The Conference in Methodism

American Methodism ordered and structured itself through conferences. In the Methodist lexicon, 'conference' refers to a body of preachers (and later, of laity as well) that exercises legislative, judicial and (to some extent) executive functions for the church or some portion thereof. Established by John Wesley, the conference remained his creature during his lifetime but on his death inherited much of his decision-making and policy-setting authority. It became a central feature, perhaps the central feature, of Methodist polity. Its political dimensions have been often noted and measured. Indeed, the drama in Methodist histories typically derives from conference, its struggle to political competence and the on-going struggles between conference and episcopacy for authority and power. When analyzed or indexed, 'conference' has that polity meaning. Unfortunately, it frequently bears that meaning alone. But 'conference' possessed a richer significance in Methodist life and discourse than the lexicon admits. This volume explores the American conference both in its narrow political or constitutional roles and in its larger dimension. A hint of the latter is in order.

Conference defined the Methodist movement in other ways than political. On conference hinged religious time, religious space, religious belonging, religious structure, even religiosity itself. Religious time lasted from one conference to the next. That was the duration of appointments of preacher to circuit or church. Appropriately, then, Methodist histories, particularly early ventures, structured time from conference to conference. Periodization was but one of conference's several uses. Conference delineated Methodist space as well. Gradually specific boundaries were drawn and conference came to have geographical meaning. Then preachers belonged to one conference; congregations related to specific conferences. In part because everything, in a sense, belonged to conference, early Methodists built on conference, employing it as foundation for other structures, tying missions, education, publication and financial efforts to that basis. Conference, as least in its early years, gathered in the entire Methodist system. Even spirituality revolved around it. Although largely obscured from historical attention, casual notations in letters and journals suggest the importance of conference as a preaching and sacramental occasion. Revivals and conversions often occurred at conference and conferences functioned to sustain and cultivate the religious life.

As American Methodism grew in numbers and national scope, both temporal and spatial dimensions increased. Methodism structured itself in terms of a tier of successively more inclusive conferences. For much of American Methodism, the three basic conferences came to be (1) the quarterly conference which gathered in the leadership and often membership of a single Methodist circuit, (2) the annual conference which brought together the preachers in a geographically defined region, and (3) the general conference whose meetings every four years functioned as legislature and judiciary for the church and typically also set executive policy, defined doctrine and elaborated the structures for the entire church. At every level conference possessed such important power and authority as to make it inevitably and intensely political. Politics did, at times and over time, eviscerate conference, gutting its other functions. But as we shall see, well into the 19th century conference retained the meanings outlined above. Hence one way to understand Methodism is to view the emergence and changes in its basic structure—conference. Methodist histories uniformly recognize, typically even feature, conference's centrality but render that in constitutional, political and polity terms. Such treatments do effectively chart the way in which the conference event developed into a governmental form. Here conference will be viewed as possessing a far more complex identity. It will be the purpose of this volume to present conference as a/the distinctive [American] Methodist manner of being the church, a multifaceted, not simply political, mode of spirituality, unity, mission, governance, and fraternity that American Methodists lived and operated better than they interpreted.

The Wesleyan Conference

Like so much else in Methodism, the conference both reflects older impulses toward Christian organization and bears the personal stamp of the Wesleys. In its immediate background lay Protestant efforts to re-order church and world according to New Testament precept, impulses expressed in complex ways in the home of Susanna and Samuel Wesley, a home that refracted both Puritan and Anglican spirituality.

Also influential for Susanna and her sons was the witness of Pietism. Traditionally associated with the efforts of Philipp Jakob Spener, who gave shape in Pia Desideria (1675) to a religion of the heart drawing on ideas and practices then reverberating throughout Europe, Pietism prospered by creating new gatherings. It did so less preoccupied than Puritanism and the larger Reformed tradition with finding biblical warrant for every detail of Christian life and less intent upon having every ecclesial structure conceptually and organizationally coherent with 'Church'. Pietism sought a recovery of the spirit/Spirit with a variety of practices, including especially small groups for prayer, Bible reading, testimony and Christian conversation. That spirit affected both Susanna's gatherings in the Wesley home and Samuel's society. The Moravians served as another mediator of Pietist practice of Christian gathering.

Precedents abounded. The Quakers, for instance, employed weekly, quarterly and yearly meetings for both governance and the spiritual life. Within the larger Methodist movement, Howell Harris and the Welsh evangelical Calvinists preceded Wesley in establishing a conference. And behind the experiment with conference lay Wesley's own success with smaller and more local gatherings—the bands, classes, and societies. Conference belonged to this web of precedented practice, within and without the Wesleyan movement.

Nevertheless, John Wesley, as Richard Heitzenrater has shown, had a penchant for putting his own distinctive stamp on and establishing claim over widespread practices and established precedent. So he presented conference as an extension of his own deliberative processes.

In June, 1744, I desired my brother and a few other Clergymen to meet me in London, to consider how we should proceed to save our own souls and those that heard us. After some time, I invited the lay Preachers that were in the house to meet with us. We conferred together for several days, and were much comforted and strengthened thereby.

The next year I not only invited most of the Travelling Preachers, but several others, to confer with me in Bristol. And from that time for some years, though I invited only a part of the Travelling Preachers, yet I permitted any that desired it, to be present....

This I did for many years, and all that time the term Conference meant not so much the conversations we had together, as the persons that conferred; namely, those whom I invited to confer with me from time to time. So that all this time it depended on me alone, not only what persons should constitute the Conference,—but whether there should be any Conference at all: This lay wholly in my own breast; neither the Preachers nor the people having any part or lot in the matter.

The name given to the record of these endeavors, "Minutes of Some Late Conversations Between The Rev. Mr. Wesleys and Others," suggests accurately the dominant role played by John Wesley. A complaint made in 1774, "Mr. Wesley seemed to do all the business himself."—epitomized the procedure. Wesley posed questions, discussion followed, Wesley framed the conclusion, and he then reworked the raw minutes into publishable form.

Both the structure and importance of this engagement can be seen in what that first, June of 1744 gathering, took as agenda:

1. What to teach;

2. How to teach; and,

3. What to do; that is, how to regulate our doctrine, discipline, and practice.

Following a question and answer, catechetical style, initial conferences addressed themselves to points (1) and (2). The first conference, for instance, hammered away at justification, sanctification and ecclesiology. After the first few conferences, subsequent conferences assumed those doctrinal formulations and largely confined themselves to (3). To these annual affairs, Wesley and his preachers brought the fundamental issues generated by the movement. Over the years, these concerns took permanent form as a series of questions which, by 1770, defined the order of business and then as Minutes which gathered and ordered the questions and answers into a legislative record. Conference, along with the United Societies, gave structural expression of the movement and gradually emerged as basic to and characteristic of Methodist governance.

Conference's Constitutional Function

That centrality eventually assumed quasi-constitutional character. Essential to this development was the authority deftly conferred on its Minutes at Wesley's hand. As early as 1749, Wesley gathered the results of the early conferences into two publications which shared the title of Minutes of Some Late Conversations but which came to be known as the 'Doctrinal Minutes' and the 'Disciplinary Minutes'. These Minutes underwent revisions, incorporating the major polity and doctrinal judgments of subsequent conferences, and appeared in ever 'larger' form in 1753, 1763, 1770, 1772, 1780, 1789, and after Wesley's death in 1797. Known as the Large Minutes, they became quasi-constitutional for Methodism, its book of discipline.

By 1784 despairing of naming an individual as successor, John Wesley lodged in these Large Minutes and in conference his hope for Methodism after his death and his plan for an orderly transference of authority. In 1769, Wesley had formulated the problem in this fashion to his assembled preachers:

You are at present one body. You act in concert with each other, and by unified counsels. And now is the time to consider what can be done, in order to continue this union. Indeed, as long as I live, there will be no great difficulty. I am, under God, a center of union to all our traveling, as well as local preachers.... But by what means may this connection be preserved, when God removes me from you?

Wesley's solution was to recognize the Conference as the heir to his authority, to identify its membership in terms of signed adherence to "the old Methodist doctrines ... contained in the minutes of the Conferences" and "the whole Methodist discipline, laid down in the said minutes," and to constitute it as a legal entity, initially by planning for election of an executive committee and moderator. Similar compacts were signed and minuted in 1773, 1774 and 1775. Finally in 1784 Wesley sought more precise legal identity of conference by entering a deed poll in the Chancery, spelling out the powers and duties of the Conference and enumerating one hundred individuals who constituted the Conference. This endowed Conference, according to Neely, "with the supreme power which had been centered in Mr. Wesley."

Multivalence

The political function of conference, vital though it was, was only one of its several dimensions. Indeed, assent to conference's normative and constitutional prerogatives probably derived from conference's other competencies, especially the way it picked up and internalized practices associated with the smaller units of Methodism, the bands and classes particularly. It became a family of preachers headed and governed by John Wesley; it was a monastic-like order held together by affection, by common rules, by a shared mission and by watchfulness of each member over one another; it functioned as a brotherhood of religious aspiration and song; it served as a quasi-professional society which concerned itself with the reception, training, credentialing, monitoring and deployment of Wesley's lay preachers; it became a community of preachers whose commitment to the cause and one another competed with all other relationships; it was a body which pooled its resources to provide for the wants and needs of its members. When one of its members died, it constituted the agency of memorial and memory. It served as the spiritual center of Methodism; it was multivalent.

Of all those traits, perhaps the spiritual, nurturing and familial ones most require illustration. A query put in 1747 clearly conveys the spiritual dimensions of conference:

Q. How may the time of this Conference be made more eminently a time of prayer, watching, and self-denial?

A. 1. While we are in Conference, let us have an especial care to set God always before us. 2. In the intermediate hours, let us visit none but the sick, and spend all our time that remains in retirement. 3. Let us then give ourselves unto prayer for one another, and for the blessing of God on this our labour.

During its meetings, then, conference concerned itself both with the religious development of its members and with the spiritual well-being of the immediate community. Often that involved services aimed at the Methodist people who would gather where conference met.

Another query of the same year illustrates not only the familial dimension of conference but also the paternal character of that familiarity:

Q. Are our Assistants exemplary in their lives? Do we enquire enough into this?

A. Perhaps not. We should consider each of them who is with us a pupil at the University, into whose behaviour and studies we should therefore make a particular inquiry every day. Might we not particularly inquire,—Do you rise at 4? Do you study in the method laid down at the last Conference? Do you read the books we advise and no other? Do you see the necessity of regularity in study? What are the chief temptations to irregularity? Do you punctually observe the evening hour of retirement? Are you exact in writing your journal? Do you fast on Friday? Do you converse seriously, usefully, and closely? Do you pray before, and have you a determinate end in, every conversation?

In time, such questions would become routinized and ritualized. Initially, they brought the preachers into deep engagement with Wesley and one another. From that intimacy derived the bond of preacher to preacher. Wesley caught the familial, fraternal expectations of conference in 1748:

Q. What can be done in order to a closer union of our Assistants with each other?

A. 1. Let them be deeply convinced of the want there is of it at present, and of the absolute necessity of it. 2. Let them pray that God would give them earnestly to desire it; and then that He would fulfil the desire He has given them.

To recognize the multivalence of conference is really only to recallconference's place within the entire Methodist impulse. And that, as John Lawson so aptly indicated, was means to a definite end, "a way of life," "that a new awareness of God in Christ, and a new equipment of moral power through the operation of the Holy Spirit, should come into the lives of the people, to the renewal of Church and State." That point is suggested in "The Large Minutes." There Wesley recognized Christian 'conference' as one of five "instituted" means of grace. That designation and the character of the other four—prayer, searching the Scriptures, the Lord's Supper and fasting—suggest how very central to the Christian life and the Methodist movement Wesley placed 'conference'. The reference here was not specifically to the annual or to the quarterly Methodist meetings or conferences but rather to the mode of engagement, discipline, purpose and structure that they shared with all serious Christian encounter. Conference was the way Wesley sought to conduct his affairs with his people. Although Mr. Wesley would find those of the late 20th century very strange affairs, they bear the marks and carry on the functions that he, and perhaps even his mother, intended as Christian conference. And even to this day they remain something of a family affair.

The conference in British and American Methodism—quarterly conference, annual conference, general conference—was the spatial and temporal outworking of a set of religious impulses, never fully integrated into theory, but nevertheless characteristic of a peculiar Wesleyan style of organization, unity, mission, reform, spirituality. Constituting the Wesleyan economy, these structural features bore the Wesleyan spiritual and religious impulses, the accent on the priesthood of all believers and the insistence on the mutual interdependence of all parts of the body of Christ. The several structurings of the Wesleyan spirit had emerged in stages and in relation to entities named as the occasion suggested—societies, bands, classes, stewards, trustees, circuits, connexion, conference, quarterly meeting. They cohered because Methodism cohered, because they belonged together in the religious experience and administrative style of John Wesley, because they possessed a center in him, because Wesley envisioned Methodism as an integrated connection.