American Methodist Worship.

Young, John H.

By Karen B. Westerfield Tucker. Religion in America Series. Edited By Harry S. Stout. New York: Oxford University Press, xiv + 345 pp. $49.95 cloth.

Karen Westerfield Tucker's study of the history and development of worship in the American Methodist tradition is a thoughtful, comprehensive, well-researched, and finely written work. While the title might suggest a book of interest only to those seeking a better understanding of American Methodism, this book contributes much to many fields. Westerfield Tucker's study certainly increases our knowledge of the subject area suggested by its title. However, its contribution is much more catholic, This book extends current understanding of the role and place of religious practice in American life and social history. Methodism has sometimes been described as the "quintessential American denomination." Granting the fairly widely held contention that Methodism's development mirrored American political and social development to a considerable extent during much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Westerfield Tucker's book demonstrates how changes in Methodist worship services and practices reflected changes in American society and American self-understanding.

In her "Introduction," Westerfield Tucker lays out both her goal for this study and the principles guiding her work. She asserts that historians of American culture, most of whom had previously ignored "the overtly theological dimensions of a people gathering to pray," now recognize "ritual and cult as revelatory of a community's beliefs and development" (xi). Similarly, liturgical scholars have moved beyond service orders or liturgies to examine worship practices, including the social and cultural aspects of the same. Against the background of these new perspectives, Westerfield Tucker sets her study of American Methodist worship. She looks at this phenomenon in the three Methodist denominations that came together in 1939 to form the Methodist Church, three African-American Methodist denominations, and two Holiness denominations. She indicates her intent to examine how the theological changes and church processes that accompanied Methodism's growth shaped and were shaped by worship practices and liturgy. She wants also to analyze "how the liturgy and performance of worship were influenced by the ideals and developmental tensions within the nation as a whole" (xii). In the dozen chapters that follow, Westerfield Tucker pursues these themes through her examination of "regular" Sunday worship, various "special services" in the Methodist tradition (e.g., the Love Feast, the Watch Night Service, the Quarterly Meeting), liturgies and practices related to sacraments and rites of passage, the role of music, private and familial devotions, church architecture, and the roles played by various church "officials" charged with leadership roles. Her concluding chapter examines the interplay in American Methodist worship over the past two-hundred-plus years between tradition and the need to speak to and serve "the present age." Her self-acknowledged goal "is to paint for American Methodist worship as complete a picture as possible of its various forms, styles, settings, expressions, understandings, and dynamics" (xiii).

In accomplishing that goal in this book, she certainly demonstrates the degree to which American Methodist worship styles, practices, and services, and the theology with which worship is in constant interplay, changed over the years in response both to American ideals of democracy and individual responsibility and to the changing socio-economic circumstances of Methodists in particular and the United States in general. Sometimes these worship-related changes accommodated cultural shifts, and sometimes they were counter cultural. Whether, for example, it was the way (until recently) the Methodist tradition mirrored changing American views of death and what lay beyond the grave, or the degree to which Methodist devotional practices became increasingly individual and private, Westerfield Tucker's tracing and demonstration of such changes should interest social, cultural, and ecclesiastical historians.

Westerfield Tucker compares "official" liturgical or worship texts where appropriate as sources for her historical examination. But she also makes extensive use of judicatory minutes, periodicals, the private diaries of church leaders and ordinary members, hymnals, and developments in church architecture. Her use of this wide range of sources takes her work much beyond earlier efforts that tended to examine only "official" orders of worship. The breadth of her research is especially important in a tradition that, as she notes on several occasions, placed great weight on the freedom of a worship leader to adapt the inherited tradition to local circumstance; indeed, the freedom to do such adaptation--"full liberty simply to follow the scriptures and the primitive church," (272)--was a part of the tradition, even when the principle was applied beyond the scope of what John Wesley intended with his comment about "full liberty."

This book unquestionably deepens in a most significant way scholarly understanding of American Methodist worship. But this work does much more. It enhances the understanding of social and cultural history generally and of American social and cultural history in particular with its well-reasoned and documented study of the place and importance of religious practice in the lives of ordinary Americans since the late eighteenth century. Westerfield Tucker noted, correctly, that no study such as she has done exists for any other American Protestant denomination. Hopefully hers will inspire others to do a similar analysis of other denominations, both in the United States and in other countries.

This book has other outstanding features. The author does not "read back" contemporary liturgical values or sensibilities into her historical assessment of Methodist worship practices; such a treatment of the values and approaches of an earlier era does not mark all historical assessments of worship and liturgy. The book is also remarkably free of errata. An incorrect volume number in the "Notes" section was the only typographical error I noted. However, an additional good reason to read this book is simply that it is very well written.

John H. Young
Queen's Theological College
Kingston, Ontario