I’m reading Restoring the Wesleyan Class Meeting by Dr. James B Scott and Dr. Molly Davis Scott. It’s a wonderful study of the Methodist Class Meeting, wherein early Methodists were supported, uplifted and corrected in the context of a relational small group every week. The authors quote Gilbert Murray from his book, The Methodist Class Meeting:
The Reverend W.L. Watkinson, in the course of a speech delivered in the Great Queen Street Wesleyan Chapel, London, on Wednesday evening, July 17, 1907, declared that the Class Meeting is the primal organ of the Church, and, while the physiologist would tell them that in the course of generations an organ might be eliminated, he had never read yet that there had been an instant where a creature had survived after the heart had been taken away.
Sobering words!
