Twenty-two years ago, in July 1997, my mom and I went on a Wesley Heritage Tour of England and Scotland with my home church, First United Methodist in Marion, Virginia. Our pastor at the time, Rev. J.N. Howard and his wife Ella organized and led the trip, and several of the adults in the church I had long known and admired as Sunday school teachers, ushers, and leaders went as well. Mom wanted to go, and I was free that summer, so I offered to go along as her chaperone, you know, to make sure she behaved.
We visited such places as the home in Epworth where John and Charles Wesley were raised by their parents, Samuel and Susanna. We visited Lincoln College in Oxford where they began meeting together in small groups and were called derogatory names like “Bible-moths” and “Methodists” (for their methodical approach to study and fellowship). We visited Aldersgate Street in London where John had his heartwarming experience that assured him of his salvation. We visited historic Methodist preaching houses like the City Road Chapel in London and the New Room in Bristol. And we visited several other sites of general interest, such as Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Roman baths in Bath, and Stonehenge. The history of both Great Britain and Methodism came alive for me that summer!
It was the summer before I started seminary in Atlanta. Tracy and I had met that spring, and by July our relationship was blossoming into something more than mere friendship. As I read my journal from that trip, I remember calling her from various pay phones in our hotels where I had to keep feeding pound coins every so often to keep the connection. Obviously, the connection was kept!
Three years later, after Tracy and I were married in 2000, we took advantage of an opportunity that was available at the time for seminarians to come and serve a one-year appointment in the British Methodist Church, which had more churches to serve than pastors available to serve them. We were appointed to serve five churches on a circuit in the far southwesternmost part of England, in the county of Cornwall, in a town called Penzance, which until then I didn’t realize was a real place. I thought it only existed in the imagination of Gilbert & Sullivan. Tracy and I quickly came to appreciate this area as rich in Celtic, Wesleyan and Methodist history. One of the churches I served was called Wesley Rock, as the pulpit was built upon a rock from which John Wesley preached when he visited there.
It was in the spring of our year over there in 2001 that we learned I was to be appointed as the associate pastor here at Keith Church in Athens, Tennessee! It just so happened that the senior pastor at the time, the Rev. Dr. Stella Roberts and her husband Sam were leading a Wesley heritage tour very much like the one my mom and I had experienced. We arranged to meet up in Bath, and it was there I met some of my futureparishioners, folks like Kate Bledsoe, Cindy Runyan, and Larry and Sarah Kerr. Stella and Sam have led several such Wesleyan heritage tours, including one this past spring, and they haveimpacted the lives and faith of several people, just as these experiences have impacted my own life and faith.
This summer, you have an opportunity to have a similar experience of a Wesleyan heritage tour, though without having to take the time away from home or pay the cost! For the next six weeks, Andrew and I are leading a study by the Rev. Adam Hamilton called “Revival.” A few summers ago, Hamilton traveled with the same company as my mom and I did, and this video study takes us to some of these very same places that were so formative in the Methodist revival movement – the rectory in Epworth, the college grounds at Oxford, the chapels in Bristol and London. I hope you will come along for this journey with us – Wednesdays at 6 and Thursdays at 11 – and maybe you will experience a heartwarming revival in your own spiritual life and faith.
The Keith Church Blog 