We are prepared to go out of existence not because we are declining or failing in mission, but for the sake of mission.

Rev David Gamble, Methodist Conference President (third from right). Addressing the Church of England’s General Synod, February 11, 2010.

Once a world changing movement under John Wesley, the Methodist church has seen its membership shrink to just 265,000.

Dave Price comments:

Winston Churchill said after the successful evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940 that, Wars are not won by evacuations. In other words, defensive measures may be necessary, but, as every chess player knows, attack is the best form of defence. A merger of the Methodist Church with the Anglicans may be necessary, but it is a defensive measure. At face value, it doesn’t sound as if it is going to win the war.

Despite assurances to the contrary, this proposed merger is not driven by a commitment to mission or unity. Overwhelmingly mergers are driven by a) institutional decline, and b) lack of clarity and commitment to the movement’s founding cause and core beliefs. They do nothing to arrest mainline decline.

The Methodists of Britain have gone down the same path as every other mainline Protestant denomination of the last fifty years. The sad reality is that attempts at union will actually speed up their decline. There is no other historical pattern.

I’ve been following Dave Price’s blog lately.

Some great stories and insights on Primitive Methodism as a church planting movement.

Allan Anderson provides four more reasons behind 100 years of Pentecostal advance:

4. Contextualization of Leadership
The overwhelming majority of Pentecostal missionaries have been national people “sent by the Spirit,” often without formal training. In Pentecostal practice, the Holy Spirit is given to every believer without preconditions.

One of the results of this was, as Saayman observes, that “it ensured that a rigid dividing line between clergy and laity and between men and women did not develop early on in Pentecostal churches” and even more significantly, “there was little resistance to the ordination of indigenous pastors and evangelists to bear the brunt of the pastoral upbuilding of the congregations and their evangelistic outreach.”

This was one of the reasons for the rapid transition from “foreign” to “indigenous” church that took place in many Pentecostal missions. Pentecostal missions are quick to raise up national leaders who are financially self-supporting, and therefore the new churches are nationalized much quicker than older mission churches had been.

5. Mobilization in Mission
The remarkable growth of Pentecostal movements in the twentieth century cannot be isolated from the fact that these are often “people movements,” a massive turning of different people to Christianity from other religions on an unprecedented scale, set in motion by a multitude of factors for which western missions were unprepared.

The growth of Pentecostalism was not the result of the efforts of a few charismatic leaders or “missionaries.” The proliferation of the movement would not have taken place without the tireless efforts of a vast number of ordinary and virtually now unknown women and men.

This was the democratization of Christianity, for henceforth the mystery of the gospel would no longer be reserved for a select privileged and educated few, but would be revealed to whoever was willing to receive it and pass it on.

6. A Contextual Missiology
The style of “freedom in the Spirit” that characterizes Pentecostal liturgy has contributed to the appeal of the movement in many different contexts. This spontaneous liturgy, which is mainly oral and narrative with an emphasis on a direct experience of God through his Spirit, results in the possibility of ordinary people being lifted out of their mundane daily experiences into a new realm.

These practices made Pentecostal worship easily assimilated into different contexts, especially where a sense of divine immediacy was taken for granted, and they contrasted sharply with rationalistic and written liturgies presided over by a clergy that was the main feature of most other forms of Christianity.

Many older missionary churches arose in western historical contexts, with set liturgies, theologies, well-educated clergy, and patterns of church and leadership with strongly centralized control. This often contributed to the feeling that these churches were “foreign” and that one first had to become a westerner before becoming a Christian. In contrast, Pentecostalism emphasised an immediate personal experience of God’s power by his Spirit, it was more intuitive and emotional, and it recognized charismatic leadership and national church patterns wherever they arose.

Churches were rapidly planted in different cultures, and each culture took on its own particular expression of Pentecostalism.

“An Introduction to Pentecostalism : Global Charismatic Christianity (Introduction to Religion)” (Allan Anderson)