CSLP Students at the New Globe Theatre, London


Front Row: Amy Sellers, Kerrie Yarnell, Amanda Coleman, Beth Bostrom, Angelia Houston. Back Row: Robin Brown, Karen Baker, Kyle Stein, Caroline Ulrich, Jason Masching.

The most recent CSLP focused on John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, and his strong message of social reform in eighteenth-century England. During a spring semester seminar the students studied Wesley and his era. Then, for a month during the summer, from their base at Southlands College, a Methodist-related college in London, the students attempted to enact Wesley's social message by performing three major service projects.

Fourteen Greensboro College students and three faculty members worked in small groups on their projects, all of which were connected in some way with Wesley and the Methodist church. One group, for example, worked at City Road Chapel, founded by Wesley in 1776 and considered the mother church of Methodism. Wesley's house and a museum of Methodism are on the site also. These students assisted with the daily functions of the chapel and museum, as well as making pastoral visits to hospitals and nursing homes. Two members of this group also served as lay-workers at the annual conference of the British Methodist Church.

A second group of students developed a pamphlet and Internet web site describing Bunhill Fields, a cemetery located directly across the street from City Road Chapel, where Susanna Wesley, mother of John Wesley, is buried, along with a number of other notable figures such as poets William Blake and John Bunyan, hymnist Isaac Watts, founder of the Society of Friends George Fox, and novelist Daniel Defoe. Bunhill Fields officially opened in 1665 as a cemetery for religious dissenters (those not members of the Church of England) but had been used as a Saxon burial site as much as one thousand years before that. (Bunhill derives from bone hill.) Since the thousands of tourists who annually visit City Road Chapel usually visit the cemetery as well, the students, with the encouragement of the chapel staff, developed a guide to the cemetery to be distributed at the chapel. Both the pamphlet and the web site direct visitors on a walking tour of the cemetery as well as providing a history of the cemetery and a brief biography of its more famous interees.

CSLP Students and Faculty in York


Left to Right: Professor Judy Cheatham, Donna Llewellyn, Caroline Ulrich, Melanie Rowell, Sarah Hampton Cheatham, Professor Rich Mayes

The third major project involved another church closely associated with Wesley and the birth of Methodism, the Wesley Memorial Church in Oxford, the city in which John Wesley and his brother Charles attended college and established their "holy clubs" and where they and their friends first acquired the derisive name "methodists." The students worked with Rainbow House, a volunteer-run parent and child program housed in the Wesley Memorial Church that ministers to the needs of the Oxford poor and lonely through fellowship, counseling, literacy programs, child care, and wholesome, inexpensive food. The students not only assisted in the daily operations of Rainbow House but also used the computer facilities of Southlands College to rewrite and reformat the center's many instructional and publicity documents.

Of course the London-Oxford setting enabled the students to touch the wellspring, as it were, of Wesley's social message, but it also allowed them to experience the varied life of one of the great cities of the world. The students generally worked full-time four days a week, then had the evenings and weekends for educational and leisure activities, including travel. In addition to its historic sites, students visited London's many museums, art galleries, and theaters. The faculty advisors led the students on two weekend trips, one to York and the North Yorkshire Moors, the other to Salisbury, Stonehenge, and the surrounding area. On the other two weekends, students traveled independently in smaller groups, some going to Belgium, France, Ireland, Scotland, Spain, and Wales.

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