Connexionalism

Connexionalism began as the practical shape John Wesley gave to the societies he organized within the Church of England during the eighteenth century revival, and it hardened over time into a doctrine about what a church actually is. Wesley never intended to found a separate denomination, and the societies he set up were meant to supplement, not replace, participation in a parish church; but their internal structure already carried the connexional logic that would outlast that original intention. Ministers were itinerant, appointed by conference to a circuit rather than called and settled by a single congregation, and small class meetings bound members together in a structure that answered upward to the whole connexion rather than sideways to a local vestry. When Methodism did become its own church, first in America with the Methodist Episcopal Church founded in 1784 and later in Britain, this structure carried over as doctrine rather than mere habit. A Methodist congregation, on the connexional understanding, is not a self-standing church that happens to cooperate with others; it is a society within one connexion, property is held in trust for the whole body rather than by the local congregation, and the conference, not the congregation, is the seat of authority over doctrine and discipline.

Connexional structure is what makes a Methodist division so different, in practice, from a split inside a congregational church. Because property is held in trust for the whole connexion rather than by the local society, a congregation that comes to disagree with its conference cannot simply vote to leave and keep its building; the trust clause ties the building to the connexion, not to whoever happens to be worshiping in it that year. Methodist history is accordingly a history of divisions carried out at the level of conference and connexion rather than by individual congregations drifting away one at a time. The autocratic style of some nineteenth century British Methodist leaders, Jabez Bunting most prominently, alienated enough of the wider movement to produce a series of connexional schisms: the Methodist New Connexion in 1797, the Primitive Methodists in 1811, the Bible Christians in 1815 and the United Methodist Free Churches in 1857, each one a new connexion rather than a loose scattering of independent chapels. The same logic still constrains a Methodist body today: a congregation cannot simply vote to leave and keep its building, because the trust clause keeps ownership with the connexion rather than the congregation. A modern split is accordingly negotiated through a process the connexion's own governing documents define and administer, releasing individual congregations from that trust clause on stated terms, rather than a congregation walking away under its own authority the way a member of a congregational church could.