Article: John Wesley’s Epworth Diary by Colin Ella - part 26 Poor attendance at St Andrew’s

I CAME again to Epworth on Sunday, 6th August, 1788, a short while before the service at the church.

I went along to the church and I was quite impressed by how Mr Gibson conducted the prayers and also by what he had to say in his sermon.

But oh dear me, what a pathetically small audience were there to hear him - no more than twenty folk, and most of these had only come because they knew I was there.

I was informed that the attendance at St Andrew’s had been poor for a long time, but then, what could be done to remedy it?

Many of our own people in Epworth now chose to worship only in our own meeting room.

Furthermore they would have liked to have taken communion there too, instead of just at the church.

As far as I was concerned I would have preferred that our members stayed with the Anglicans, but in all honesty, I felt there was little I could do to prevent the steady drift away from them.

In the main, Mr Gibson’s sermons were not of a kind to set a good example, and in all conscience, I could not persuade the Methodists to hear him, nor indeed take the sacraments when that man of straw was the celebrant.

I was also now feeling my years and thinking my earthly time was almost over and I had fears for the future of our work in Epworth.

Epworth was not the only area presenting this problem - far from it. It was the same wherever the Anglican parson neither loved nor preached the true gospel.

My long and heartfelt desire for our Movement to remain within the framework of the Church of England was looking bleaker by the day.

We really were on the move and I could see the time when our separation would be complete.

I was ever and always a clergyman of the Church of England and I still truthfully saw the Methodist Cause as an evangelical extension of the Church of England.

I left Epworth by my chaise on the following Wednesday and made for Sheffield.

I preached to a very large congregation there, in fact, the largest I had ever seen at a morning gathering.

As we were approaching Derby on the Friday there was an extremely loud crack from underneath the chaise and in a moment we had overturned.

My companion on this trip, Jenny Smith, and myself, were pretty badly shaken but we both managed to crawl out by the fore windows. We then discovered that the axletree had snapped clean in half.

This was no great surprise to me, for it was the sort of thing I had experienced on numerous occasions. I was little the worse, the only inconvenience being that the broken glass had cut my glove on my right hand.

Next week in Part 27 - Long and Hard Travels

From: http://www.epworthbells.co.uk/community/nostalgia/john_wesley_s_epworth_diary_by_colin_ella_part_26_poor_attendance_at_st_andrew_s_1_3207413