James MAUGHAN

MAUGHAN, JAMES (b. Hepburn, Northumberland, England, 25 Oct 1826; d. Adelaide, SA, 8 Mar, 1871). Methodist New Connexion minister.

Maughan was born into straitened circumstances, had only a few years of schooling, and worked from an early age in a colliery near Newcastle-on-Tyne. As a young man he was converted through the ministry of a Methodist New Connexion minister and became a local (lay) preacher. In 1848 he was accepted as a minister on probation by the Conference and appointed to the Bradford circuit. He was received into full connexion in 1852. From 1848 to 1862 Maughan served in eight English circuits of the Methodist New Connexion. A good preacher and organiser, Maughan was able to increase the membership and erect new buildings in several of his circuits. While at Bristol in 1862 he was asked to undertake MNC work in Australia. He sailed with his wife, Catherine, and three children and, after a short stay in Melbourne, moved to Adelaide. He held his first service in a room in Hindley Street on 21 Dec 1862.

New Connexion work in South Australia was started ten to twenty years after other branches of Methodism had established themselves in the colony. As a result, despite Maughan's popularity and ability, it never prospered. A church to seat 600 (a figure suggesting great hope for the future) was built in Franklin St, Adelaide in 1864 and another at Hope Valley, north of the city, three years later. These left the tiny membership (108 in 1867) burdened with debt.

Maughan's sermons collected by his biographer show that he was thoroughly conservative in his theology and earnestly evangelical in his preaching. At the same time he had a lively interest in science, especially chemistry, and philosophy. He was much in demand as a lecturer on scientific subjects and the income from this activity supplemented the finances of his struggling church. One year he was awarded a prize for an essay on diseases in wheat. Maughan's scientific interest was always the servant of his dominating passion, religion. The book of revelation, the Bible, could be supplemented by appeal to the book of nature, God being the author of both.

Maughan was often debilitated by chest disease, presumably tuberculosis, and he died in 1871 at the age of forty-four. A few years later the Hope Valley church was sold to the Primitive Methodists. The church in Franklin Street lingered on until 1888 when, with the sanction and encouragement of the Conference in England, MNC work was merged with that of Bible Christians. The church that Maughan had built was named after him and shortly after Methodist union in 1900 became the first Central Methodist Mission in Adelaide. The name 'Maughan' survives as an appellation of the present church which in 1965 replaced that built a century earlier.

W Cooke, Memoir of the Life and Labours of Rev. James Maughan (London, 1872)

ARNOLD D HUNT