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Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Indoor-Outdoor Methodists
From the days of its early “field preachers,” Methodism advocated mixing up interiority with the great outdoors. A beautiful window in Oxford makes that luminously clear.
Detail from the Flower Window c. 1878
Wesley Memorial Methodist Church, Oxford
Photo: Brother Lawrence
In the tall, gleaming panels of church windows, one expects to see saints in heavy robes and Bible-toting evangelists. But this is Wesley Memorial Church in Oxford, England, and as with so much of Methodism the rules are gently broken.
Rather than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, we see lilies, grape vine, bull rushes and pomegranate (roses and camellias also). The Flower Window at the west end of the chapel is gorgeous and, we understand, completely original in design. One source says its theme is “flowers of the English countryside” but church secretary Dorothy Stepney says the sources are Biblical.
Perhaps there’s some influence of both. Methodism sprang up here in Oxford. A few university students in the early 17th century – including John Wesley, his younger brother Charles, and George Whitefield—formed a “Holy Club” and soon began their own ministry. Led by Whitefield’s then-radical example, they turned to “field-preaching.”
“I thought it might be doing the service of my Creator, who had a mountain for his pulpit and the heavens for a sounding board; and who, when his Gospel was refused by the Jews, sent his servants into the highways and hedges.” So Whitefield addressed 200 coal miners in February 1739, as in defiance of church convention, he preached in the open air of Kingswood.