Methodists are people with an odd name. One would not expect a Christian church to be called Methodist. It sounds as though they were making a dogma of method. Well, actually that is what they were first accused of doing.
Their founder, the Rev John Wesley, was an Oxford lecturer who led a small group of undergraduates in the 1730s in reading the Bible and the early Christian Fathers. As a result of their study they began to carefully observe the rules of the church regarding feast days and fasts, and to regularly undertake works of charity.
They gave help to the poor and visited those who were sick or in prison. It was that regularity which led unsympathetic undergraduates to nickname them Methodists. When, some years later, Wesley began to form the religious societies which developed into the Methodist Church, the name transferred.
It was not the funny name which attracted people. In an age much more religious than the present, the preaching of salvation in plain language made a considerable impact on the new working classes then being created by the agricultural and industrial revolutions in England, but there was more to it than that.
At a time when power and wealth were in the hands of the few - the ruling classes - the rest of the population were merely farm hands or factory hands and were encouraged to think of themselves as of little or no account, except in so far as they could produce something the community needed.
When the Methodist preacher announced in the highways, at the market crosses, in fields or in barns - wherever the crowd had gathered - that God loved the ordinary people, had redeemed them through Christ and would help them to be holy, it gave to people a new sense of personal worth.
Having formed into societies people who responded to their message, Wesley and his preachers encouraged and trained them in the management of their societies. This reinforced and developed that sense of worth.
It was part of Wesley's genius to devise a simple system by which the untrained could manage their own groups. Instead of the business agenda used by all modern organisations he formulated lists of questions, and all the group had to do was to answer the questions put to it.
IT was the easiest of all organisational systems to follow, and it gave to the Methodists a self-confidence in their own societies which they carried outside. The founders of many of the early trade unions in the 19th century were Methodists using the skills they had learned in their church meetings.
That they applied their Methodism in social concern outside the church was a natural development from Wesley's understanding of holiness. To him it was not just personal piety. It was social holiness; it had to be related to every aspect of daily life.
So it was limited to honesty and morality, but was more concerned with the well-being of the community as a whole. That is why he established schools for the young, homes for the elderly and dispensaries where simple medicines could be available to the poor.
That is why he published cheap editions of pious books, often condensed to make them more readable. Holiness, in other words, was not a detachment which others might admire, but an engagement with others so their lives might be improved in quality, and not only in religion.
How many of the Methodists have ever achieved that standard may be debated, but what is remarkable is how many of them took the matter seriously.
In one notable aspect, Wesley failed. In a sermon on the use of money, he urged people to earn all they could, save all they could and give all they could. It was the third injunction which was the recipe for holy poverty, and the one which Methodists, by and large, have found hardest to follow.
In this they are no different from anyone else, but at present when so much of life is dominated by financial values, and when people are encouraged to get as much money as possible, as quickly as possible, Wesley's voice comes as a salutary reminder that wealth is not the solution to every problem.
In Ireland the Methodists have expressed their heritage of social holiness in the enthusiasm with which they have pursued education and social responsibility; the strongest expression of the latter being their work in the field of housing for the older citizens.
In both cases, the Methodists themselves have been a small minority among the beneficiaries. Their colleges and sheltered housing projects have been open to members of other Christian churches and to people of other faiths.
Always eager to quote Wesley's comment that "the Methodists are friends of all and the enemies of none", Irish Methodists have in recent years found a renewal of that vision in the development of ecumenical co-operation.
Dudley Levistone Cooney is author of The Methodists in Ireland, published by the Columba Press (£12.99)