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.

This book contains an overview and assessment of the rise and decline of British Methodism in the South Pacific, with a detailed history of the American Wesleyan Methodist Church in Australia, Papua New Guinea, Bougainville, the Solomon Islands and New Zealand.

Excerpt from The History of Southern Methodism on the Pacific Coast I accepted the duty with no high estimate of my ability to meet the demands of the Conference. I had read much of Church Notory, some of it contemporary history, and from personal ob servation I knew it to he an exceedingly diflicult task to be a correct, faithful historian. I knew there were currents of fact not! Thought into which a historian is liable to drift, sometimes unduly magnifying the actions of men, sometimes giving too great prominence to certain events, sometimes overlooking the true heroes and neglecting the record of events best calculated to reveal the truth. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

There have been several Methodist denominations in the South Pacific, two of which operated under the name "Wesleyan Methodist Church". The first was from Britain in the nineteenth century and the second from America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The latter and numerically smaller of the two, the American Wesleyan Methodist Church, is ultimately the focus of this thesis, but an overview of British Methodism is necessary to provide a context for the emergence of the latter group. This thesis outlines the historic development of the American Wesleyan Methodist Church of Australia from the appointment of its founder, Rev. Dr Kingsley Ridgway, in November 1945 until its most recent National Conference, in September 2015. In addition to the domestic history of the denomination, the development of missions in Papua New Guinea, Bougainville, the Solomon Islands and New Zealand resulted in the formation of the South Pacific Regional Conference of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in 2012. A summary of the regional expansion and the structure of the Regional Conference is included. The motivation for the formation of a second Methodist Church in 1946 was a conviction by some evangelicals that Australian Methodism had ceased to genuinely reflect John Wesley's original priorities. This claim is evaluated by comparing South Pacific Methodism of the twentieth century against John Wesley's statements that Methodism must hold true to his original "doctrine, spirit and discipline" or become merely a "dead sect". The conclusion of this research is that British Methodism, as practised in Australia and New Zealand in the twentieth century, had largely ceased to be recognisable as Wesley's Methodism and that American Methodism, as practised by the Wesleyan Methodists in Australia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, also fails to reproduce much of Wesley's spirit and discipline.

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.