In 1736, John Wesley and his brother Charles came to the colony of Georgia, having been invited by James Oglethorpe, the founder of the colony, to preach to the English and native populations. When they arrived, they found things to be different than they had expected, and Charles returned to London after just a few months. But John decided to stay and began to fall in love with a member of his congregation by the name of Sophia Hopkey. Although most people expected them to get married, through a series of miscommunications, Sophy ended up marrying someone else, whom she had apparently also been seeing. As you might imagine, John was a little less than pleased, and when she showed up to church John took the opportunity to publicly rebuke her and then refused to serve her communion. This caused quite a stir, and her husband brought charges against Wesley for defamation. And then it gets even worse because not only was the judge of the colony known to be an ill-tempered despot, but he also happened to be Sophy’s uncle and allegedly bribed the grand jury to make sure that charges were brought. Wesley rightly reading the tea leaves decided to leave Georgia soon thereafter. And that story becomes important because later Wesley himself will also be denied communion, although then it will be because he was not considered to be a true Christian, which will impact Methodist theology on the sacraments.
We continue in our series on what Methodists believe. And while I said last week that we were only going to look at stuff that was unique to Methodism, rather than all our beliefs, that’s not really true for today, or not fully true, because there are some things that we believe as part of the sacraments that are broader than just Methodism. When it comes to the sacraments, we, along with most Protestant churches practice two, communion and baptism. That stands in contrast mainly against the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches which have seven sacraments. Protestants practice just two because during the protestant reformation Luther said he sought to follow only those sacraments in which Jesus participated and also commanded us to do. And while a lot more could be said about that, I’m not going to, so we can get into beliefs about baptism, which could be its own message as well.
