Traces the history of Methodism from the eighteenth-century Wesleyan movement through successive stages of theological development to its role in today's ecumenical movement

This book brings together Methodist scholars and reflective practitioners from around the world to consider how emerging practices of mission and evangelism shape contemporary theologies of mission. Engaging contemporary issues including migration, nationalism, climate change, postcolonial contexts, and the growth of the Methodist church in the Global South, this book examines multiple forms of mission, including evangelism, education, health, and ministries of compassion. A global group of contributors discusses mission as no longer primarily a Western activity but an enterprise of the entire church throughout the world. This volume will be of interest to researchers studying missiology, evangelism, global Christianity, and Methodism and to students of Methodism and mission.

Contents: Meet John Wesley; A Tale of Two Villages; A Nursery Epic; Student and Missionary; A Prayer Meeting and What Came of It; The Very Soul That Over England Flamed; How They Sang a New Day into Britain; Men of Mighty Stature; Methodism Crosses the Atlantic; The Birth of a Church; The Afterglow; The End of the Long Trail; Methodism in the New Republic; Methodism's Man on Horseback; Camp-Meeting Days; The Winning of the West; The Missionary Spirit; Methodist Breaks and Fractures; Southern Methodism; Through the Civil War and Beyond; A Spiritual Forty-Niner; The Tale of the Years in Many Lands; Forming a World Parish; High Hours in a Church's History; The Battlefields of Reform; The Unification of American Methodism; and Methodism Since World War I.

Hempton explores the rise of Methodism from its unpromising origins as a religious society within the Church of England in the 1730s to a major international religious movement by the 1880s.