New England Annual Conference

The New England Annual Conference is an Annual Conference (a regional episcopal area, similar to a diocese) of the United Methodist Church. This conference serves the congregations in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, eastern Connecticut, and all of Vermont. The conference's administrative offices and the office of the bishop are located in Lawrence, Massachusetts. It is part of the Northeastern Jurisdictional Conference. The bishop is the Reverend Sudarshana Devadhar (Boston Area).

(SOURCE- The Wesley Center) Asbury traversed New England each of these years down to the last before that of his death. He always approached it with peculiar feelings; with mingled repugnance and hopefulness. He seemed there as in a foreign land, while all the rest of the nation was his familiar domain. Everywhere else he was welcomed by enthusiastic throngs; there he was repelled, and pursued his solitary journeys comparatively a stranger, finding refuge in families which were proscribed as heretical by public opinion, and in "meetings" which were impeached as fanatical "conventicles." Yet he believed that Methodism would "radiate" over these elder communities. "I feel," he writes, "as if God will work in these states and give us a great harvest; a glorious work of God will be wrought here. Surely we shall rise in New England in the next generation." He lived to see the verification of his prediction. To him the religious life of New England presented an example of the rigid Hebrew legalism, strangely combined with the speculative dogmatism of the early Greek Church but unrelieved by the spiritual mysticism of the latter, and nearly destitute of the vital charity and joyousness primitive faith.

Its distinctive theology he detested; it seemed to him to bind, as in iron bands, the souls of the people; depressing, by its tenets of election and reprobation with uncomplaining but profound distress, scrupulous, timid, and therefore often the best consciences; inflating the confidence and Pharisaism of the self-reliant or self-conceited, who assumed their predestination to heaven; enforcing the morality without the gracious consolation of religion; and giving to the recklessly immoral an apology for their lives in their very demoralization, their lack of "effectual grace," of "an effectual call." Devout Augustinian theologians would not indeed admit his logic; such was nevertheless his honest estimate of the New England Church, and he continually returned to the East, directing the best energies of Methodism against its traditional beliefs and ecclesiastical stagnancy.

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