Overview

The Methodist Church met the challenge with a centralized polity and a cross-class, gender-variegated, evolving religious culture. It relied on wealthy laymen to raise special funds, while small gifts fed its regular funds. Young bachelors from Ontario and Britain filled the pastorate, although low pay, inexperience, and poor supervision caused many to quit. Membership growth was slow due to low population density and church-resistant elements in the Methodist population (bachelors, immigrant co-religionists, and transients), and missions to non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants in Winnipeg, Edmonton, and rural Alberta spread Methodist values but gained few members. In The Methodist Church on the Prairies, 1896-1914, the first scholarly study of church history in the prairie region, George Emery uses quantitative methods and social interpretation to show that the Methodist Church was a cross-class institution with a dynamic evangelical culture, not a middle-class institution whose culture was undergoing secularization. He demonstrates that the Methodist's achievement on the prairies was impressive and compared favourably with what Presbyterians and Anglicans achieved.

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The Methodist Church on the Prairies, 1896-1914 is groundbreaking. It is one of the few works in religious history that focuses on the prairie region and it is one of the few that takes a strong social history approach. Emery's use of statistics is sophisticated and marks a long overdue departure in Canadian church history. He revises the recent literature that argues Methodism was a middle-class institution, reminds us of the important rural constituency that made up the Methodist church, and calls for a better understanding of class as opposed to sweeping definitions of the middle class that virtually render Canada a classless society. Emery adds another voice to the secularisation debate but makes the argument from a unique social history of religion and western Canadian perspective. David Marshall, Department of History, University of Calgary

Author Information

George Emery is professor emeritus of history at the University of Western Ontario and the author of The Methodist Church on the Prairies, 1896-1914.

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