The Writing on The Wall

On the wall at Sheffield Jesus Centre there is a plaque that commemorates the opening
of the Jesus Centre by the mayor in 2012.  Next to it there are two other plaques found
when the building was being rebuilt.  They commemorate the 50th and 60th anniversary of
Hanover Methodist Church.  Dear Sheffield Jesus Centre, do you have the faintest idea what
you are comparing yourselves to?  The 19th century Methodist church was not the lame race
horse that it is now, it could run.  William Law writes about the Methodists as if they were the
gold standard.  “The trouble is you don’t want to be like a Methodist.”  Jesus Army, the
trouble with you is that you do.  Not like a modern day Methodist (although I must be
cautious as a few of their churches are coming back to life again) religion that believes that
Jesus died for their sins, receives communion on a Sunday and gets salvation from the
minister.  Oh, how happy I was in the 1960s.  At last, I thought, the Methodists have seen the
darkness.  They are wonderfully unsaved.  

The Jesus Army want to be like the original Methodists.  Social reformers like the founder
of the awful Labour Party, Kheir Hardy, who cared about ill people and poor people,
or that other nut case politician William Wilberforce who abolished slavery.  Methodists who
started Sunday schools in the 1830s because children who pushed the trucks in the coal
mine (before the days of pit ponies) couldn’t read. As if they needed to.  
There weren’t any instructions on the back of the coal trucks  and in the
days before the Davey lamp they wouldn’t have been able to read them anyway, it would
have been too dark.  If pushing a cart through a coal mine is what you’re employed to do
I can’t understand the value of education.  But they taught so many children to read that
eventually we had to have the Education Act in the 1870s to stop these Methodists (and
other churches that were just as misguided) teaching everybody to read the Bible.  I know
that reading the Bible in a religious setting is not particularly dangerous but it can upset the
weak and the vulnerable.  Some Roman Catholics have come under conviction of sin after
reading the Scriptures and that’s why we made their church so dead against it in the Middle
Ages.  

I suppose I can take comfort from the fact that these crazy Methodist politicians and
weird do-gooders created a country where children no longer had to push carts in coal mines
so that young people lost interest in Jesus completely.  Life in the UK is much too
comfortable and people don’t need God anymore.  Jesus Army go and do likewise.
But be careful what you compare yourselves to and careful what you wish for.  
Hanover Methodist church was an awful lot bigger than your little hall.  It had
several storeys and actually had a capacity of 1800.  Do you think you will be that big?  Do
you think you will be there for 60 years?  Most of you don’t because you’re listening to the
whispering demons that spend all their time talking to the church's leaders and telling them
the battle in Sheffield is unwinnable.  I’ll let you into a secret. It isn’t.