Are Methodists Peculiar? Not Enough

In a recent article in Firebrand David Watson took up the important question of what make Methodism unique. https://firebrandmag.com/articles/a-peculiar-methodism. He argues, and I agree, for a recovery of Methodist peculiarity. I disagree with his analysis of what went wrong, which simply repeats the old traditionalist tropes going back to the 70's. But what I really miss in his presentation is much sharper listing of Methodist distinctives as they might play out in the US particularly, but also beyond, and that’s what I want to provide below.

• Evangelism for personal salvation. What made Wesley and the revivalists of his day both unique and threatening to the religious establishment was an emphasis on personal conversion. In the context of 18th century England this was truly radical because it had radical social and political implications. If people could, through their own personal decision, enter into a saving relationship with God through Christ then the entire English ecclesial establishment was under threat. Of course it had faced, and larger neutralized that threat with regard to smaller non-establishment churches. But Wesley’s revival was well organized threat from within. 

Today the idea that the idea of personal choice in the must fundamental aspects of human personhood remains a source of revolutionary empowerment when it is taught and preached. While we don’t find an established church in most of the world, we do find entrenched civil religions and their inexorable pressure to conform. Evangelistic preaching for personal salvation, if it can escape the clutches of civil religion, remains central to empowering human freedom. 

• Personal salvation for social holiness. Equally radical was Wesley’s preaching that with the power of the Holy Spirit a person could be sanctified for the sanctification of the wider society. People were freed from the need to be propped up by the vast network of social conventions, laws, restrictions, and mandates that society uses to control people's charitable impulses and keep them from ever threatening social norms. Because people were saved for social holiness they knew the power to act as Jesus acted even when it ran exactly contrary to what was socially acceptable, whether in terms or personal or political action. 

This remains true today. What should make Methodists distinct is our preaching that sanctification frees us from conformity to the socially acceptable forms of doing good and being good and opens us to radical new ministries of love and service. 

• Free thought and free will as the basis for any free choice for Jesus Christ. Establishment Christianity in Wesley’s England didn’t want people, especially poor people, to believe that they had a free will. What the established churches wanted was ecclesial puppets who believed that they could make no meaningful personal choices and should therefore hand their lives over to priests or pastors to be guided (hopefully) toward salvation. People who realize that by God's grace they have been given the power to freely choose to follow God’s will as revealed in scripture, and that they can read scripture in the fellowship of other free people in order to discern its meaning, are the worst nightmare of the ecclesial establishment. 

Wesley's Armenianism was a necessary corrective to both stultifying establishmentarianism and deadly Calvinist predestinarianism, and remains so today. 

• The expectation of a response. Wesley and his preachers expected that those who heard the gospel preached would respond by a public affirmation of faith in Christ and a commitment to sanctification. Methodist preaching and teaching should be like a good country western song. It succeeds when it makes you laugh, cry, or dance. It fails if all you do is smile, frown, or tap your feet. But most of all it fails if it doesn’t inspire you to do something beyond feeling something. Wesley expected sanctification, and so should we. The unfortunate Southern Methodist tendency to encourage a pattern of revival, backsliding, and more revival until “revival” becomes institutionalized in the life of the believer isn’t Methodist, its Baptist, and its bad. 

• Putting leadership from ecclesial margins at the center of the evangelistic movement. Wesley’s genius, and the distinctive genius of Methodism, was to include relatively uneducated lay persons of low social status at the center of growing movement. In forming classes and bands and their lay leaders, and empowering lay preachers, Wesley recognized that regular people were capable of directing the movement of God‘s plan of salvation and reforming their own lives. This distinctive focus on lay leadership, not least in preaching and teaching, is the only way to insure that all the gifts and graces within our churches come to fruition in the life of the Body of Christ.

• Methodological and contextual innovation. Wesley and the early Methodists were constantly trying, adopting, or rejecting different methods for preaching the gospel and organizing the movement to do so more effectively in specific social and cultural contexts. They were both innovators and early adapters in the realm of evangelism on the geographical and social frontiers. It was not contextualization that conformed to the context for the sake of easy acceptance, but rather contextualization that made the gospel comprehensible even if being understood meant giving offense. 

This we need to rediscover. Our theological obsessions are now a century old or older. We're fighting over the 20th century 22 years after it ended. 

Worse, United Methodism, apart from a few pioneers, is in many cases a decade behind in the adaptation of new media and new languages in order to make the gospel comprehensible to contemporary people. Covid laid bare the fact that United Methodists barely understood digitally mediated ministries and pedagogies, the use of social media to create and sustain community, and emerging forms of video and virtual reality. To maintain an effective public witness to Christ we must recapture Wesley's spirit of innovation and apply it across the range of media that are becoming the cultural norm for communication, teaching, and community building. It is exactly the presence of innovators in the midst of United Methodism, albeit largely on the margins of ecclesial structure, that should give us hope that we can begin to once again embrace the life-giving Methodist spirit.

• Disruption. If there is a distinctive Methodist tradition that waned during the early 20th century and was followed by full scale conformity of Methodism and then United Methodism to American civil religion it is the tradition of disruption. When Wesley and his followers were called “enthusiasts” and “fanatics” it wasn’t a compliment. There is certainly little danger today that contemporary United Methodists from across our theological spectrum would warrant either appellation. Our passions and our internal conflicts disrupt nothing, for they are played out entirely within the conventional passions and conflicts besetting our society. Far from disrupting society, our continual focus on human sexuality simply mimics the deepest seated trope of American culture and civil religion. From our political protests to our ham-handed efforts to somehow hold a General Conference in a time of Covid we simply replay and rewind the same old American religious and political games. And not even the highlights.

Not that we couldn't be real disrupters. It would be well worth losing members if Methodists unequivocally denounced the political movement of Donald Trump and his acolytes. And it would be faithfully Christian. It would be well worth losing members if we made a piercing analysis of the dangers of data mining and social manipulation through social media central to our preaching and teaching on social holiness, and again it would be faithfully Christian. It would be well worth losing members if we made both valuing science as a source of real knowledge and placing public welfare above personal liberty central to our preaching, and again it would be faithfully Christian and genuinely Methodist. One could go on. All Methodists need to do is what Wesley did, unfailingly apply the gospel to the pressing personal and social issues of the day even if some people turn away. 

Methodists have a tradition which, if embraced, could once again make us the center of a liberating gospel and an engine for social holiness. Whether we can live with its more uncomfortable aspects, and the dangers it poses to what is now our entrenched ecclesial establishment, remains to be seen.