UMR Communications is offering the latest headlines in the RSS format.
Q & A
Q&A: Asbury a model for modern Methodists Mary Jacobs, Feb 5, 2010
Many historians consider him the “Father of American Methodism.” When Francis Asbury came to America in 1771 at the age of 26, the Methodist church in the colonies had just a few hundred members. When he died in 1816, there were over 200,000 members, and by the time of the Civil War, Methodism was the largest church in America.
Historian John Wigger has chronicled Asbury’s story in American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists (Oxford University Press, 2009). He spoke recently with staff writer Mary Jacobs.
I think that a lot of Methodists know the name Asbury but may not know much about him. Why is that? John Wesley just so dominates Methodist thought. Wesley is the originator of Methodist theology; it’s not Asbury. Also, among people who study religious history, we tend to look for people that fit familiar categories—intellectuals like Jonathan Edwards or Reinhold Niebuhr; great communicators like Billy Graham or Charles Finney, or more negatively, autocrats. Asbury is none of those. I think he just didn’t fit familiar categories and therefore he got left out. But without Asbury, there would not have been American Methodism in any form like we know it now. And I think Asbury is a relevant model for Methodists today.
How so? If you want an example of someone who successfully reached out to the nation with the gospel, or if you’re interested in church growth, then Asbury is someone you should be interested in.
What did Asbury do personally that fostered that kind of growth? There are four ways that he communicated his legacy through the Methodist movement. The first was his piety—his basic devotional life of prayer, Bible reading, concern for the poor and his practice of voluntary poverty. These were things that were well-recognized during his life and were the foundation for his authority and leadership. Even people who didn’t like a lot of things he did respected his piety.
Second was his ability to connect with ordinary people up close. He wasn’t a great communicator; in fact he was a terrible preacher. But in small groups he could be absolutely mesmerizing. He won people’s loyalty one conversation at a time.
Third, he understood popular culture. He was willing to have Methodists do things that appealed to Americans in post-Revolutionary America. A good example is camp meetings. He attended one or two in 1801-02 and realized how successful they could be. He began writing to his district-supervising preachers to start holding camp meetings because they worked. They connected with unchurched Americans in ways other church services hadn’t.
Fourth, he was simply a very skilled administrator. There is a nuts-and-bolts angle to this. Given the communication technology at the time, he had more information about the church than anyone else. He got it through his travels and his endless conversations with thousands of preachers and ordinary Methodists every year, and he used all that information to successfully run the church, especially with regard to stationing preachers in their annual appointments.
What can we learn from Asbury’s example? Asbury is a model of a kind of leader we don’t normally notice. He is a person whose authority is built on piety, sacrifice, hard work and a willingness to get close to his people. It’s an alternate model of leadership we could look at—and consider how it stacks up against what we normally expect.
Some bios describe Asbury as an “extraordinary preacher,” but that’s not what you found. That’s one of the surprising things that I learned when I got into this. He simply wasn’t good in front of large groups. He had an odd way of speaking and was hard to follow. Lots of people commented on that.
One thing that struck me about Asbury was that he appeared to have a sense of humor. From what I’ve read, that’s one thing Wesley did not possess. Is that significant, in terms of how he affected the history of the church? I think it is significant because he had an ability to connect with people, and I think part of it was through his humor. He could be funny and entertaining, but he could also use humor to accomplish things or to deflect controversy. He would use these little turns of humor without being more heavy-headed about it. Asbury was the only Methodist leader to remain in the U.S. during the American Revolution. Does that reflect something that’s different from other Methodist founding fathers? Asbury was much less political than Wesley. He didn’t care anything about politics; he actually had a deep-seated fear, I think, of authority figures. He was the son of a gardener. The other telling thing is that Asbury very quickly came to think of himself as an American. He quickly understood America in ways that none of Wesley’s other missioners did. His sense of humor is a good example. That’s a very difficult cross-cultural thing to do. He could do that when others just couldn’t.
How is the church different today because of Asbury’s life? He made Methodism into a church that reached out to common Americans in a way that it wouldn’t have without him. Wesley’s previous preachers had mostly stayed in New York and Philadelphia. Asbury could see that the future was not in the seaboard cities but in the constantly expanding rural landscape. He really fashioned American Methodism along Wesleyan lines, in the direction of following all of this rural expansion. In Asbury’s lifetime, more than 95 percent of Americans lived in a place with fewer than 2,500 residents. Asbury understood that to keep up with America populations, Methodism had to reach out to rural Americans.
What can Methodists learn today from his example? Asbury is inspiring for his piety and all that went into that. I think his deep commitment to others is something that ordinary believers can look to as a model. Here was someone so deeply committed to being connected to people that he allowed himself to live in their homes for 45 years. There’s no Asbury home in the U.S. that you can go to visit because he never married, never had his own home and never owned a piece of property. He traveled everywhere on horseback. His voluntary poverty may not be a model for everyone but it’s certainly something to think about in our modern lives in America.
What did Asbury do personally that fostered that kind of growth? 
