The Centre has published its Annual Report for 2023-24 – an acknowledgement and celebration of our achievements over the past twelve months. OCMCH Director, Professor William Gibson, had the following to say about the Centre’s work over the last year, The final annual report of the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History is a moment to reflect on the achievements of the Centre over the last seventeen years and its predecessors over thirty years. The Centre was formed in 2007 when the lease on the Harcourt Hill Campus was reviewed at a break point. The existing Wesley Centre whic ..read more

(D. S. Bell at Westminster Training College, 1909-11) Donald Simpson Bell (1890-1916) was born into a family of Wesleyan Methodists in the North Yorkshire spa town of Harrogate on 3 December 1890. The youngest son of Smith and Annie Bell, he attended St. Peter’s Church of England Primary School as a child before continuing his education at Harrogate Grammar School. In 1909, Bell left Yorkshire and moved to London to train as a teacher at Westminster College. A naturally gifted athlete, he excelled at many sports and quickly forged a fine reputation for himself in college sporting circles. He ..read more

Jean De Dieu Mampouya with OCMCH Research Fellow Dr Peter Forsaith in Oxford I’m delighted to have been awarded the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History’s research bursary in April 2024. I would first like to thank Prof William Gibson for that marvelous welcome in the research centre. I would be careless and remiss if I failed to thank Drs Peter Forsaith and John Lenton for their precious advice and warm support during this stay. And many thanks to Dr Daniel Reed and Thomas Dobson for their unwavering encouragements. My research trip was productive, and my thesis has really been boos ..read more

On 4 August 1914, Britain declared war on Germany. The First World War raged for over 2,000 days before coming to a halt on 11 November 1918, and killed 880,000 members of the British forces, including 102 alumni of Westminster College. This amounted to 6% of the adult male population of Britain at the time, and it took much of the following decade for the College to recover.[1] Greatly reduced, Westminster was evacuated from London to Richmond College, the Wesleyan theological institution. In the second of our collection highlights, we explore what happened at the Westminster College site dur ..read more

The Centre is delighted to announce the publication of Methodism and External Controversies in Britain, 1800-1900: A Provisional Biography by Clive D. Field. Like most new religious movements, Methodism encountered opposition and found itself embroiled in literary controversies with its critics from the outset. The hundreds of anti-Methodist publications issued during the eighteenth century, and Methodist responses thereto, have already been extensively investigated by scholars. Less well-known, however, are the external controversies in which British and Irish Methodism was en ..read more

After months of journeying down the Rhine and waiting in makeshift camps around London, thousands of ‘Poor Palatines’ were finally settled on the estates of Protestant landowners amongst the rolling hills of Ireland, County Limerick in the years 1709 and 1710. Upon arrival, a wet, boggy and rocky landscape unfolded before their eyes, only vaguely reminiscent of the famously lush viticultural lands they reluctantly left behind in the midst of war-induced devastation and poverty in southwest Germany. Although the Palatines were originally part of Lutheran and Calvinist denominations in Germany ..read more

The Centre is delighted to announce the publication of Heterodoxy & Antiquity: joseph Bingham (1668-1723) by L. W. Barnard. In the early eighteenth century Joseph Bingham (1668-1723) was a significant figure. Ejected from Oxford in 1695 for heterodox views on the Trinity, he was appointed to Church livings in Hampshire. With use of the Winchester Cathedral library, he wrote his Origines Ecclesiasticae which appeared from 1708. His son, Richard, went on to published his father’s collected works in ten volumes which were still in print in the nineteenth century. Bingham’s works en ..read more

For Black History Month, we’re delving into the Centre’s archives to learn more about Oxford Brookes University’s black heritage. During a recent digitisation project, we made freely-accessible online a photograph album from the Westminster Training College archives dating from 1893 to 1912.1 This belongs to a series that commences in the 1850s and mainly features formal group shots of students, staff, and sports teams arranged chronologically. It is the most important visual record of the college’s earliest history. What’s remarkable about one Westminster College photograph for 1904-5 is tha ..read more

The Centre is delighted to announce the publication of Our Justice Journeys: Three Centuries of Striving for a Better World edited by Thomas Dobson. Methodist commitment to social justice predates the Church itself, and is often what draws members to the Connexion. Our Justice Journeys brings together papers from the 2022 Methodist Heritage conference celebrating the 250th anniversary of the birth of Hugh Bourne, alongside other essays touching on Methodist collections, histories, and work in the present day. Between them, they explore many different aspects and narratives of M ..read more

The Centre has published its Annual Report for 2022-23 – an acknowledgement and celebration of our achievements over the past twelve months. OCMCH Director, Professor William Gibson, had the following to say about the Centre’s work over the last year, The academic year 2022/23 has been a highly productive one for the Centre. Staff have participated in over fifty events and the recovery from COVID has meant that we have recorded over a hundred in-person uses of our collections. Three specific examples of our work deserve special mention as they have potential to really enhance our activities ..read more