Bishop Ward's ePistle for July 29, 2010
Mississippi Conference of the United Methodist Church
Summer Reading
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Summer has, throughout my life, been an invitation to reading.  It was the season of the bookmobile which came to our farmhouse.   After morning chores and lunch, our mother would send us off to read for at least an hour.  The front porch to this day evokes yearning for a book in my hands.  Our father and mother established a rule:  no television on weekdays during the school year.  If homework was done, we could read.
 
This early environment cultivated in my spirit a love of good books, well written.  In the Methodist family, we share this love and this hunger to learn and to think deeply.
 
A great joy of my life through the years has been participation in reading groups, study groups, covenant groups.  Shared reading and reflection is a means of grace.
 
I hope that you will commend books you discover to me, just as I will commend books I discover to you through this link.
 
May you be enriched through the gift of reading,
Hope Morgan Ward

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American Saint, by John Wigger
 
This new and definitive biography of Francis Asbury is great reading -- accessible, clear, compelling.  Amazed at what I was learning about the founding of the Methodist Church in American, I could not leave the book alone until I finished reading it.
 
Asbury came to American in 1771 at the age of 26 and never went back to England.  Through single-minded devotion and perseverance, he crafted a church to engage ordinary Americans and their world.  While I had often read of the 130,000 miles he rode, crisscrossing the nation, I missed until now the impact and import of his ministry.  He never owned a home, traveled as a pauper through wilderness and weather, lodged with Methodist people in simple and inadequate places, pressed on through various and dire health crises, and personally interacted with thousands of people.  Asbury was more recognized face-to-face than any other American of his day, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. 
 
While growing rapidly through pro-active itinerant ministry, camp meeting, "powerful awakenings," and amazing growth, the church was beset continually with crises and tensions.  Laity and preachers pressed back against some appointments, laity challenging or pleading for certain clergy to be appointed, clergy making supplication for consideration of location or family circumstance.  Differences of opinion arose, particularly around the tensions and balance of authority of leaders and democratic process, around "locality" and "itinerancy."   Times have changed, and yet issues are remarkably contemporary. 
 
Asbury was fully committed to itinerancy, living it completely in a life of prayer, devotion, poverty, generosity to the poor, and continuous travel.  Imagine an annual circuit on horseback, beginning in Charleston, traveling northwest to Tennessee and Kentucky, then to West Virginia and Pennsylvania to New England, then south to Philadelphia and New York and Baltimore, then on to Virginia and the Carolinas.  Imagine preaching continuously on this route while planning the conferences and the appointments of the preachers in the place ahead.  Imagine presiding, preaching, ordaining and appointing preachers at 10 annual conferences along the way.  Asbury lived this pace for over forty years, wearing out traveling companions who found the pace sustainable only a year or two.
 
Wigger's biography of Asbury is astonishing, instructive, inspiring.  My copy is available if you would like to borrow it!
 
Hope Morgan Ward