During the nineteenth century, camp meetings became a signature program of American Methodists and an extraordinary engine for their remarkable evangelistic outreach. Methodism in the American Forest explores the ways in which Methodist preachers interacted with and utilized the American woodland, and the role camp meetings played in the denomination's spread across the country.
Half a century before they made themselves such a home in the woods, the people and preachers learned the hard way that only a fool would adhere to John Wesley's mandate for preaching in fields of the New World. Under the blazing American sun, Methodist preachers found a better outdoor sanctuary for larger gatherings: under the shade of great oaks, a natural cathedral, where they held forth with fervid sermons. The American forests, argues Russell E. Richey, served the preachers in another
important way. The remote, garden-like solitude provided them with a place to seek counsel from the Holy Spirit, serving as a kind of Gethsemane. As seen by the American Methodists, the forest was also a desolate wilderness, and a means for them to connect with Israel's wilderness years after the Exodus
and Jesus's forty days in the desert after his baptism by John.
Undaunted, the preachers slashed their way through, following America's expanding settlement, and gradually sacralizing American woodlands as cathedral, confessional, and spiritual challenge-as shady grove, as garden, and as wilderness. The threefold forest experience became a Methodist standard. The meeting of Methodism's basic governing body, the quarterly conference, brought together leadership of all levels. The event stretched to two days in length and soon great crowds were drawn by the
preaching and eventually the sacraments that were on offer. Camp meetings, if not a Methodist invention, became the movement's signature, a development that Richey tracks throughout the years that Methodism matured, becoming a central denomination in America's religious landscape.
- ISBN10 0199359628
- ISBN13 9780199359622
- Publish Date 16 April 2015
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 240
- Language English