A Heritage to Sing About
This next Sunday is Heritage Sunday in the United Methodist Church. It is a Sunday in which we reflect upon our theological and practical heritage that we have received as being part of the great family of churches that are in the lineage of John and Charles Wesley. John Wesley was born in 1703, the fifteenth child born to Samuel and Susanna Wesley. Samuel was an ordained Anglican priest serving the community of Epworth, England at the time of John’s birth. His brother, Charles was born four years later. These two brothers were bound not only as brothers but came to be inseparable leaders in a religious revival that swept England in the mid 18 th Century, and which spread to the American colonies. There is a great history of how the Methodist movement, as it came to be called, transformed the religious landscape of England, and even helped preserve England from the violent and bloody sort of revolution that engulfed France in the late 1700s. For good biographies of John Wesley...