belize, 1980 - Prolades.com

six years in the District and became the first principal of Wesley College, a new Methodist High
School that opened at Belize City in 1882. In addition to the recently established circuits at Toledo
and Stann Creek, new circuits were formed at Orange Walk and along the Belize River during the
1880s.
Some discouragement was evidenced among the Methodist missionaries in British Honduras
in the early 1880s, due to the subordination of the Honduras District to the Jamaican Synod. Peters,
then Chairman of the Honduras District, and himself a former missionary to Jamaica, expressed his
unqualified disapproval of this action. Apparently, Peters and his colleagues were unanimously
opposed to the new organizational structure of the West Indian Conferences, due to long delays in
communication. Regular sailings between British Honduras and Jamaica had terminated, which
required that passengers and mail travel by boat via New York to reach their destination, a voyage
of about four weeks. Therefore, at it’s own insistence, the Honduran District remained under direct
British supervision, rather than continuing its association with the Western Conference, composed
mainly of the Jamaican Districts.
Missionaries in Belize were also impatient with the duties of school teaching and
administration that were imposed upon them and that kept them from devoting more time to
evangelism and church planting in the interior of Belize, especially among the Spanish-speaking
population. For years, Fletcher, Spratt, Gibbens and Atkins had advocated that the Missionary
Society begin new work in Guatemala, Mexico and Spanish Honduras. However, the Society lacked
both the manpower and the finances for this needed expansion. In the meantime, the missionaries
were tied down to school responsibilities and implored the Society to find lay schoolmasters for
Methodist schools in Belize. But the oppressive nature of the climate, the high cost of living in the
Colony, and the low pay offered to schoolmasters were factors that discouraged prospective laymen
and made the Society's task of recruitment very difficult. The involvement of the small missionary
staff in school responsibilities no doubt hampered the advancement of the Belize Mission.
Nevertheless, the District increased its membership by a fourth between 1880 and 1884, no doubt
due to the zeal and self-sacrificing service of these pioneer workers whose letters reveal that they
longed for a gracious outpouring of the Holy Spirit and for the assistance of godly laymen who
practiced their faith and who had a zeal for God.
After Atkins' return to Jamaica in 1886, the Rev. William Tyson was appointed as Chairman
of the Honduras District and served in that capacity for five years. Tyson, who had gone to Jamaica
as a missionary in 1846, and subsequently served in the South African Conference and for a time in
English Circuits, was an experienced and discerning minister whose wisdom and love for people
earned him a good reputation in Belize. Under his leadership, several new fields were opened,
including the formation of the San Pedro Sula Circuit in Spanish Honduras led by Owen Jones and
Jenry Bunting.
Tyson's removal in 1891 was followed by a period of discontent and unrest in the Honduras
District. He left behind a small group of junior ministers who weren't without talent or promise, yet
were young and did not form a well-matched team. Rather than using their energies for creative
ministries, the missionaries were preoccupied with personal differences, wrangling and contention,
and scandal involving the character of a young minister, which led to divisions and discouragement
among the brethren. Under a succession of short-lived appointments to the chairmanship of the
District, under whose administration numerous disputes and complaints were voiced to the Society
in London, the progress of Methodism in Belize was seriously delayed at a crucial time that called for
bold advance into the Spanish-speaking republics of Central America, where Evangelical work was
almost nonexistent.
The growth of liberal political institutions, coupled with the decline of Roman Catholic
influence during the 1880s, offered unprecedented opportunities for evangelical penetration into the
neighboring countries from the Methodist base in British Honduras. The band of missionaries there
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