The Convergence of British and American Methodism in the South Pacific
Date
2017
Authors
Cameron, Lindsay Logan
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Abstract
There have been several Methodist denominations in the South
Pacific, two of which operated under the name "Wesleyan Methodist
Church". The first was from Britain in the nineteenth century and
the second from America in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. The latter and numerically smaller of the two, the
American Wesleyan Methodist Church, is ultimately the focus of
this thesis, but an overview of British Methodism is necessary to
provide a context for the emergence of the latter group.
This thesis outlines the historic development of the American
Wesleyan Methodist Church of Australia from the appointment of
its founder, Rev. Dr Kingsley Ridgway, in November 1945 until its
most recent National Conference, in September 2015. In addition
to the domestic history of the denomination, the development of
missions in Papua New Guinea, Bougainville, the Solomon Islands
and New Zealand resulted in the formation of the South Pacific
Regional Conference of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in 2012. A
summary of the regional expansion and the structure of the
Regional Conference is included.
The motivation for the formation of a second Methodist Church in
1946 was a conviction by some evangelicals that Australian
Methodism had ceased to genuinely reflect John Wesley's original
priorities. This claim is evaluated by comparing South Pacific
Methodism of the twentieth century against John Wesley's
statements that Methodism must hold true to his original
"doctrine, spirit and discipline" or become merely a "dead sect".
The conclusion of this research is that British Methodism, as
practised in Australia and New Zealand in the twentieth century,
had largely ceased to be recognisable as Wesley's Methodism and
that American Methodism, as practised by the Wesleyan Methodists
in Australia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, also
fails to reproduce much of Wesley's spirit and discipline.
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Methodist, Wesleyan, Ridgway, Kingsley, South Pacific
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Thesis (PhD)
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