John Wesley Prayer Collection

John Wesley Prayer Collection

This collection consists of three books: John Wesley’s Tracts on Prayer, MINUTES, and John Wesley’s The Book of Common Prayer.

 

John Wesley’s Tracts on Prayer: Now included in John Wesley’s The Book of Common Prayer – Also Sold Separately – This is the 2nd Edition of John Wesley’s Tracts on Prayer published by furocious studios (revised Aug 2017). The contents of this book are similar to those found in The Works of the Rev John Wesley – Volume Xi used for the first edition. Used in this edition are the original booklets with substantive capitalization found in early 18th Century. The main difference in this book from the original booklets is the modern text-type rather than Caslon. Other than that this book keeps the original style especially the European English spellings. These editions are preserved here in flavour with John Wesley’s Prayer Collection. They have nice little surprises like Wesley’s Preface. Little touches like that keep this book from being redundant with other collections of Wesley’s work. There are also Hymns added to the collection of Prayers for Children and a tiny delightful booklet called GRACES perfect to make this book complete.

 

MINUTES: This is the Minutes from the 1784 Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in America. Presiding over the Conference were church leaders Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury. During this Conference they approved John Wesley’s revision of the Book of Common Prayer for the Services of the Methodist Church in North America. The Minutes were then bound with copies of the first edition. This booklet contains 81 topics for discussion ranging from serious matters of the church such as how to provide for Ministers, and how to “extirpate Slavery” to practical advice for “several Degrees of Fasting.”

 

John Wesley’s The Book of Common Prayer: This is the Student Hard Cover 2017 third edition – Now with John Wesley’s Tracts on Prayer.

“I BELIEVE there is no LITURGY in the World, either in ancient or modern language, which breathes more of a solid, scriptural, rational Piety, than the COMMON PRAYER of the CHURCH of ENGLAND . . .” John Wesley. Despite those words, Wesley realized that in its entirety the BCP needed to be modified to fit the practices of the Methodist societies, especially for those congregants living abroad in the new frontier.

This book was originally published in 1784 under the title THE SUNDAY SERVICE OF THE METHODISTS; IN NORTH AMERICA With other OCCASIONAL SERVICES. Wesley published this version toward the end of is life from the desire to give parishes of the Continental US a service book. This was especially needed for those churches who’s pastor covered a wide circuit and could not be present for every service. The duty would then fall to a sometimes less trained or experienced deacons.

Wesley would probably object to me calling it the Methodist Book of Common Prayer, but plain and simple, that’s exactly what it is. This is word for word the 1662 Book of Common Prayer chopped down to to the essentials. The services are considerably shorter so as not to wear out the saints. There are a few interesting changes Wesley made to the content. Though I did an exhaustive study, I did not write up a critical comparison. I’ll leave that to the PHDs to quibble.