Wesleyan Connection in Shelburne and Birchtown, Nova Scotia: Saving Souls or Catching Whales

This book traces the history of the development of Methodism in Nova Scotia, with its focus upon Shelburne and Birchtown. It carries with it the issue over control of a religious organization. Although Wesley lost the figurative battle for that control, one cannot view it as a personal failure. He continued to lend a sympathetic heart and ear to the Anglo-American refugees in Nova Scotia; he embraced the efforts at Birchtown because he supported the idea of freedom for black people and opposed slavery. Historians of American Methodism maintain that, in ordaining Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury for North America, as well as in his ordination of lay elders to cross the Atlantic, John Wesley did indeed establish the means by which the Methodist Episcopal Church, both in the United States and what would eventually become the confederation of Canada, could and would organize itself into a significant religious body. With illustrations.