Inaugural Sugden Heritage Lecture, ‘Keeping a Movement Moving’

The Inaugural Sugden Heritage Lecture, ‘Keeping a Movement Moving’ is co-sponsored by the Australasian Centre for Wesleyan Research and Queen’s College, University of Melbourne. It will be delivered in the Stafford Room at Queen’s on Thursday 3 September at 7pm by distinguished Wesley scholar, Dr. Ted Campbell. The event will be followed by drinks and canapés in the Eakins Foyer. The Lecturer will also be live streamed via Zoom. Prior to his recent retirement, Ted was Albert C. Outler Professor of Wesley Studies at Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology. He has edited several volumes of John Wesley’s letters in the critical edition of Wesley’s Works and is well positioned to highlight the significance of the autograph letters of Wesley held at Queen’s.

This lecture examines the remarkable collection of John Wesley letters preserved in the Queen’s College Library, University of Melbourne, with particular attention to the six letters addressed to John Francis Valton and the five addressed to Samuel Furly—the two correspondents most fully represented in the collection. It will also consider Wesley’s letter to Joseph Benson in the State Library of Victoria. Read individually, these letters illuminate the pastoral concerns of an eighteenth-century evangelical leader. Read together, with other letters in the collection, they reveal something larger: Wesley’s persistent effort to keep the Methodist movement united, disciplined, and spiritually vital over more than half a century. The Melbourne letters offer more than a glimpse into Wesley’s private relationships. They provide an unusually rich window into the practical means by which one of Christianity’s most enduring renewal movements maintained its momentum. They remind us that movements are sustained not only by inspiring beginnings but by the patient, repeated work of forming leaders, reinforcing shared practices, and calling a community back, again and again, to its original vocation.

The event is FREE to attend or view online, but registration is required. Please register at the link below.