I’m just back from a delightful week with delightful friends in Savannah, GA, home of Food Network queen Paula Deen (no distant relation, I think) and genteel Southern charm. It was a much-needed time of renewal and rest before the start of a new university year.
For Methodists (especially a history geek like me), Savannah holds an added interest, as the site of our founder, John Wesley’s, brief experiment as the pastor of an English Anglican colony. Wesley signed up to minister to the Savannahians, seeking the next step on his faith journey, and arrived early in 1736. Nothing now survives of the colony as it was then, except the grid-like layout of the town, designed by General Oglethorpe himself. In Reynolds Square, nearest to the site of his home and chapel, a statue now stands, commemorating the young man who served his time here before making a huge impact on global Christianity through the dynamic movement he was to found.
This public honouring of Wesley, in truth, masks something rather critical. His time in Savannah was an unmitigated disaster. He was prissy, prim and particular, unbending about his ‘methodical’ practice of Christianity and his parishioners seem to have detested him. He resented the claims they made on him and his time, because he really
wanted to go and convert the Native Americans, or else hide himself in his study. He became embroiled in a romance with a young woman, Sophie Hopkey; it ended in public humiliation when she interpreted their relationship status very differently than him and became engaged to someone else, frustrated at Wesley’s coldness. Reacting with indecent self-righteousness, he refused her communion one Sunday morning: and found himself now the target of accumulated rage. The people turned on him; lawsuits were brought against him; his friends deserted him; and he fled in the night, across the hostile Georgia marshes, to a ship that would take him away from this shame and abject failure, and back home.
All a far cry from deserving a statue in the town square…except that Wesley’s experience in Savannah proved crucial in his own growth and in the rise of Methodism. Out of the ashes and despair, out of the utter breakdown he experienced, he clutched at Grace: and found new life. He let go of his control freakery (somewhat!) and his need to prove himself to God and others; he acknowledged the frailty of his faith and the inadequacy of his own intellect and energies, and threw himself on God instead. The result: within months, he was at the center of a movement which revived the churches, revolutionized social provision in England, and renewed countless people in hope, in life and in action for the poor. But it couldn’t, it wouldn’t have happened without Savannah.
We live in a culture which despises failure. We are citizens of world of self-sufficiency, where our own resources must be enough and needing help seems like weakness. These attitudes, though, simply deceive us. No-one found grace except through realising their own limitations. No-one ever became fully alive without first dying at some level to their false self. No-one has ever fully understood maturity without experiencing the loss of hopes and dreams. Fr. Richard Rohr’s book Falling Upward is a wonderful reflection on these themes, one which I found an apt distillation of Wesley’s story too. As Rohr says: “we grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right…if there is such a thing as human perfection, it seems to emerge precisely from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere, especially our own”.
The mature John Wesley believed fervently in the possibility of human perfection, carefully defined. Perhaps he knew a little of what he was talking about.
