On "Discovering" Wesley

Columbus didn't "Discover the Americas" -- they were already there

I’ve spent my entire adult life in the Wesleyan tradition, divided between the Church of the Nazarene and the United Methodist Church¹. At first, I wasn’t sure what that meant and didn’t know much about Wesley, although I was familiar with his brother Charles’ hymns.

My real introduction to Wesley happened while teaching a Sunday School class when I was at Olivet Nazarene University. We selected readings from Discipleship Magazine as our first class material. The particular topic was on the nature of Grace and the futility of trying to earn God’s favor. From there we read Howard Snyder’s The Radical Wesley, a wonderful book about John Wesley’s background, thought, and organizational brilliance. Somewhere along the way I became fluent in Albert Outler’s “Wesleyan Quadrilateral” of scripture, tradition, experience, and reason.

When I moved to a Presbyterian school, the importance of my Wesleyan identity deepened, especially after they got a grant to solidify their Reformed ethos. After moving to Portland, two things further solidified that understanding. First, I read Wesley scholar Randy Maddox’s Responsible Grace. In it, he argues that the key to understanding Wesley’s theology is to make a earnest response to the grace that had been offered to us preveniently. More significantly, we were leading a another Sunday School class in a Methodist church when I realized that the class members didn’t have any awareness of John Wesley at all. I found Wesley sermons online and used those as the basis for our class for that quarter.² There is so much in Wesley’s sermons that serves us well today.

In my first book, I devoted a chapter to articulating a Wesleyan approach to Christian Higher Education, since much of the literature drew from Reformed understandings. I had tried the argument out at the 2013 Wesleyan Theological Society meeting at Seattle Pacific.³

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Given that background, I was somewhat surprised to see a story last week in Christianity Today with the provocative title, “Wesley is Fire Now” and Evangelicals Are Being Strangely Warmed”. I have to give kudos for the title, especially the last half which references Wesley’s famous Aldersgate experience. The story argues:

There appears to be a growing number of young people drawn to Wesleyanism and Wesleyan-Arminian theology. Nearly 20 years after the rise of New Calvinism—when “Young, Restless, Reformed” Christians embraced the doctrinal system taught by French theologian John Calvin—there’s a new and renewed interest in another theological tradition, which has a bit of a different flavor.

Where Calvin taught predestination, Wesley believed that, through prevenient grace, God freed the human will sufficiently to accept or reject the offer of salvation. God predestined a plan of salvation, but not individual people. 

Theologians in the Wesleyan tradition, like many Christians, emphasize the centrality, inspiration, and reliability of Scripture. They also teach the importance of sacraments. And many of them—though not all—are egalitarian, affirming that women can be gifted and called to ministry. 

Now, I’d be the first to celebrate the fact that young men⁴ would be drawn to a more compassionate and less combative faith than offered by the Young, Restless, and Reformed crowd (think Mark Driscoll). A less intellectualized and argumentative faith that relies instead on what Wesley called “the enlivening of our spiritual senses” is a healthy shift.

My friend Chris Gehrz wrote about the article a couple of days later. He observed:

At the same time, it was striking to see how similar the “new Wesleyans” — at least as the CT article depicts them — seem to the older “new Calvinists.” It’s partly that Sidenbender reports that “many Wesleyans… think there’s just a different emphasis, not outright antagonism between the two positions”; both are caught up with a soteriological debate whose intricacies have just never meant that much to Pietists like me, who are generally more concerned with working out their faith in practice than parsing out nuances of sin and grace. But I think Hansen would recognize other similarities: the affinity of the “young, restless, strangely warmed” for connecting and evangelizing through podcasts, blogs, YouTube videos, and conferences (albeit none having anything like the numbers of the Calvinists); and the new convert’s enthusiasm for a heroic reading of a particular Christian past.

There’s another important aspect of the Christianity Today story that caught my attention. The story quotes young people and professors from Asbury University, which has long been in the Wesleyan fold. You likely know it from the 2023 revival that was in the news.

It also heavily quotes leaders of the Global Methodist Church.⁵ The GMC is the new denomination that disaffiliated from the United Methodist Church over LGBTQ+ affirmation.

The articles quotes figures from the Wesleyan church, pastors from the GMC, a leaders of the Wesley Biblical Seminary, and others. One theme that frequently shows up in the story is a desire to mimic Reformed groups, periodicals, and websites.⁶

But the thing that gets me hung up is the idea that this somehow is all new and bubbling up from some unexpected place. It’s been part of UMC identity from the start.

I wrote this summer that the Mountain Sky Annual Conference meeting heard from the chief historian for the UMC. She talked about the uniqueness of Wesley, why he was hard to pin down (because he didn’t try to make enemies even among those he disagreed with), and what he has to offer to our current moment.

My local congregation is currently working through a series she moderates called “Radicle Wesley” (meaning elemental). She goes through the early days of the Methodist movement to tease out the lessons for us today. I’m assisting our pastor in leading those sessions, trying to be helpful (and not burden everybody with unnecessary tangents!).

We didn’t need to “discover Wesley”. He’s been there all the time, in Charles’ hymnology, in our understanding of God’s gift of grace, in our passion for both individual and social holiness. It’s been part of the United Methodist Church all along, even if it occasionally and sadly wound up on the back burner.⁷

So I’m glad to see young people embracing Wesley. Its what I’ve been advocating for my entire career. But this isn’t some new fad. It’s the church celebrating the gift of God’s Grace and trying to live into a spirit of obedience to that Call.

1. Plus about four years in the Church of God (Anderson) which is also a holiness group.

2. I highlighted relevant passages on the handouts as a CliffNotes version of the sermons for those who didn’t want to read the whole thing.

3. Randy Maddox had moderated that session.

4. More on gender in Friday’s SubStack.

5. Now having their initial General Conference in Costa Rico.

6. I’d argue that these groups have been more harmful than helpful on balance.

7. The UMC did go through its “country club of America” stage in the 50s and 60s. I think critics latch onto that time period to critique the denomination the same way many past evangelicals missed Vatican II altogether when discussing Catholics.