“How can you, how dare you suffer yourself to be called Bishop?” Methodism’s founder wrote to Bishop Francis Asbury in 1788. “I shudder, I startle at the very thought! Men may call me a knave or a fool, a rascal, a scoundrel, and I am content; but they shall never by my consent call me Bishop!”
Historian Ashley Boggan admitted that whenever she reads Wesley’s blistering words, “I still feel like I’m in trouble.”
It was the last letter Wesley in England sent across the Atlantic to Asbury, a crucial organizer and one of the first two bishops in the newly established Methodist Episcopal Church in the U.S.
The new denomination that Asbury helped form would eventually develop into today’s United Methodist Church, which still has 59 bishops in active service across four continents. But it also is a denomination with plenty of troubles, including a mounting number of church disaffiliations after decades of debate over LGBTQ inclusion.
Read more at this link.
No comments:
Post a Comment