Methodism and the Challenge of 'the Sixties'

Abstract

There was something about 1960. 'This after all is not merely the beginning of a year, explained Ray Watson, Chairman of the Methodist Lay Activities Council, 'it is the beginning of a decade.' But there was much more to it even than that. 'On all sides, he continued, 'we are being reminded of expansion - material and human - of scientific achievement,population explosion and increasing prosperity: 1 The year 1960 represented the emergence of a bright future from the recent strangleholds of economic depression and war. In the United States, 1960 received added articulation with the election of the young John F. Kennedy to the presidency. Without an equivalent defining act Australians drew on broad signs of progress to confirm that great change was imminent. They were not wrong, but could not, of course, foresee all the directions such change would take. As much as there was great hope in the 1960s there was also great turmoil. Every Australian had to respond to what became the 1960s phenomenon. Methodists did so with a 'spiritual dynamic'.