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Excerpt from The Early Story of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Victoria God. The volume is, therefore, a Jubilee Memorial, and an offering to the Methodist public. Like the Banyan tree, whose branches spread out, then incline towards, and eventually reach, the earth, where they strike root until vigorous offshoots become both a progeny and support to the parent stock, so there are innate forces in Methodism which cause it to spread out in all directions, till a cluster of Churches is formed, in time becoming selfsupporting, but yet maintaining a vital and glad connection with the parent Church. The truth of this has been verified and illustrated in this land. The plain narrative of this growth is given in this volume. The authors are not historians, but more like annalists They have not exhaustively studied the facts, interrogated the spirit, and deduced the important lessons, which Methodism in this land presents to the historian. They have compiled and put into a succinct form the facts and annals of the early Methodist story. Their plan has been, of set purpose, to be full when writing about the first and pioneer work of the Church, but to be brief and summary when relating its more recent achievements. They could not enlarge upon the recent, as they felt at liberty to do upon the earlier story. The work was too delicate, and the perspective too near for them to attempt it. They preferred sketching the more distant landscape, and have dealt with the nearer foreground in a few outlines. This may be disappointing to some, but worthy deeds and lives in recent years will be dealt with in due time, when we are considerably older, but by other hands than the writers of this volume. 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.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Geoffrey Blainey turns his attention to the state in which he was born and raised.

The presence of the (British) Wesleyan Methodist Church is first recorded in the South Pacific when class meetings were initiated near Sydney town late in 1811. From 1815, with the arrival of the first Wesleyan Methodist minister in Sydney, until the mid-1900s, Methodism was carried by lay people and missionaries across Australia and to New Zealand, Tonga, Samoa, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Bougainville and the Solomon Islands. Methodist expansion in the South Pacific was one of history¿s most dynamic waves of Christian mission.During this same period, while missionary efforts were excelling in the South Pacific, European and American Methodists were enjoying a new spirit of prosperity and ease. Methodist academics embraced radical changes to traditional doctrines while traditional disciplines were simultaneously being abandoned in local churches. By the twentieth century Methodism was disoriented and torn by internal conflict¿rendering it incapable of withstanding the pressures of an increasingly industrialised and secularised world. There followed a decline in Methodist potency as catastrophic as its earlier growth had been successful. From 1901 Methodism began to fall behind population growth in Australia and New Zealand until, in 1977, the Methodist Church of Australasia ceased to exist in Australia altogether.Meanwhile an American strand of Methodism, also carrying the name ¿Wesleyan Methodist Church¿, had begun in Melbourne. The (American) Wesleyan Methodist Church was organised in Victoria in 1946 under the leadership of an Australian minister and slowly expanded into other Australian states. By the year 2000 its ministry had stretched to Papua New Guinea, Bougainville, the Solomon Islands and New Zealand. In 2012 the South Pacific Regional Conference of the Wesleyan Methodist Church was formed. This book tells this extraordinary story of Methodism reborn. An overview of the growth and decline of British Methodism provides a backdrop to a detailed, thoroughly researched study of the arrival and expansion of the modern-day Wesleyan Methodist Church in the South Pacific.