John Wesley and the Origins of Methodist Missions

This book by Philip Wingeier-Rayo, currently the Executive Director of Education at the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry, The United Methodist Church, and formerly Professor of Missiology, World Christianity, and Methodist Studies at Wesley Theological Seminary, is a valuable addition to knowledge about the roots of, influences on, and early efforts in Methodist mission history.While there are many other fine surveys of Methodist mission history, most begin their narrative with the founding of American or British mission societies or the sending of early overseas missionaries by those societies. In this historical work, Wingeier-Rayo shifts the focus several decades earlier to investigate not just John Wesley’s relation to mission (as implied by the title) but forerunners to and influences on Wesley.Part I of the book covers the missionary context of the eighteenth century. Wingeier-Rayo carefully establishes which portions of mission history and practice Wesley was familiar with through family and personal connections, schooling, reading, and personal experience in Georgia, covering both the broad scope of European mission practice and theology and the specific impact of Moravian mission on Wesley. This part contains significant new information about Wesley’s missional formation.Part II of the book turns to John Wesley’s relationship with mission during his ministry leading the Methodist movement. Wingeier-Rayo correctly concludes that Wesley’s approach to Methodism was missional in many regards, but Wesley was not very interested in and indeed often opposed to foreign missions beyond the British Isles. This section of the book will feel most familiar to readers acquainted with Wesley’s biography. Nonetheless, it highlights an important question: If John Wesley was ambivalent at best about foreign missions, what then were the origins of Methodist missions?The answer comes in part III. Wingeier-Rayo offers two answers: lay migrants and Thomas Coke. Wingeier-Rayo emphasizes the often ‘unheralded’ but critical work that lay migrants did in bringing mission to new places beyond the British Isles. While stories about Methodism in the American colonies will likely be familiar to many readers, a discussion of Methodism in Gibraltar is both original and indicative of larger patterns of the role of soldiers and sailors in the spread of Methodism.Wingeier-Rayo then moves to Thomas Coke, ‘The Father of Methodist Missions’, the person most responsible for the formalization of Methodist expansion beyond England. Coke achieved this expansion in part by pushing Wesley to change his views and policies and in part by venturing forward without Wesley’s permission. While the chapter on Coke does a good job summing up his activities on behalf of foreign mission, given Coke’s significance to Methodist mission, it would have been nice to have more material on Coke, including a summary of Coke’s knowledge of earlier mission efforts, as is offered for Wesley in part I.The remaining portion of part III gives brief glimpses of Methodist mission in Asia, Africa, and Latin America from the time of Wesley and Coke forward. Wingeier-Rayo uses these chapters to highlight, respectively, the role of women, the relationship between mission and colonialism, and ecumenism as themes in mission history. Given the potentially vast amount of material in these geographic and thematic areas, these chapters necessarily feel selective in their approach, and the book does not break much new ground here. Still, the chapters illustrate the long and broad legacy of the origins of Methodist mission covered in the rest of the book.The book can be a bit meandering and repetitive at times in its narrative. And readers who come with expectations based on the title that John Wesley will play the starring role in originating Methodist missions around the world will be disappointed. That is, however, because Wingeier-Rayo gets the history right. Perhaps a book entitled, ‘Lay Migrants, Thomas Coke, and the Origins of Methodist Missions’ would not have gotten the same attention as one with John Wesley in the title, but this book gives credit where it is due: to those lay migrants and to Thomas Coke. And readers will come away from this book with a richer understanding of both parts of the title—of John Wesley and of the ‘Origins of Methodist Missions’—because of Wingeier-Rayo’s work.

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