William SHAW

SHAW, WILLIAM (b. Chetwyn End, Newport, Shropshire, England, 22 March 1854; d. Adelaide, SA, 1 Oct 1937). Methodist minister.

Shaw was accepted by the Methodist New Connexion Conference as a probationary minister in 1878 and was ordained 1882. In 1883, while stationed at Chester, he was asked to go to Melbourne as superintendent of the Richmond circuit. The MNC Conference decided in 1888 to withdraw from its Australian work and Shaw negotiated the merger of the Victorian church with the Wesleyans. As a Wesleyan minister, Shaw then served eleven years in Victorian and six in Tasmanian circuits.

In 1905 Shaw was transferred to Archer St, North Adelaide. Thereafter, until his retirement in 1928, he was minister of some of the leading Methodist churches in the state. Always interested in young people's work, he became state and national president of the CE movement. In 1918 he was elected president of the SA Conference. After his retirement he led for five years a program of Methodist evangelism under the banner of the Spiritual Advance Crusade.

Shaw was regarded as an expository preacher of considerable power. He was a careful scholar, cautiously conservative yet ready to accept elements from the new Biblical scholarship of his time. At the request of the Methodist General Conference he wrote a textbook, Christian Theology, for students that earned him a DD from McGill University in Montreal. Its prolix style, however, worked against its popularity and it was never widely read.

A D Hunt, This Side of Heaven: A History of Methodism in South Australia (Adelaide, 1985); Minutes of Methodist Conference (SA), 1938, 60; Australian Christian Commonwealth, 8 Oct 1937; W Shaw, Christian Theology (Melbourne 1928)

ARNOLD D HUNT