Methodism in the American Forest

Abstract

In tracing the development of Methodist open air preaching in America, Russell Richey covers some ground already trodden in some of his previous books, notably Early American Methodism (1991). However in this new work, the backdrop of forests and glades is examined not just as location but as an agent for identity formation and a potential resource for theological reflection, albeit one that that Richey laments is under-utilized by both nineteenth-century pioneers and twentieth-century denominational consolidators.Richey begins by looking at Wesley's own practice of outdoor preaching before examining the adaptation of the resulting Methodist discipline for the American context. Some fascinating accounts follow from early American itinerants, and from these, Richey posits the idea of woodland as preaching place being tamed into ‘cathedral’ (shady grove) and resorted to for confession (garden).He then traces the augmentation of quarterly meetings by the introduction of camp meetings at the turn of the nineteenth century. Gathering in forest clearings, it was often possible, as in few places else, for racial mixing to take place, and Richey gives absorbing insights into many roles camp meetings played in the antebellum period in the divisions of American Methodism over issues of slavery and the treatment of Native Americans, as well as the development of institutional ecclesiology, all of which led to the emergence of rival Methodisms organizing their own outdoor gatherings.Following the Civil War, camp meetings and their settings became domesticated in a number of ways. Martha's Vineyard camp meeting had begun in 1835, but by the 1860s it developed into Wesleyan Grove, a permanent camp ground that Richey describes as a vocation-friendly ‘heavenly home, a resting place, a religious colony’ (160). Both in the rise of The National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness and in the Chautauqua education programme meetings, the emphasis became focused not on the conversion of those outside the faith but the improvement of those within it, either through entire sanctification or more instruction. Here, Richey claims, the taming of the great outdoors into permanent camp grounds consolidated a growing division between evangelical and liberal approaches to Christian discipleship which continues in the United Methodist Church and elsewhere today.Richey's book is a thoroughly absorbing and welcome exploration of a subject which, as he himself acknowledges, has been comparatively under-recorded or analysed since Charles A. Johnson's The Frontier Camp Meeting: Religion's Harvest Time in 1955. Most of the minor criticisms I have of Richey's book arise from being a British reader. It would have been very useful to have had the inclusion of a map and illustrations, particularly in the treatment of the establishment of permanent camp grounds toward the end of the book. A separate bibliography would have been invaluable, too, in order to follow up more easily on Richey's many sources. Also, James M. Buckley, whose A History of Methodists in the United States Richey refers to, does not attribute the origin of the British connexion which became established in the United States in 1840 as ‘Lorenzo Dow's Primitive Methodists’ (171), even though Buckley does repeatedly get William Clowes's name wrong!Perhaps Richey's most original claim is that early American Methodism missed an opportunity in not reflecting upon its sylvan ministry to develop a lived Wesleyan creation theology. Here it would have been helpful to have had contemporaneous examples from other traditions to avoid reading back from a twenty-first-century perspective what such theologizing might have looked like in the service of itinerant evangelistic ministry in the early nineteenth century. If Richey's appendix, giving entries of ‘John Wesley Preaching under Trees and in Groves’ from his Journal, is anything to go by, there is little indication that the British countryside impacted much upon Wesley's theological understanding of his preaching ministry as he documented it. In this outlook at least, his earliest American preachers seem to have followed his lead without adaptation.