Deep Malady

Few evangelists surpassed the zeal of John Wesley and his disciples when they officially founded "The Yearly Corporation of the People Called Methodists" in 1784. Last week the zeal seemed to be guttering low. As 650 delegates met in a heat wave at Newcastle-on-Tyne, even their lustiest singing of The Living Church ("And are we yet alive") could not hide their mood. By the delegates' own gloomy account, the Methodist Church in Britain is sick.

"We are combatting something deep in the soul of the nation," said the Rev. William Sangster, head of home missions. "For this deep malady, we need some deep X-ray therapy that we have not found." Agnosticism, he complained, is flourishing in Britain in place of the great religious revival for which Methodists so fervently hoped. Last year the number of new Methodist church members (current membership: 739,000) fell to the lowest level in 13 years; some 100,000 children stopped attending Sunday schools. Every year, for the last twelve years, the total number of ministers has declined; it fell by 276 during the past year. There is a shortage of 5,000 preachers in rural areas, where Methodism may soon "expire." Added Sangster: "We thought that even if our numbers were smaller, we could count on the total conviction of the people who came. But even those in the pews are having their own battle for faith."

The delegates were agreed on the diagnosis, but differed on the causes. Conference Vice President John Gibbs blamed the often deplorable state of Methodist churches--"unloved places" with litter at the door, peeling paint on the windows, sturdy weeds shooting out of the rainwater gutters. But most blamed the prevailing British mood of "humble" non-positivism.

"Who today expects the church--Methodist or other--to say or do anything vital or relevant to human well-being?" asked retiring Methodist President Harold Roberts. Methodism appeared to outsiders to be "irrelevant in the contemporary situation," declared former President Donald Soper amid halfhearted cries of "No, No!" Insisted Soper: "I do not believe with the fervor I had 20 years ago that there is any permanence in the Methodist Church as a separate institution. Are we not seeing with the insight of a century a process which is inexorable?"

The "inexorable" process: reunion with the Anglican Church (2,922,000 members), from which the Methodists originally broke away (to preach the Gospel to the masses with hotter fervor than the Anglicans considered seemly). Two-year peace talks had bogged down on the issue of apostolic succession, the Anglican doctrine which declares that the church's ministry is derived from the apostles by a continuing mystic transmission of spiritual authority through the episcopacy. "The doctrine of historic episcopacy is contrary to the plain warrant of Scripture," cried Theologian C. Kingsley Barrett of Durham University. "We must say no to it in God's name."

Unable to find ways to deal with their own problems, Britain's Methodists went home, reported one observer, "heavy with an acute sense of gravity."

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