Susanna Wesley: Mother on Fire -HIRD

By Rev. Dr. Ed and Janice Hird

Never underestimate the power of a praying mom. Has your life been impacted by a sacrificial mother who would never give up?

Born in 1669, Susanna Wesley was one of the greatest mothers who ever lived, raising up two of Christianity’s most gifted leaders, John and Charles Wesley. Can you envision, like Susanna, being the twenty-fifth of twenty-five siblings?  Her father Samuel Annesley had a Doctor of Divinity from Oxford and in 1648 was chosen to preach at the British House of Commons.  His eight hundred-strong congregation of St Giles Cripplegate was one of the largest in London.  Susanna’s father did a remarkable thing, encouraging his daughter to read and study theology.  When he died, he left Susannah his most valued possessions, which were his manuscripts and family papers.

Daily, as a mother, Susannah prayed “Dear God, Guide me. Make my life count.”  She loved to read biographies about other Christians, especially missionaries.  While reading an account of Danish missionaries, she concluded, “At last it came to my mind, though I were not a man, nor a minister of the gospel,...I might do somewhat more than I do...I might pray more for the people, and speak with more warmth to those with whom I have an opportunity of conversing. However, I resolved to begin with my children.”  She believed that by discipling her own children, she could change the world.  As a young woman, she once said, “I hope the fire (of revival) I start will not only burn all of London, but all of the United Kingdom as well.  I hope it will burn all over the world.”

As the mother of the Methodist revival, she methodically instilled in her children a passion for discipleship and learning. While only ten of her nineteen children survived to adulthood, she poured her life into them, raising up three sons, Samuel, John and Charles to become pastors.  Susanna believed each child was equally valuable; and had an uncanny way of making each know they were important.

Eric Metaxas has described Susanna as the mother of the homeschooling movement. In an age when many parents only educated their sons, Susanna taught all of her children how to read, write and reason, regardless of gender, including all of her seven surviving daughters. She instructed all of her children three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon. Her children began and ended each school day by singing a Psalm and reading from the Bible.  Remarkably, she spent one hour a week with each of her children in personal instruction.

Her educational goal was that on her last day, she would be able to say “Lord, here are the children which Thou hast given me, of which I have lost none by my ill example, not by neglecting to install in their minds, in their early years, the principles of Thy true religion and virtue.”  When Susanna failed to find Christ-centered textbooks, she decided to write her own. Her first book A Manual of Natural Theory looked at how the natural universe revealed God as creator. Her second book was an exposition of the Apostles’ Creed, looking at the essentials of the Christian faith. Her third book opened up the practical implications of the Ten Commandments for daily living.  In her crowded house, Susannah would pull her apron over her head, taking an hour a day for her personal devotions when she was not to be disturbed. 

As both the daughter and wife of clergy, Susanna understood the challenges of pastoral ministry.  There was never enough money to feed and clothe the children properly. Her husband Rev Samuel Wesley, as the underpaid Rector of Epworth and Wroot, was always in debt, and even ended up twice in debtors’ prison.  Susanna offered to pawn her own wedding ring, but her husband refused her sacrifice.

 Being very outspoken, her husband had many enemies during his thirty-nine years in Epworth, some of whom destroyed the Wesley’s crops, stabbed their cows, attacked their dog, and set their house on fire in 1702.  During a contentious 1705 election, a political mob surrounded their house at night with loud drumming, firing of pistols, and shouting that they would kill Samuel. When their house was burnt down for a second time in 1709, six-year-old John was miraculously plucked as a brand from the burning.

While her husband was away in 1711, she started Sunday evening devotions for her children, which ended up attracting many neighbours: “Last Sunday I believe we had above two hundred. And yet many went away, for want of room to stand.”  The replacement Epworth priest was deeply offended that far more people went to Susanna’s devotional prayers than his Sunday morning service.  Responding to her concerned husband, she said, “As to its looking peculiar, I grant that it does. And so does almost anything that is serious, or that may in any way advance the glory of God, or the salvation of souls.”  When her son John Wesley later preached to tens of thousands, he fondly recalled the revival that earlier happened with his mother’s Sunday evening devotions.

John, the fifteenth child and Charles, the eighteen child of nineteen were almost not born, because of Susanna’s refusal to say amen to her husband’s 1701 prayer for the new King William of Orange.  Because Susanna saw the new King as a usurper, her husband left home, refusing to return: “We must part for if we have two kings, we must have two beds.” Samuel only returned and reconciled after their house burnt down.

When John Wesley felt called to ordination, his father discouraged him but his mom encouraged him to go for it.  Susanna coached John and Charles in the spiritual disciplines while at Oxford, encouraging him to read the Imitation of Christ by Thomas A Kempis and Rule for Holy Living by Jeremy Taylor. After reading these books, John told his mother, “I have resolved to dedicate all my life to God —all my thoughts and words and actions.”

When John and Charles felt called as missionaries to Savannah, Georgia, Susanna said, “If I had twenty sons, I would send them all.” When John returned to England and began preaching in the fields, Susanna approved, sometimes standing by his side before tens of thousands.  She encouraged John to allow nonordained people to preach.  After her debt-ridden husband died leaving her homeless, she lived for her final three years with John Wesley in the famous Foundry Methodist Chapel.  On her deathbed, she said “Children, as soon as I am released, sing a Psalm of Praise to God.”  May we like Susanna end our lives on fire giving glory to God.

 

Rev. Dr. Ed and Janice Hird

Co-authors of For Better, For Worse: discovering the keysto a lasting relationship.

-an article previously published in the September 2019 Light Magazine

A True Gift – More than Ink and Paper (Peter A. Black)

My gratitude was real . . . and surprising, even to me.

I beamed, “Thank you Lord . . . what a gift!” Gifts come in many shapes and sizes and in various forms. We often think of gifts as ‘things’ – something we give to or receive from someone else.
 

This ‘gift’? A magazine article.* Words. Black ink on white paper. Also a coloured photo of a smiling, greying-haired woman of Asian ethnicity. I first met Debbie Sirjoosingh three decades ago and heard her address a number of conferences over the years.

I still sense the throb of passion with which she spoke of her love for the people of Ethiopia, the country where she was serving. People were dying in the tens of thousands from disease and starvation, during famine and political upheaval. She’d shared the love of Jesus there, treating the sick and distributing food. After six years, Debbie returned to her work amongst her beloved Turkana people of northwest Kenya.

This woman has been a gift from God to thousands. That ‘gift’ article updated me on her life, and I’m thrilled that her fruitful labour continues and her passion remains unabated today. An afterglow lingered in my soul right through Christmas.

Upon her original arrival at a remote area of Turkana in the early 1980s, she was greeted by 60 degree Celsius temperatures, parched land and whirling, blowing sand and a dried-up river bed and virtually no water.
 

A grass hut became home and a small rodent-infested hut her dispensary. No phone, no post office and no newspapers. Neither was there electricity or medical doctors. And yet, in her heart she belonged. “[That’s] where God desired me to serve Him: among the Turkana people . . .” she said. 

Although she didn’t know the language and had no one to teach her, Debbie learned by living and interacting with the people and loving them in practical ways. Back then, most local Turkana had never heard the name of Jesus. Many years before, a German missionary couple had shared Jesus’ message, but were long gone.

Photo Credit: SAGE, Fall 2015
www.paoc.org

“My heart danced with joy,” Debbie said, “knowing that I was sent by the Lord who loves me, to minister to a forgotten people.”

I was truly humbled when reading her words: “I worked on the ground, on bended knees, delivering babies, washing and binding very infected wounds, dividing my bed sheets to give to the naked, cooking porridge and tea to serve the hungry, excavating graves with pick-axe and shovel to bury the ones who succumbed.”

What a gift: one woman, one compassion-filled heart, alone with God!  I’d also heard some time ago that she’d dug foundations and helped erect buildings for housing practical services and ministries for the people of the community. Churches have been established and pastors raised up and equipped to minister amongst the Turkana.

Currently, with funding from praying friends and donor supporters in Canada and assistance from ERDO (denominational-based NGO) and in cooperation with Kenya Ministry of Health, much has been accomplished. Presently a solar-powered health centre is under construction. It will soon be opened to care for the medical needs of 50,000 people and will provide both in-patient and out-patient care.

Although told that there was no water in the area, through prayer Debbie and those involved were led to “the exact spot to sink a borehole,” so they now have water to support the development. She has trained Turkana students who are continuing their education in various aspects of nursing, nutrition, agriculture, and more.

This intrepid follower of Jesus is still gripped by a passionate forward-reaching grace. “My journey continues, hand in hand with Him, until eternity,” she said.  And so, one year flows into the next and Deborah Sirjoosingh continues to go with the flow, sailing on and serving wherever the will of God carries her.

Hers has been an ‘incarnational’ Christian life. And that is what Christmas is about. God was incarnate – “robed in flesh” – in Jesus Christ. He still is, in people like Debbie. More than ink and paper, God’s Best Gifts are “the word made flesh.”

~~~

*Photo credit and updated information courtesy of SAGE, Fall 2015; www.paoc.org;

Article by Deborah Sirjoosingh with Freda Myco.

 

(A shorter edition of the above post was published in Peter's weekly column, P-Pep! in The Standard Guide Advocate, Dec. 17, 2015.)

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From The Best Schools blog, my recent posts on credentialism - O’Leary

Part I: Credentialism: How much of your education do you really need? In a recent article in New Criterion , Charles Murray, whose book, Coming Apart, I have been considering here,, offers another scholar’s view that expertise in a field requires 50 000 chunks of information:

Fame can come easily and overnight, but excellence is almost always accompanied by a crushing workload. Psychologists have put specific dimensions to this aspect of accomplishment. One thread of this literature, inaugurated in the early 1970s by Herbert Simon, argues that expertise in a subject requires a person to assimilate about 50,000 “chunks” of information about the subject over about ten years of experience—simple expertise, not the mastery that is associated with great accomplishment. Once expertise is achieved, it is followed by thousands of hours of practice, study, and labor.

But surely this calculation does not apply across the board. In many fields, information and interaction are not easily divided into 50,000 chunks in the same way that $50,000 can be divided into 50,000 chunks of one dollar each. That fact bears on the problem of credentialism as a barrier to getting a job.

Credentialism? It means an emphasis on acquiring academic credentials in a field before one can be hired. Before I go any further, let me make clear what it does not mean: Obviously, we want our nurse practitioner to have credentials, that is, to have learned human anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, and medical procedure and ethics to the satisfaction of her educators before she treats you.

But so many courses today offer a different, cloudier picture. Consider business courses, for example. In “The Case Against Credentialism” in the Atlantic in 1985, James Fallows observes,

The rise of the M.B.A. has occurred during precisely the era in which, as anyone who follows business magazines is aware, the content of graduate business training has come under increasing attack. “We have created a monster,” H. Edward Wrapp, of the University of Chicago's business school, wrote in 1980, in Dun's Review. “The business schools have done more to insure the success of the Japanese and West German invasion of America than any one thing I can think of.” I'd close every one of the graduate schools of business,”

[...]

Credentialism evades this fact by padding and lengthening courses, raising fees, and marketing prestige or exclusivity. If all that added up to productivity in running a business, US firms would not need government help.

The problem came home to me when I was doing some editorial work years ago on a textbook for sales personnel, as part of a business course. More.

 Part II: Those less well-advertised reasons why credentialism is so important today [...]

 The usual explanation is that more and better education results, which helps students, prospective employers, and society in general. Maybe credentialism does all that. But here are some other things is also does:

 * It keeps younger potential competitors out of the work force for several extra years. That can be better news for government and industry than for the students who must finance those years by incurring debt.
 * It makes achievement in getting credentials sound as important as achievement in the field itself. That’s problematic. Does getting high marks in a certificate course in hotel and resort management show that a person can run a hotel or resort? Possibly, but so much of what we really need to know can only be learned on the job.
 * It forms an industry for the people who create the courses and grant the credentials. That’s not a bad thing in principle. In practice, its value depends on the true relationship between credentials and later performance. More.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

Here are some pieces I wrote recently on public education - O’Leary

 Banned words in New York City schools? “I’m with the banned,” Part III, One of the most extraordinary examples of schools-are-for-teachers occurred in New York City: the maintenance of “rubber rooms” for incompetent teachers. In Moe’s words:

And these were public school teachers passing a typical day in one of the city’s Rubber Rooms---Temporary Reassignment Centers---where teachers were housed when they were considered so unsuited to teaching that they needed to be kept out of the classroom, away from the city’s children.

There were more than 700 teachers in New York City’s Rubber Rooms that year. Each school day they went to “work.” They arrived in the morning at exactly the same hour as other city teachers, and they left at exactly the same hour in the afternoon. They got paid a full salary. They received full benefits, as well as all the usual vacation days, and they had their summers off. Just like real teachers. Except they didn’t teach.

All of this cost the city between $35 million and $65 million a year for salary and benefits alone, depending on who was doing the estimating. And the total costs were even greater, for the district hired substitutes to teach their classes, rented space for the Rubber Rooms, and forked out half a million dollars annually for security guards to keep the teachers safe (mainly from one another, as tensions ran high in these places). At a time when New York City was desperate for money to fund its schools, it was spending a fortune every year for 700-plus teachers to stare at the walls

But maybe, beyond a few fixes, nothing much can be done, for this reason:

The parent groups and politicians who demand that the system be reformed blame the administration and the unions for stonewalling---and thereby miss the point that a civil servant once explained to me: If the government funds the schools through taxes and quasi-government agencies administer them, everyone involved is part of the government's constituency.

The incompetent teachers in the rubber room are citizens and voters like anyone else, including the children's parents. So are the administrators. So are the trial lawyers of the incompetent teachers and their union officials. And the trial lawyers of parents suing the board. So are the business people who clean and repair after episodes of graffiti and vandalism. And so forth.

Whatever reform the government intends is likely to be stonewalled by one of the groups that is in fact a legitimate part of its constituency. To put the students first, definitely and unapologetically, is not possible by the very nature of the system.

Very well, then, do I see private schools, charter schools, or home schooling as the answer?

For some students, yes. Their main advantage is not superior virtue, harder work, or better methodologies. It’s simply the fact that a private institution is free to prioritize how well the kids are doing over other interests.

When your post gets 65,000 visits - Denyse O'Leary

Recently, I had the odd experience of writing a post (for an education site) that suddenly got 65,000 hits. The big problem was convincing my bosses that I didn’t know how it happened and was sure it would never happen again: Here's the post:

Recently, a Canadian high school teacher broke the silence about where cultural relativism really leads.

He told his Ontario students the horrific true story of the mutilation of an Afghan girl fleeing her abusive husband. He wanted to begin a study of moral philosophy with a case that students would surely agree on. But they didn’t. Most could not “pass judgment on another culture.”

Which sheds an interesting light on tolerance and diversity education: Apart from the idea of justice and injustice (moral judgment), all they can teach is moral imbecility.

A couple of other posts on related subjects that many readers found helpful were:

When we celebrate diversity, what exactly are we celebrating? And “Does a man’s honor really lie between the legs of a woman?”, unpacking the same issue using different news stories.

Our regular education offerings may also be worth a look:

Should a student go into social science? Social science’s house is on fire, and top guns don’t seem to notice.

Should a student go into criminal justice? Consider the obstacles first. The obstacles are very real, and many are misrepresented.

That’s what our The Best Schools site is like: hard-hitting. In an age when many angry students are hitting the streets because their degrees and debt don’t lead to jobs, we offer a real world look. We don’t say, you can’t. We do say, know and work with the risks.

The Legacy Continues - Part 3- Meyer

I have spent the last five weeks traveling around through 3 Canadian provinces and 5 USA states. What I have found is that people in general have very little knowledge of First Nations/Native American people – their history, culture and the challenges they face. The general consensus on both sides of the border is that “they” should become like “us” – get an education, get a job and stop all the whining, complaining and protesting.

What I have also found is that people in general are not mean-spirited; they are simply unaware – and they are eager to learn and be informed. There just seems to be a real disconnect between the mainstream culture (including Christians) and the First Nations/Native American culture.

The books that I write are set in a fictional First Nations community and have primarily First Nations’ characters in them. They are well-endorsed by First Nations/Native American people. I believe they can build a bridge of understanding between our two cultures. As non-First Nations people read them, they will have an opportunity to learn, even as they are enjoying a fast-paced compelling story.

In the last two blog posts (The Legacy Continues – part 1 and 2), I wrote about what had happened to the First Nations people in my mother’s generation and in my generation. Now, I would like to share a bit about what is happening in my children’s generation.

A couple of days before I left, I had the privilege of attending a high school graduation where we live in Norway House. Most of the kids were First Nations. It was such an awesome moment. The valedictorian was a young man who is Cree. The guest speaker was a doctor, a young lady who was also Cree and had grown up in Norway House. An elderly lady, a residential school survivor, spoke of how wonderful it was to be present at her grandson's graduation. She herself had never had the opportunity to graduate from high school.The principal (non-Aboriginal) spoke of how these graduates, in completing school (some with high honours) had had to face more than most teens their age. Each of the graduates had an escort to walk them into the ceremony. For some that was a boyfriend or girlfriend; for some it was their son or daughter. One young father proudly walked in with his newborn baby - you just know he's going to be a good daddy to her. There is hope for the future for First Nations people. There are many, many good things happening. When thinking about the atrocities committed against the Aboriginal people of Canada, our response should not be pity. It should be a sensitivity to the barriers that have had to be overcome by a people who have been crushed down but not destroyed. Another wrong attitude would be to idealize any one cultural group. Cree and Ojibway people blow it occasionally just as those from Irish or English descent do.

We need to respect each other’s differences, honour each other’s cultures, and understand that we are all created equal and God desires for us all to be brothers and sisters together in His family.There is no them and us. There is only us.

Dorene Meyer
http://www.dorenemeyer.com/
Author of Deep Waters, a compelling contemporary novel that will give you the opportunity to “walk a mile in the shoes” of Gracie, a First Nations residential school survivor, and experience her reconciliation to Sarah, the daughter who had been taken away from her at birth.