Methodist Covenant Prayer

“I am no longer my own but yours. Put me to what you will, rank me with whom you will; put me to doing, put me to suffering; let me be employed for you or laid aside for you, exalted for you or brought low for you; let me be full, let me be empty, let me have all things, let me have nothing; I freely and wholeheartedly yield all things to your pleasure and disposal.

And now, glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, you are mine and I am yours.

So be it. And the covenant made on earth, let it be ratified in heaven.
Amen.”

This is a repost from the armybarmy blog, written by Salvation Army officer Stephen Court. He is married to Danielle Strickland. According to Christianity magazine she spends her days in brothels ministering to prostitutes, or trawling the streets praying with drug addicts. Her uncomfortable but challenging message to the church is that it has abandoned the poor. She is social justice director for the Salvation Army's Southern Territory in Australia.

How the Primitive Methodists sent a missionary to Australia

In June 1840, two Primitive Methodist laymen, John Rowlands and John Wiltshire arrived in Adelaide. They quickly formed a Primitive Methodist society, and opened a chapel. In 1841, they wrote to the English Primitive Methodist circuits of Darlaston and Oswestry requesting them to send a missionary to Australia, pleading “the society is crying out for a missionary”.

Such a request was clearly beyond the means of two of England’s strongest circuits and indeed of the missionary committee of the church as a whole. They had no funds to raise the considerable amount to send a missionary to the ends of the earth. How could such an expensive request be fulfilled?

Then in 1843, the leaders of the Bottesford circuit near Nottingham suggested the money for an Australian mission could be raised by asking the 70,000 children in Primitive Methodist Sunday-schools to give or collect one penny a year. This children’s crusade was successful, and in June 1844 two ministers, Joseph Long and John Wilson, were appointed to South Australia.

One penny a year times 70,000. That’s how the first Primitive Methodist missionaries came to Australia.

Abridged from “This Side of Heaven”, by Arnold D. Hunt, pages 57-59.

Marking the start of a movement

This stone marks the spot where the first Primitive Methodist Camp Meeting began on Mow Cop. The Mow Cop "castle" is in the background. The inscription reads

TO THE

GLORY OF GOD

a

Camp Meeting near

this spot on May 31st

1807

began the

Religious Revival

led by

HUGH BOURNE

and

WILLIAM CLOWES

known as

Primitive Methodism