Encoding Methodism: Telling and Retelling Narratives of Wesleyan Origins

Methodists love to tell the story and Methodist churches have consistently told and re-told the narrative of their eighteenth-century founding by John (and sometimes Charles) Wesley as a way of describing the distinctive identity of their religious communities. This book offers a comprehensive and critically documented account of the development of these narratives of Wesleyan origins and the ways in which they attempted to describe or encode the identity of Wesleyan/Methodist communities. This is not a cynical account of how interpreters have simply written their own agenda into the narrative (and that has happened); rather it shows in many cases how the unique position and contexts of narrators have enabled them to see things that really happened in the eighteenth-century Wesleyan movement. The book utilizes the contemporary metaphor of understanding how various interpreters and interpretive communities have encoded Wesleyan identities by telling narratives of Wesleyan origins.

• | Author: Ted A. Campbell
• | Publisher: New Room Books
• | Publication Date: September 11, 2017
• | Number of Pages: 212 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 0938162446
• | ISBN-13: 9780938162445