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Epilogue
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
NEAR the end of 1924, a Centenary Missionary Conference was held in Northern Alberta. Among the speakers was Margaret Sherlock Ash, a former WMS missionary in Victoria who was now a leader in the Alberta Branch WMS. The report on the event termed her address “a masterpiece ,” saying that “our women have not missed the vision nor power of Methodism, but have made as worthy contributions as their brothers through the years.”1 The celebration included a pageant, and one of its scenes featured Barbara Heck. A few months later, the Methodist churches in Montreal also observed the Missionary Society centennial. They also witnessed a pageant. In one “splendid scene…Barbara Heck challenges Phillip Embury to preach and he tells her that he will do so if she will gather a congregation, which she immediately does, and we see the first meeting.”2 At the end of the life of the Methodist Church as an independent denomination, Methodist women were still remembering their heritage . When Canadian Methodist women celebrated this legacy, they performed a ritual of remembrance, repeating a part of the story of their foremothers, a story that had empowered them over the years. In part, they had “done what they could” because they believed that it was their inheritance, and thus both their right and their duty. Behind this tradition lay the empowering ethos of early Methodism . Followers of John Wesley experienced the forgiveness and the love of God in their hearts, and they recognized that experience as the authority necessary for leadership. Fortunately John Wesley—with the help of both the example and the opinions of his mother Susanna— recognized the value of the leadership of lay people, women as well as Epilogue Notes to epilogue start on page 280 239 men. Thus, early in the Wesleyan movement precedents were set, never to be completely lost from memory, even when practices changed. Methodist women in Canada had the background of a religious faith and nurture, which allowed them to claim some authority, and of an earlier heritage, which sanctioned some leadership by women. They were also faced with such specific needs and opportunities as those afforded by an itinerant ministry and by the Methodist system of class meetings. These were the factors that shaped their particular expressions of their Christian faith. Over time circumstances changed. Saddlebag preachers riding through the wilderness were replaced by ministers living in neat parsonages at the heads of well-organized circuits. Churches were built, Sunday schools and choirs organized. Evangelical Protestants took on the challenge of Christianizing the “heathen” in foreign lands and then also the foreigners who arrived on Canadian shores. As they participated in all these changes, women recognized new needs, new opportunities to live out their faith. As Canadian society changed, so did its attitudes toward women and its expectations of them. Canadian Methodist women, like those of other religious groups, were affected by these attitudes and expectations, but they were not simply limited by them. The glorification of women’s maternal role, for instance, caused a high value to be placed on women’s responsibility for the religious state of their families, but it did not relegate their religious activity simply to the domestic sphere. What they saw as their domestic responsibility moved them to organize and teach Sunday schools, and to support missionary societies to evangelize the women and children of the world. Similarly, the growing quest among Canadian women for political rights alerted some Methodist women to the realization that this denomination, which they assumed to be in the vanguard offering opportunities for women, was far from exemplary in the legal status it afforded its women. Some within this group made their voices heard, and worked for change. The ways that women expressed their faith were as different as the women themselves. There were always Marys, always Marthas, and always those who combined the characters of both. There were those revered as Mothers in Israel, and as the context wherein they expressed their faith changed through the years, women found, and made, new opportunities. Yet within change there was continuity. On May 10, 1925, exactly one month before the church union, when the Methodist Church 240 EPILOGUE [34.228.7.237] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:09 GMT) became part of The United Church of Canada, the church at Sandwich , Ontario, held a reception and communion service. Attendance was the largest on record, and there were not enough cups to serve all who wished to...