ABSTRACT
Personnel-sharing had long been two-way traffic; welcoming colleagues from abroad as well as supporting mission partners lent to sister churches. Less of the budget went on personnel costs as the number of mission partners dwindled; more was available to support Nationals in Mission Appointments, to fund scholarships, and to make grants to sister churches, ecumenical and other bodies. Members of the Church were actively pursuing their calling to engage in God's mission through a wide range of commitments, often not specifically Methodist but in association with activists of all faiths and none. In an otherwise unrecognizable world, eighteenth-century Methodists would have felt at home in the company of these enthusiastic, Spirit-filled Christians, with their ecstatic utterances, visions, prophecies and the same hysterical symptoms which frequently marked conversion experiences in Wesley's day. By 1996 the contours and context of Christian mission were vastly different from anything that Thomas Coke could have conceived.
