Rory Hill

Language, Faith and Space Rory Hill

This short book takes as its subject the Wesleyan Methodist Church in the island of Jersey from the start of the twentieth century to its mid-point. It focusses in particular on how the use of the French language within that Church declined and eventually disappeared, and it considers the social and spatial implications of such a change. The francophone Methodism of the Channel Islands was unique in many ways, receiving influences from the Huguenots and the Calvinism of the continent as well as the doctrine of John Wesley and the other Church fathers in Britain. Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney and Sark were among the first places where the Methodist faith was expressed in French but island Methodists were thereafter prominent in spreading it into France and other francophone territories.