The Convergence of British and American Methodism in the South Pacific

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.