Anyone interested in the global spread of evangelical Christianity in general or Methodism in particular in the nineteenth century should read Douglas Tzan's biography of William Taylor. Taylor, as Tzan's account makes abundantly clear, was an innovator, working outward from a tradition that had always valued entrepreneurial zeal. He was an old school Methodist who embraced the future as he comprehended it. He quarreled with bishops and flouted much of Methodism's ecclesiastical structure but never quite abandoned that sense of connection (that all-important word for Methodists) that lay at its heart. He embraced the transportation revolution brought about by steam and Anglo-American empire but concluded that “civilization would save no one” (103). He recruited hundreds of missionaries to serve overseas on behalf of precious souls but more or less abandoned his family, not seeing them for years at a time. Taylor was a hero to thousands, but he did not know his adult children, and toward the end of his life his wife wanted nothing to do with him. Tzan holds all of these complexities in balance, yielding a portrait not just of a man but of a movement that did much to shape the course of world religion. Tzan's account is as vivid and memorable as his subject.
Taylor became an itinerant Methodist preacher in 1842, at the age of twenty-one. He married Isabelle Anne Kimberlin in 1846. In 1849, William, Anne (as she preferred to be called), their first child Morgan Stuart, and Anne's sisters boarded a clipper ship bound for California and its flood of gold rush migrants. The Taylor's second child, Oceana Wilson, was born off the coast of Argentina but died scarcely more than a year later.
In San Francisco, Taylor became embroiled in a financial scandal that would, as Tzan explains, define his ministry for years and force him into new patterns. Taylor assumed personal responsibility for the debt involved in buying a hotel as a ministry to sailors. When a fire destroyed the building and the booming real estate market collapsed, he was left unable to repay the debt, amounting to tens of thousands of dollars. Desperate to remove this “embarrassment,” Taylor fled California and became an author and itinerant evangelist in the hopes of raising enough to repay his obligations, establishing a pattern he would follow for the remainder of his life. He never stopped traveling, speaking, or writing, even after the debt was gone.
Taylor wrote more than a dozen books, chronicling his expanding travels and evolving views on missions. Beginning in 1862, he traveled to Britain, Palestine, and Australia, preaching and selling books. By 1866 his debt had essentially been erased. But Taylor did not return to a more traditional ministry path. Instead, he pushed on to South Africa and India. From 1875 to 1882, Taylor crisscrossed the United States recruiting missionaries for India and South America. By the middle of the 1880s there were more than two hundred Taylor missionaries in the field, putting him at the forefront of a massive surge in American missions abroad.
Taylor advocated self-supporting missions, one of the themes of Tzan's analysis, often repeating a Southern aphorism from his youth: “root hog or die.” The gist of this approach was that, like the apostle Paul, missionaries should support themselves. God would provide but only “for those willing to work for it,” as Tzan writes (183). Taylor refused to allow the Methodist Missionary Board to oversee his missions. His maverick ways and relentless self-promotion made him “a living hero of the Methodist faithful,” according to Tzan, a prophet of a bold future (196).
Not surprisingly, Taylor increasingly quarreled with denominational leaders. When they tried to place his South American missions under the umbrella of the church's missions board in 1884, Taylor abruptly resigned his ministerial credentials, whereupon his friends in the South India Conference elected him as a lay delegate to the 1884 General Conference. In a stunning turnaround, after returning to the U.S. from Chile, Taylor was elected the Methodist Episcopal Church's Bishop of Africa.
When his health began to fail, Taylor returned to California in 1895, only to find “a wife and sons he had abandoned for most of his life . . . either unable or unwilling to care for him” (236). He died in Palo Alto in 1902.
In some ways, Taylor anticipated trends that would continue into the twentieth century: a trend toward short-term missions based on easier travel, reliance on indigenous preachers (particularly in Africa), and the growing prevalence of women on the mission field, to name only a few. Methodism's expansion into Africa, India, and South America owed much to William Taylor. He was a controversial figure in his own day, whose larger-than-life persona exaggerated the church's strengths and weaknesses, and whose ultimate end was mostly sad. There is much to learn from Taylor's life. This is a brilliant achievement that deserves to be widely read.
