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 check out the following webpages:

• Wikipedia article: John Wesley 
• Carey Brycchan’s article on John Wesley as an abolitionist 
• John Telford has written an extensive biography on Wesley, that can be found online at Northwest Nazarene University’s Wesley Center online 

The official United Methodist website, www.umc.org, has an interesting section that talks about the history of the United Methodist Church as it came over to America and beyond. 

This Sunday, we will celebrate another important contribution of Methodism to the Christian church worldwide: the hymns of Charles Wesley. From early on, Charles was very musically and poetically talented. Charles wrote poems and hymns continually, it would seem. While riding on horseback, poems would form themselves in his mind, and upon arriving at a house would rush in calling for “pen and paper, pen and paper!” When he had finished writing down whatever had thrust itself upon his consciousness, he would then greet the inhabitants of the house and go about whatever business had called him to that place.

Personal eccentricities such as this aside, Charles was an indispensible partner to John in spreading the Methodist revival across England. While it was John who took the gospel preaching out into the market places, open fields and mines of the common laborers in industrializing England, it was Charles who gave them songs to sing. The stories and passages of the Bible formed the foundations of the hymns Charles wrote, and are complete theological treatises put to meter and rhyme. Charles was a friend of many prominent musicians in London, so some of the hymn tunes associated with many of his hymns come from that association. However, the early practice in the Methodist societies was for the hymn texts to be written out, with the meter assigned, but no music. The song leader would call out the name and page of the hymn to be sung, and then declare to what tune it would be sung. Hence, in the early Methodist worship services, the same hymn text might be sung to several different tunes. People memorized tunes by name, and felt free to mix and match, as they pleased, this hymn text to that tune.

The complete poetical works of Charles Wesley have been published in several volumes, which fill one half of a library shelf. I know this because I encountered a set when I worked as a circulation assistant at the Yale Divinity School Library. A careful study of Charles Wesley’s hymns reveals his great familiarity with scripture as well as with the practical divinity that he and John were teaching to the people who flocked to hear their preaching and who then desired this salvation of God that was presented to them.

This Sunday, we will look closely at some of Wesley’s hymns in the United Methodist Hymnal that so clearly proclaim this message of salvation and spiritual renewal. Among the hymns will be the following:

“O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing”

“I want a Principle Within”

“Come Thou Long-Expected Jesus”

“Hark the Herald Angels Sing”

“O Love Divine”

“Christ the Lord is Risen Today”

“Forth in thy Name, O Lord”

Come join us as we join to sing our great Redeemer’s praise.