This Week in Texas Methodist History January 15 Advocate Editor A. J. Weeks Reports on Missionary Council Meeting in Savannah, January 1938 Methodists eagerly anticipated the bicentennial of John Wesley’s Aldersgate experience which was to occur in May, 1938. Most Methodists recognized Wesley’s “heart warming experience” as the birth of the Methodist movement. In 1938 Methodists were also celebrating the ancipated reunion of the northern and southern branches of the church along with the Methodist Protestan Church. Deleghates had been working on the details of merger for years, and sentiment in favor of unification was running high. The annual conferences of 1938 would vote to approve the merger of the three denominations which would be consummated in 1939. The editor of the Southwestern Advocate, A. J. Weeks, decided to attend the the Missionary Council meeting to be held in Savannah, Georgia, in January 1938. He also decided to fly rather than take the railroad. When he reported on the trip and the conference, he reveled in the Methodist connections along the way. He left Dallas by air. The first stop was Tyler where he commented on the CME college. Then on to Centenary where Centenary College existed. Then to Jackson, the home of Millsaps College. Birmingham was next, the home of Birmingham Southern. After that was Atlanta, the home of Emory, and finally Macon, Georgia, where he switched to ground transportation. The meeting in Savannah was a love fest in which both MEC and MECS luminaries spoke eloquently about walking on the same streets John and Charles Wesley had walked. The union was still 16 months away, but the two denominations had already started the process of merging the missionary efforts of the northern and souther churches. It was a grand example of how history=in this case the Georgia experience of the Wesleys brought the denominations closer.