John Wesley was an eighteenth-century Anglican priest and Oxford tutor. He and George Whitefield were the primary leaders of the Evangelical Awakening which had a profound effect on the spiritual, social, and political life of both England and colonial America. Wesley gathered converts into a network of small groups for personal accountability, behavioral change, leadership training, and the transformation of their communities. Central to his system was the "class meeting," which proved to be one of the most effective tools for making disciples ever developed. This study examines the historical development, the theological foundation, and the social outcomes of John Wesley's class meeting.

Kevin M. Watson offers the first in-depth examination of the early Methodist band meeting: a small group of five to seven people focusing on the confession of sin in order to grow in holiness.

Everyday Disciples: Covenant Discipleship with Youth by Chris Wilterdink resources pastors, youth leaders, and youth groups with information and planning materials related to Covenant Discipleship and accountability practices. Covenant Discipleship encourages youth to connect with Christ and one another through mutual accountability. It also encourages a networked support structure for living in the world as Christ followers.

In 1988, The General Conference of the United Methodist Church restored class leaders and class meetings to the Book of Discipline after an absence of fifty years. In this volume, David Lowes Watson explains what the recovery of this tradition can mean for congregations, and offers some guidelines for the revitalized office of class leader. Adapting the later Methodist class meeting as a pastoral subdivision of the congregation, Watson shows how class leaders, under the supervision of the pastor, can nurture the discipline of other church members in light of a ÒGeneral Rule of DisciplineÓ derived from the early Methodist societies: ÒTo witness to Jesus Christ in the world, and to follow his teachings through acts of compassion, justice, worship, and devotion, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.Ó This volume is the second in a trilogy : Covenant Discipleship, Class Leaders, and Forming Christian Disciples.

Cities of Zion: The Holiness Movement and Methodist Camp Meeting Towns in America follows Methodists and holiness advocates from their urban worlds of mid-century New York City and Philadelphia out into the wilderness where they found green worlds of religious retreat in that most traditional of Methodist theaters: the camp meeting. Samuel Avery-Quinn examines the transformation of American Methodist camp meeting revivalism from the Gilded Age through the twenty-first Century. These transformations are a window into the religious worlds of middle-class Protestants as they struggled with economic and social change, industrialization, moral leisure, theological controversies, and radically changing city life and landscape. This study comprehensively analyzes camp meeting revivalism in America to offer a larger narrative to the historical movement. Avery-Quinn studies how Methodists and holiness advocates sought to sanctify leisure and recreation, struggled to balance a sense of community while mired in American gender role and race relation norms, wrestled with the governance and town planning of their communities, and confronted the shifting economic fortunes and continuing theological controversies of the Progressive Era.