John Wesley had great influence over Methodism during his life. He devoted his religious movement to the notion that the proper model for religion was the simplicity of the apostolic church. In funding religious work, faith would be key to finance. Methodist economy outgrew Wesley's early understanding of providence. Simple giving by faithful members could not support the movement's ambitions. Clive Murray Norris describes that by 1800 the movement had complex administrative structures; expensive obligations to personnel, property, and philanthropy; and a commitment to debt finance. Business decisions at times brought criticism from without the organization and created tensions within. In 1741, an Anglican cleric derided Wesley's fund-raising: “A religious Cheat is the worst of all” (1). But Methodism lacked the full resources of the Church of England and had to innovate. More significant for Norris's book was the internal tension between evangelical goals and practicality. The desire to grow raised the conflict of spreading the means of grace without living outside of the movement's means. That tension runs through Norris's book. His objective is “to describe what” the work of eighteenth-century Methodism in Britain “cost, and how the money required was raised and managed” (v). In great detail, Norris fulfills that goal.

The first three chapters examine the financing of Methodist preaching. Chapter 1 lays out itinerant preaching's basic operations and how funding developed to meet their costs. The itinerancy began informally. Preachers split time between ministering and employment in a trade. In the 1760s, ministers were prohibited from secular business. Itinerant preachers were to be professionals. Importantly, some preachers relied on resources contributed by their wives, whether through their labor or family wealth. Maintaining a professional ministry required Methodism to develop a system of finance by direct donations from local religious societies and by distribution of funds across the broader Connexion. Those funding sources supported stable wages and pensions. As professionals, the preachers spent much time in regulating membership, gathering participation data, and collecting funds.

Chapter 2 examines the costs of preaching, which Norris estimates at £40,000 per year by 1800. The main driver of costs was the support of preachers’ growing families. Funding the growing itinerancy caused Methodism to shift from reliance primarily on individuals’ contributions to centralized financial management. The handling of costs was successful through 1800, but anxiety arose over limited collections and the complaint that preachers cared too much about their pay. The movement's appetite for growth required more sophisticated sources of funds. The Preacher's Fund, a pension plan, was one. Wesley's preachers followed a trend in eighteenth-century British society in contributing annually to a fund for their support in old age. The fund also supported widows and orphans. Those payments stressed the fund until the 1780s, when lay persons began to contribute. Connexional leaders leaned on the fund to supplement Methodism's routinely strained general budget and were rebuked by preachers for poor accounting and transparency.

Chapters 4 and 5 deal with chapel construction. By 1800, Methodists had constructed 960 chapels, about one per 116 members. Whitefield and Wesley had used open-air field preaching to launch Methodism, and society members frequently worshiped in private homes, but physical chapels brought new opportunities, pastoral care for larger numbers, and follow-up for nonmembers touched by revival preaching. Chapels were oases from the secular world while entangling Methodists in capitalist networks. Many local societies were eager to build chapels and turned to local investors for mortgages. However, in the mid-1760s, those debts threatened a financial crisis for the Connexion. Central regulation brought discipline to local chapel projects. Competitive interest rates (often the maximum allowed by usury law) and steady debt servicing from collections and seat rents attracted investment from well-off members and non-members. Dealing in interest concerned some Methodists, and seat rents brought divisions of economic class into societies and threatened to restrict chapel access from some worshipers.

Chapter 6 outlines incomes and expenditures of local societies and circuits and flows of resources from periphery to center and their redistribution. A weekly penny and quarterly shilling from members sufficed for the routine costs of the traveling ministry. Preachers and lay stewards collected and accounted for funds from societies and each circuit, which kept preachers fed, groomed, and saddled. Larger expenses such as buying or maintaining chapels and parsonages or purchasing a horse required special collections. Local funds did not cover all costs. The Connexion maintained the General Fund, constituted by the Yearly Collection and buttressed by the Preachers’ Fund and the Book Concern, to support nonlocal works, to alleviate onerous circuit debts, and to redistribute resources from wealthy circuits to poor. These transactions over time required a central committee structure that inched financial responsibility away from Wesley.

Chapters 7 and 8 present the Book Room, a key form of evangelization in a century of expanding print culture. Wesley attended to its literature and growth and considered its profits his property. He developed in-house production, ensured accessible prices (charging for some texts in order to give others away), and marketed through preachers rather than paying book distributors. Wesley distributed profits through his movement as he saw fit; after his death “the cash-poor Connexion's central income doubled” from Book Room revenue (190).

The ninth chapter, “Education, Welfare, and Missions,” addresses three areas that extended Methodism to nonmembers. These works were important but exceptional in that their financing was peripheral to the Connexional economy described by Norris. A substantial conclusion summarizes the book and argues that “eighteenth-century Methodism was a thoroughly modern institution” (243).

Specialists and researchers will appreciate this book's large amount of data, which populates seven figures, nine tables, four appendices, and most pages, as well as the omnipresent block quotations. Nonspecialists might have trouble finding the narrative amid the facts. Readability aside, Norris's book is important. It highlights the mundane yet fundamental forms of religion. One preacher remarked that keeping accounts “was my duty, but it was poor dry work” (20), but Methodist institution builders believed that dry work was needed to raise the dry bones.