| Feature Article – November 2005 |
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When I was asked, back in the Spring, to write an article on Conflict in the Church for the Mustard Seed by its editor, I did not envisage this turning into a series of writings on the subject for the fall issues of the Diocesan newspaper. But as in all things God will ultimately have his way, and so it appears that our good Lord has other plans for me when it comes to writing at the computer this fall. In my last article entitled Nothing New Under the Sun, I looked at the history of the Church from the time when the first disciples walked with Jesus and saw him proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom of Heaven to the poor, heal the sick, raise the dead, and feed the hungry. Beginning with James and John, the sons of Zebedee, up until the present age we see in the story of our history that conflict has always been a part of who we are. We can even see, if we examine carefully the evidence before us, that the Holy Spirt has used conflict from time to time to stir up the wills of the faithful and to quicken and restore to faithfulness a sluggish or erring church.
At the request of the editor of the Mustard Seed, I have been asked to delve a little deeper into the history of the church and look at a few different conflicts in the life of the people of God, the Body of Christ, to see if they can in some way shed some light on the current situation facing the church and give us some words of encouragement, hope and wisdom to help us in these tempestuous times. In honouring this request and in the hope of not stirring up to much ill will I have decided to devote this article to a little known conflict that threatened to rip apart one of the most revered families in Anglican church history: the family of the eighteenth-century evangelists, John and Charles Wesley.
The incident in question revolves around the revolution of 1688, when William of Orange, along with his wife, Mary Stuart, the daughter of James II of Great Britain, attempted to seize the throne from her father. The long and the short of this event is that it signalled the end of the Stuart line of kings and set the course that would ultimately see an Hanoverian prince from Germany become the future King George I over his Scots relation, Charles Stewart, more affectionately remembered as Bonnie Prince Charlie! For John and Charles’ father, the Reverend Mr. Samuel Wesley, to retain his position as a priest of the Church of England and to hold an incumbency he had to swear an oath to God of allegiance to the king and faithfully offer prayers every Sunday at public worship for the king’s majesty. Susannah Wesley, the good Reverend’s wife, had other feelings on this matter and believed that William III was not the true King. She could not accept William as king without seeing it as the breaking of her own vow to God to support and uphold the rightful king of the realm, who she still held to be a Stuart, a direct blood descendant of James II.
It soon became known to all that Susannah, sitting every Sunday in the front of the church, refused to say the “Amen” following the prayers for the king. In essence, by refusing to give her consent to the prayers she was refuting William’s claim to the throne and consequently jeopardising her husband’s position in the Church. Upon discovering what was going on, Mr. Wesley refused to live with his wife until she recanted, which she refused to do, thus resulting in a period of twelve months during which they lived apart. However, by the grace of God, William III died, making a reconciliation possible.
Now at first glace, when one hears of the cause of the row that threatened to split this family in two, it is all too tempting to laugh at the situation and say, “How silly could they be!” But such a response only reveals that we have not heard what the real problem was, and that we have failed to grasped clearly the much more serious and deeper theological issues at stake. The ultimate question at stake here for Susannah was not about William or James as the rightful king of the country, but about the honouring of the vows which she had made, not to the king, nor to his representative, be they temporal or ecclesiastical, but to God himself. This distinction was one which her husband, Samuel, unfortunately, failed to recognize. Such vows, whether they are recited in front of king, prince, bishop, or someone else, are vows made ultimately to God.
As this incident from the Wesley family history tells us, even seemingly trivial things can be of ultimate importance and the source of contention and conflict, if the heart of the matter is the issue of following the will of God. Therefore, let us during our own time of conflict and strife take heart in these words from Psalm 146: “Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help . . . Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God.”