John Wesley was an Anglican clergyman who sought to bring new life to the Church of England through conversion and enthusiastic response to God in sacramental worship. In America, Wesleyan forms of worship did not survive. There Methodists tended to follow the frontier-revivalist pattern of worship.
Methodism can be seen as a counter-cultural movement in the midst of the Enlightenment. When the sacraments were on the margin of church life, early Methodism put them at the center; when religious zeal was in disrepute, Methodism made enthusiasm essential; where religion was confined to the churches, Methodism took it to the fields and streets. John Wesley (1703–1791), the founder of Methodism, was a faithful son of the Church of England and never ceased in his love for its worship. The Methodists under Wesley functioned virtually as a religious order under a General Rule within the established church.
Distinctive features of early Methodist worship were “constant communion,” i.e., frequent Eucharist, fervent preaching for salvation, vigorous hymn singing (then a novelty), care of souls in small groups, and a mixture of extemporaneous and fixed prayers. Charles Wesley (1707–1788) wrote hymns by the thousands; he and John created a great treasury of 166 eucharistic hymns. John Wesley practiced pragmatic traditionalism, preferring ancient forms for modern needs when possible: vigils became the Methodist watch night, the agapē surfaced as the love feast, and the covenant service was adapted from Presbyterianism. In 1784, John Wesley published his service book for America, the Sunday Service, advocating, among other things, a weekly Eucharist.
Much of this did not survive the transit of the Atlantic, and American Methodism soon discarded Wesley’s service book but not his hymn book. Much of the sacramental life was dissipated (although the texts for the rites remained largely intact). Instead, Methodism tended to adapt many of the techniques of the frontier. Camp meetings abounded for a time and eventually resulted in a distinctive revival-type service. Fanny Crosby (1820–1915) wrote many hymns of personal devotion to the blessed Savior, while Charles A. Tindley (1856–1933) was a prolific black hymn writer.
Despite the prevalence of revival-style worship, there persisted in America a number of areas where more formal worship was preferred, such as in Birmingham and Nashville. Thomas O. Summers (1812–1882) was the leader of a nineteenth-century liturgical movement in the South which affected the reprinting of Wesley’s service book and produced a standard order of worship. Wesley’s prayer book long remained in use in England, or even The Book of Common Prayer. In general, Methodists in the nineteenth century reacted against the new ritualism of the established church in England, only to adopt some aspects of it several generations later.
Revivalism gave way to a period of aestheticism with much discussion of “enriching worship.” This, in turn, gave way to a neo-orthodox period of recovering historic liturgies, especially Wesley’s. Recent decades have seen more attention to assimilating the post-Vatican II Roman Catholic reforms, especially the lectionary. The new (1989) United Methodist Hymnal shows how far this has gone and may mark the beginning of a neo-Protestant emphasis on keeping the identity of one’s own tradition.