties to the Church of England, and elected Coke and Asbury superintendents of the new body.
On successive days Asbury was ordained deacon, elder, and superintendent. He had two reasons for insisting on an election, rather than simply receiving Wesley’s ordination. First, election gave him a measure of authority and legitimacy not mediated through Wesley. From this point on, he served at the pleasure of the American conference. Wesley couldn’t recall him to Britain, as he had tried to do during the war, or appoint someone to supersede him without the approval of the American preachers. Second, Asbury understood the importance of elections in American society.
At several points in his sermon Coke announced that he had come to ordain Asbury “a Christian bishop,” setting, from the beginning, a precedent for replacing the title “superintendent” with “bishop.”
It was clear to the preachers gathered in Baltimore that they were establishing an episcopal polity completely independent from the Church of England, and, ultimately, from Wesley himself. Coke would later have second thoughts, deciding that he had pushed things too far in this first wave of exuberance. But for the church as a whole, there would be no turning back.
Democracy and episcopacy weren’t easily reconciled, but for the moment Asbury and the preachers wanted the advantages of both.
When Charles heard of Coke’s ordination of Asbury, he responded sarcastically in verse: A Roman emperor,’tis said,His favourite horse a consul made:But Coke brings greater things to pass—He makes a bishop of an ass.
The pro-slavery petitioners argued that the American Revolution had been fought primarily to secure the right to private property, not, as the Methodist petitions claimed, to secure “liberty” for all “mankind.”
“How can you, how dare you suffer yourself to be called Bishop?” he wrote to Asbury, addressing him as “my dear Franky,” when he learned of the change. “I shudder, I start at the very thought! Men may call me a knave or a fool, a rascal, a scoundrel, and I am content; but they shall never by my consent call me Bishop! For my sake, for God’s sake, for Christ’s sake put a full end to this!”
Despite its growth, Methodism remained a poor person’s church.
Methodists believed that remaining free of debt was a moral responsibility,
Fifty years later, as Methodists helped create the American middle class, they became avid college builders, founding more than two hundred schools and colleges between 1830 and 1860.
The only acceptable course was to live in a state of voluntary poverty, or as close to it as decency allowed.
he clung to the practice of paying all of the preachers the same salary ($64 a year), whether probationers or bishops.
In general Methodists admired Asbury’s financial restraint, but there were differences in the way that most viewed the problem of wealth. A life of voluntary poverty may have seemed ideal to Asbury and preachers like William Watters, but most Methodists hoped to do better. In their minds the root problem wasn’t wealth, only how it was used. The gentry led immoral lives because they were corrupt at heart, with or without their money. Prosperity held its own dangers to be sure, but most Methodists dearly hoped that they would have the chance to prove that wealth and piety could be successfully combined.
One measure of the church’s success was that it now had to deal with pretenders. By 1792 there were at least three cases of “infamous imposters” traveling through the country from Virginia to New York with forged preaching licenses, pocketing offerings, and in one case marrying “a young woman of a reputable family,” even though the impostor already had a wife.
There had been little for Methodists to fight over in 1780. They had largely overlooked internal disputes in the interests of survival. But by 1790 the church had acquired enough resources and stability that those dissatisfied with Asbury’s leadership no longer felt constrained to hold their tongues and wait.2
“When men become rich, they sometimes forget that they are Methodists.”
Coke could hardly have brought more serious charges against Asbury. In effect, he accused Asbury of figuratively stabbing Wesley in the back and literally hastening his death, crimes worthy, Coke declared, of eternal damnation.27
Much of Glendinning’s story—a humble family background, limited education, apprenticeship at a trade, a restless spirit and thirst for travel, supernatural visions and prophetic dreams, a dramatic conversion, and a quick transition from convert to preacher—resembled that of most Methodist preachers.
“I have one rule, not to do great things in haste; another, not to act at a distance, when I can come near,”
Preaching was “his element, his life, he could not live long without,”
Like all Methodist preachers, in his delivery Asbury relied “much on the divine influence,” according to Boehm. Once, when Samuel Thomas stood to begin his sermon, Asbury, who was sitting nearby, tugged at Thomas’s sleeve, whispering to him, “Feel for the power, feel for the power, brother.” Any Methodist preacher would have understood what this meant. It was advice that Asbury himself tried to follow, though not always successfully.
Asbury saw himself as a sort of Methodist George Washington. In the popular imagination Washington was austere, disinterested, standing above the fray of petty partisanship, concerned only for the welfare of his country, qualities that Asbury hoped others saw in him with regard to the church.
Where northerners, like Ezekiel Cooper, still hoped to force an end to slaveholding among Methodists, Jenkins-style southerners hoped only to work within the system, converting as many slaves as possible but taking no interest in their emancipation. To Cooper, slaveholding was a sin that no expediency could justify; for Jenkins, any hint of abolitionism meant an end to the church in the South. Asbury agonized over this conundrum for the rest of his life, unable to find a way out.
He was so well known that letters from Europe could be sent to him “in any publick town or city upon the continent,” addressed simply to “Francis Asbury.”
And yet Asbury couldn’t and wouldn’t allow himself to relax. The Methodist way of salvation demanded that one push on to the very end; there could be no rest short of the eternal rest of death. Eventually something had to give, either when his health failed or the church changed under his feet, demanding a new style of leadership.
Disease was a product of God’s providence, sent to test one’s faith. Early Methodists rarely prayed for divine healing, a concept that would only gain prominence in America with the Mormons in the mid-nineteenth century and in the late nineteenth-century Holiness and Pentecostal movements.
As they developed in the 1780s and 1790s, quarterly meetings came to have a well-defined pattern. Fridays were observed as a day of fasting in preparation for the meeting. Preaching began Saturday morning and continued till early afternoon, when the business session convened. Here preachers and local leaders met to deal with disciplinary cases, license local preachers and exhorters, make recommendations to the annual conference, and discuss finances and other administrative concerns. Preaching continued Saturday night, followed by prayer meetings in nearby homes. Sunday morning began with a love feast, followed by sermons and exhortations from the presiding elder and circuit preachers. The sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper followed either at the close of the morning service or in the afternoon. Sunday evening concluded with more preaching, singing, and praying.
Asbury had always believed that poverty and suffering were allies of true spirituality.
He had to wonder how much of real substance was left for him to do. Was he already a quaint relic of the past in his own church? It wasn’t yet clear, but he had a suspicion which way things were headed.
Methodism wasn’t a personality cult; it was more of a culture.
Connecting with old friends was another expression of Asbury’s understanding of what Methodism was. He had always put people before ideas, had always been more concerned with maintaining the church’s connectional nature than with formulating a systematic theology.
Here was the church’s senior bishop, emaciated, poor, and suffering, begging for those in need. Poverty was nothing to be ashamed of, just the opposite. Social pretension was the enemy of true religion, of this Asbury remained sure.
There was no blueprint for what he did, for building a large, strictly voluntary religious movement led by non-elites in a pluralistic society. Yet his understanding of what it meant to be pious, connected, culturally responsive, and effectively organized has worked its way deep into the fabric of American religious life. If ever there was an American saint, it was Francis Asbury.
He simply believed in a God who transcended this world.
