It is a crime how the leftists have perverted the Methodist Church and co-opted the very name of Methodism, which was taken from its English founder John Wesley's diligent, methodical study of scriptures. I have recently been re-reading his book, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection. His brother, the prolific hymnist Charles Wesley, wrote over 600 scripture-based hymns that were the pop music of the Methodist community from the 1700s to the 1930s (the days before radio and television), engraving the words of scripture into the minds of Methodists the same way frequent media exposure of pop lyrics hypnotically engraves pagan hedonism today.
The Wesleys taught holiness in living. In my youth, and I'm not quite retirement age yet, Methodists renounced alchohol, gambling and other vices, and were not to go to movies or dances on the Sabbath. (Many pastors in my experience made quite a point of indignance about the drinking among Catholic priests.) How all of that changed since the overthrow of the seminaries by radicals in the 1960s.
The Wesleyan Methodists of England sent Francis Asbury as their first American bishop, who for decades of the 18th century crisscrossed the eastern seaboard on horseback to found Methodist communities. Methodism was one of the largest denominations in the colonies, remaining one of America's mainstream churches and sponsors of foreign missionaries all the way until the 1960s, at which point communist-supported radicalism began to infiltrate and tear down "the Establishment", driving away conservative traditionalists and Bible-believers.
Methodism's ideas of a personal responsibility to study and understand the scriptures and encouragement to attend Sunday Schools at all ages and ask questions of elders as a way to understand them fully (which had been subjected to persecution by the Church of England in the mother country), as well as Wesley's pre-Constitutional establishment of a republican-style governing structure for the widespread church, played a large part in the development of our national Founders' guiding philosophies.
John, Charles and Susanna Wesley are spinning in their graves.
When Obama pronunced "Wesleyan" as "Wellesleyan" it wasn't just a slip of the tongue; you could tell that he said it because he knew what Wellesley was, but not Wesley. You could tell that Obama had no idea who Wesley was.
I was born into a Methodist pastor's family and became a Methodist pastor. By the mid 80's the loving community that was the foundation of my home and youth had become an evil, corrupt bureaucracy with no soul. My resignation was heartbreaking.
Today Methodists disdain the teachings of Jesus and consider all belief a matter of personal choice. They ae no longer a Christian organization.