These were still my people and my institutions. I could discern the older strengths of the culture emerge in the people, particularly in the stability of the people in the church, even now that their Constantinian hopes have been shattered. The vestiges of these years still were around, and the right political and cultural conditions could re-enflame the embers. Yet we heard no celebration of the Israeli invasion of Gaza, no celebratory calls for vindication, only jeremiads for the coming moral, cultural disaster from the changes, but more deeply, evidence that some were trying to encounter older practices of the Christian tradition. A vitality remained in the congregations that comprised our past that exceeded the more dismal broader social setting.

In central Ohio we visited a congregation in which we could sense the on-going strength of the church, but also how deeply it had become culturally captured. What interested me most was the construction of a shrine at the front, right side of the sanctuary. The congregation had moved the altar, the communion table, to the side of the sanctuary, where it was nonetheless very visible. It had been carefully adorned – candles stood on both sides, a floral arrangement in the middles, and the offering plates were brought to it. Above the altar on the wall was a plaque, and above the plaque, a framed, triangular American flag. I thought that perhaps the congregation had suffered a death from an American soldier. I was close. Instead the flag was from an American platoon that had been part of the invasion of Iraq. The platoon had sent the flag to the congregation in response for their support. The congregation had transformed this into a shrine – idolatrous to be sure – but similar to a relic of a saint from a holy pilgrimage that one might find in Catholic circles. Such a transformation of sanctuary space would have been unthinkable thirty years ago when I first encountered this congregation – the pulpit was the first that I had preached behind.

In contrast Geordan Hammond’s work on Wesley shows his deep commitment to Eucharistically centered worship. Wesley wrote his essay “On the Duty of Constant Communion” before he went to Georgia in 1732; he published it in 1787 in The Arminian Magazine. It shows the stability of Wesley’s commitment to primitive Christian worship. As Hammond argues, “Wesley’s high regard for the Eucharist was a constant and unwavering aspect of his life and ministry” (p. 89). In this dimension Wesley both participated in common Anglican convictions of his day, but in intensity, as typical, he surpassed the norm to move towards the more rigorous, disciplined, and Christologically-intense form of these convictions. Hammond states, “During his last few years at Oxford and in Georgia, Wesley held to the minority view in the Church of England that espoused ‘Firstly, a belief in the Eucharistic sacrifice as a real, objective, and effectual God was pleading of Christ’s sacrificial offering of himself on Calvary (with which offering some would have wished to line the Last Supper). Secondly, a belief in a permanent and objective real presence, expressed by saying that by the action of the Holy Spirit, the bread and wine become in power, virtue, and effect the body and blood of Christ. Thirdly, a doctrine of consecration that was quite specific in regarding the Holy Spirit as the agent of consecration, combined with a belief that the institution narrative-oblation-epiclesis sequence was the necessary and essential liturgical material by which consecration was effected’” (p. 79).