The Oxford Handbook of Methodist Studies. Edited by WILLIAM J. ABRAHAM and JAMES E. KIRBY.

Abstract

This handbook claims to be a summary of fifty years of scholarship, in the global perspective, on Methodism, in its historical and theological contexts, with particular reference to its place in evangelicalism. It recognizes that Methodism is a ‘complex and multifaceted experiment within western Christianity’, a hybrid in ecclesial and doctrinal terms, hovering between the established Church of England and Dissent, but drawing from both in this post-Reformation pietistic movement of renewal, which ended up as a worldwide communion of churches owing their origins to the work of John and Charles Wesley and the people called Methodist in eighteenth-century England. Its growth and success in what Hempton calls the ‘Empire of the Spirit’ across the Atlantic and in those English-speaking parts of the former British Empire has tilted the balance in favour of the rather differently framed North American variety of Methodism, forged out of the frontier expansionism of 1750–1850.