Methodists and the social conscience in South Australia and New South Wales, 1949-1972

Abstract

Along with Protestant Churchmen of other denominations throughout the Western world in the 1960s, many Australian Methodists felt obliged to re-assess the nature and place of the Christian Church in an increasingly affluent, liberal and secular society. From the mid-1940s to the 1960s consistently fewer Methodists could respond affirmatively to the question put shortly after World War Two by the Director of the South Australian Methodist Church's Department of Social Service, the Reverend E.H. Woollacott: 'Are we dedicated to the task of making society conform 2 to the will of God'? Woollacott perceived the 'will of God' in terms of the Nonconformist conscience which in Woollacott's day was the cornerstone of the Methodists' thinking and activity on social questions. From at least the 1880s the political and social questions which interested Australian Nonconformity 'were generally those which had plain moral implications'. After 1945 restrictive social legislation such as six o'clock closing was under threat as many more prosperous Australians rejected the ascetic legacy of late nineteenth century Protestantism. Numerous Methodists, too, rejected the Nonconformist conscience and eventually even the institutional Methodist Church rejected Woollacott's call. In 1966, when the Church had lost sight of Woollacott's question and the terms in which it was framed, the Reverend John Barrett confessed on behalf of the Annual Conference of the South Australian Church that 'we are often the Church that does not know what to say'…