A Spring Celebration

Monday 7 March

Wesley’s Chapel, City Road, London, shone with yellow daffodils and spring sunshine, and was scented with narcissi, for Monday afternoon’s Women’s Network event. The theme was ‘From the Old to the New’, as the Network will become ‘Methodist Women in Britain’ very shortly.

The afternoon's very varied programme comprised of several speakers (including an address from Connexional Women’s Network President 2010/11, Revd Julie Hulme), a Gospel singer, hymns and light-hearted drama (including a sketch imagining the automated voicemail for Heaven: press 1 for praise, press 2 for miracles… etc).

For my 5 minutes, I spoke about the way Methodist Heritage is seeking to make our past speak to our present for outreach and discipleship. In this case, I linked the 21stC interest in well-being and natural therapies back to John Wesley’s attempts to help alleviate human physical suffering as well as meet spiritual needs. His early meeting houses such as the New Room in Bristol were intended to be places for education and dispensing medicine as well as preaching. Wesley was inspired by his Christian beliefs to try to provide poor people with effective and affordable medicines and he published a book of remedies, A Primitive Physic (1747) (available online from Wesley's Chapel!)

Remember this was written in the 18thC.... Besides a large number of cold baths and the use of ‘electrifying’, presumably using the small electrical generating machine that can be viewed today in John Wesley’s House on the Wesley’s Chapel ‘campus’, Mr Wesley’s ideas ranged from using boiled onions and rosewater to laudanum, goose dung and horse warts! My personal favourite ‘cure’ is the application of ‘a live puppy to the belly’ for cholic!