Methodism in Australia

A History

Glen O'Brien, Hilary M. Carey, Glen O'Brien, Hilary M. Carey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317097082
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Methodism has played a major role in all areas of public life in Australia but has been particularly significant for its influence on education, social welfare, missions to Aboriginal people and the Pacific Islands and the role of women. Drawing together a team of historical experts, Methodism in Australia presents a critical introduction to one of the most important religious movements in Australia's settlement history and beyond. Offering ground-breaking regional studies of the development of Methodism, this book considers a broad range of issues including Australian Methodist religious experience, worship and music, Methodist intellectuals, and missions to Australia and the Pacific.

PART I
Histories, 1811–1977

Chapter 1
Methodism in the Australian Colonies, 1811–1855

Glen O’Brien

Early nineteenth-century British Methodist expansion followed the imperial trade routes and military expansion of the ‘Settler Revolution’, servicing and exploiting every major population centre in the British dominions. The first Wesleyan Methodist minister to arrive in the colony of NSW, in 1815, was the Rev. Samuel Leigh (1785–1852).¹ He was not, however, the first Methodist to arrive in Sydney town, for, as elsewhere in the British colonies (and also in America), Methodism had its origins not in the direct missionary work of preachers but in the hopes, wishes and energetic work of a devout laity.

Early Lay Preaching

The earliest Methodist class meetings in the colony were those established in the Windsor district by Edward Eagar in 1811. Eagar, a convicted forger whose death sentence had been commuted to transportation, would eventually, in 1818, receive a pardon from the Governor, going on to become the first Circuit Steward in NSW. His assistance to the Rev. Richard Cartwright in reading the Anglican Prayer Book service in outlying areas is an indication of the initial friendly relations between Methodist preachers and the clergy of the Church of England.

The schoolteacher Thomas Bowden held a class meeting in Sydney on 6 March 1812. Bowden had been a class leader in England, and had served as Master of the Great Queen Street Charity School in London. After arriving in NSW with his wife and family aboard the Graham in January 1812, he was given charge of the Male Orphan Institute. Bowden encouraged John Hosking, another Methodist schoolteacher, to join him in establishing Methodism in the Antipodes.²

It would certainly be appropriate to see in the work of the earlier lay preachers and class leaders, in establishing the distinguishing features of the movement, the beginnings of Methodism in NSW. David Hempton rightly claims that ‘Methodist expansion was the result not of an evangelistic strategy concocted by elites but was carried primarily by a mobile laity.’³ On 3 April 1812, the two class meetings combined to hold a Love Feast and from this meeting sent letters to the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society in England requesting one or two missionaries for NSW. The Rev. Samuel Leigh arrived on 10 August 1815 ready to begin what would turn out to be a gruelling ministry with little earthly reward.

The Arrival of Samuel Leigh

One would not want to diminish the importance of this early lay ministry. However, the arrival of Samuel Leigh may also be legitimately perceived as a starting point, and he was usually seen as the pioneer in commemorative events organised by the clergy-centred Wesleyanism of a later period. More recent studies have helped restore the vital place of lay preachers as the authentic pioneers of Australian Methodism in every area to which it spread.⁴ Notwithstanding this important emphasis, nineteenth-century Wesleyan Methodism was a movement dominated by clerical authority, so Leigh’s arrival may at least be seen as the beginnings of NSW Methodism as formally approved by the British Conference.

Leigh’s work was in many respects a failure, but he did establish the requisite Methodist discipline that provided a foundation for subsequent growth, something the earlier lay preachers had not been able to do. By March 1816, Leigh had established Sunday Schools and the first Benevolent Society in NSW. Along with Hosking and Bowden he was involved in establishing branches of the Bible Society (1817) and the Australian Religious Tract Society. Leigh met John Lees, a farmer and former soldier, at Castlereagh on the Hawkesbury River where the first Methodist church was built, opening on 7 October 1817. Leigh’s ministry as a circuit rider would take him on a regular 240 km (150 mile) circuit covering Parramatta, Liverpool, Windsor, Richmond, Castlereagh and the Hawkesbury River district. Spending 10 days in Sydney, frequenting the convict enclave known as ‘the Rocks’, with its evident human need, then 10 or 11 days travelling his circuit, Leigh sought to establish a cause in the tried and true Methodist pattern, considering it his business to be constantly on the move rather than to loiter in one location. This good start augured well but the momentum was not sustained and Methodist membership in NSW would not climb beyond 400 until 1836, after Leigh had left the colony.

On the day after his arrival, Leigh was accompanied by Edward Eagar to a meeting with Governor Lachlan Macquarie. The Governor reportedly informed Leigh, ‘I regret you have come here as a missionary, and feel sorry, and cannot give you any encouragement in that capacity.’⁵ The Governor informed Leigh that he had ‘missed his way’ by not presenting proper letters of introduction from British government officials. Furthermore, ‘I had rather you had come from any other Society than the Methodist. I profess to be a member of the Church of England and wish all to be of the same profession and therefore cannot encourage any parties.’⁶ Leigh assured Macquarie of his own desire to remain closely attached to the Church of England. The offer of a position in the government, through which Leigh was assured he would grow much more rich and comfortable than by going about preaching, was turned down, Leigh insisting that he had come to the colony as a Wesleyan missionary and could act in no other capacity while he remained there.⁷ Macquarie seemed eventually to have warmed to the Methodists. In March 1816 he was happy to patronise Leigh’s Benevolent Society and in January 1819 the foundation stone of a Wesleyan chapel was laid in Macquarie Street, Sydney, on land donated by the Governor and by the Crown Solicitor Thomas Wylde. A plot of land was also given for a chapel in Parramatta, and Macquarie undertook to provide further plots of land for the same purpose in ‘any or every settlement in the colony’.⁸

Methodist Consolidation

After Macquarie’s years as Governor (1810–21), colonial Methodists enjoyed favourable relations with Governor Thomas Brisbane (1821–25) who considered them a valuable body of people who did much good. Brisbane drew from both the public’s purse and his own to contribute to a Wesleyan chapel in Pennant Hills in 1825.⁹ In 1836 Governor Richard Bourke proposed the so-called Irish system, which put a secular system of education in place for children of all denominations with allowance for separate religious instruction. This was howled down by Protestants, led by Anglican Bishop William Broughton. The suggestion of providing equal levels of funding for both Protestant and Catholic schools was argued against, and the end result was that all church schools were set adrift to fend for themselves.¹⁰ Wesleyans objected to the Act because it did not give them denominational recognition, protested that the census forms did not reveal their true strength and claimed the financial support of the state for their ministers and schools. We see here the beginnings of the more confident and aggressive style that would typify later nineteenth-century Methodism. Eventually colonial Methodism would take its place alongside the Church of England, the Catholic Church and the Presbyterian Church as one of the four major denominations in colonial Australia. By 1839 each of the handful of Methodist ministers in the colony was eligible to receive a government salary of ₤150–₤200 per annum.¹¹ English Wesleyans suffered some disadvantage in their Dissenting status, but in the religious free market economy of the Australian colonies Methodists suffered no such restrictions, which contributed to their becoming a nineteenth-century religious success story.

Disputes over Relations with the Church of England

In requesting a minister, Bowden, Hosking and Eagar had made it clear that they wanted someone who was ‘not radically a Dissenter’, but, rather, one who could work with the Anglican chaplains and not act independently of the Church of England.¹² Lay Methodists in early NSW appear then to have been ‘Church Methodists’ rather than ‘Chapel Methodists’, not thinking of themselves primarily as Dissenters but as allied closely with the Established Church. Leigh turned out to be just the man they wanted. He quickly established good relations with the Anglican clergy and made it his business to ensure that Methodist activity would in no way interfere with the routines of Anglicanism. Leigh wrote home to the Wesleyan Missionary Society on 2 March 1816, assuring its members that the Anglican clergy were entirely friendly towards him.¹³ These friendly relations were aided by the fact that the early colonial clergy shared a similar evangelical piety and set of doctrinal emphases with the Methodists.

Leigh may have seen the Methodist mission as ancillary to the Church of England, but his colleagues in the Methodist ministry did not seem to share that opinion. In reality Methodists functioned more often as an alternative to Anglican worship than as a supplement to it. Disputes among Wesleyans over their relationship to the Church of England would contribute to the earlier close relations between Wesleyans and the Church of England being disrupted so that after the 1820s the two churches had little to do with one another and when they did, they were not always friendly encounters.

It soon became apparent that there was more work in the colony of NSW than a single Methodist preacher could handle. In 1817 Leigh began to request the Missionary Committee to forward a co-worker and Walter Lawry was appointed. Born on 3 August 1793, the Cornishman Lawry had been accepted as a candidate for the Wesleyan ministry in 1817. He arrived on the convict ship Lady Castlereagh, on which he had served as chaplain, on 1 May 1818. Lawry soon saw the need for even more helpers for the work, writing to his ministerial colleague the Rev. Joseph Sutcliffe in September that ‘to ride 24 miles on a hot day and preach three times is no joke’.¹⁴

Initial relations between the two preachers were amicable but stresses in their relationship soon became apparent. Leigh had a serious, almost morose character, whereas Lawry had a warm personality, enjoyed company and was somewhat less driven than Leigh in his work ethic. It probably did not help that Lawry decided that he should ‘faithfully and affectionately’ apprise Leigh of the ‘most glaring deficiencies and inconsistencies’ he discovered in him.¹⁵ Nor would it have been taken kindly by Leigh that Lawry successfully won the hand of Mary Hassall, a young woman whom Leigh had earlier failed successfully to court.¹⁶ In the estimate of the preachers who would join them in the field in 1821, the two men were ‘naturally unfitted for agreement in all the affairs of life’.^17...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword by Russell E. Richey
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Methodism and the Southern World
• Part I: Histories, 1811–1977
• Part II: Themes
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Subject Index
• Name Index