Wesleyan Church Today 3

3. Wesleyans are Wesley-an.

Wesley is one of the best places to start discussing the “head” that’s guided by our heart. A number of Wesley's ideas stand out as essential ingredients in who Wesleyans are today. One of his main teachings was that you can know in this life whether you are bound for heaven--broader American Christianity has absorbed this idea too, so it is no longer something that would distinguish the Methodist tradition from others.

When we think of Wesley today, we probably think more about his contribution of entire sanctification to theology than the idea of the assurance of salvation, since the latter is now widely held. Wesley taught that a person should be victorious over willful sin from the moment they become a Christian. But he also believed—sometimes more optimistically, sometimes less—that others would find themselves set free in this life from the “bent to sinning” as well—the tendency to sin, the sinful nature. He called this “Christian perfection.”

The belief in victory over sin in this world is not a very common belief in the church today. Yet it is the clear teaching of the entire Bible. I cannot think of a single verse in the entirety of the Bible that in any way advocates intentional sin as a normal or expected part of a Christian’s life. This remains one of the greatest strengths of our tradition and one in which almost all other Christian traditions remain in the dark.

Of course the Wesleyan version of entire sanctification came more directly through Phoebe Palmer and the holiness movement of the 1800’s. Palmer taught “the shorter way” and made it the expectation of all Christians to experience it today. I grew up with sermons on how we needed to take hold of the “angel” of entire sanctification and not let go until we received the blessing. Further, from John Fletcher on, American Methodists increasingly identified the Spirit-fillings of Acts as experiences of entire sanctification.

Ten years ago, Keith Drury famously proclaimed the death of the holiness movement. By this he did not mean the death of the doctrine as truth, only the death of the movement. But some have wondered if what we have really witnessed is the ebb of Palmer type holiness, rather than a more Wesley-an formulation of the truth. A conference last year on salvation at Wesleyan Church HQ found strong interest by Wesleyan educators in John Wesley’s understanding of Christian perfection, which some had never heard distinguished from Palmer's.

Wesleyans thus continue to believe in the necessity of victory over sin and the power of God to free all Christians from the power of sin. We are probably seeing a resurgence of interest in this doctrine among many younger Wesleyans. It will likely remain of the distinct beliefs of The Wesleyan Church.

Wesley is known for the saying, “There is no holiness but social holiness.” By it he implied that any sense of Christian holiness that does not lead to positive social action is no real holiness. It was this impulse that lead Wesley to preach to coal miners in the north of England and the reason why even today English Methodism is heavily composed of the everyday working class of England. So it was when Methodism entered America. The Midwest is a powerhouse in Methodism because this was the frontier when the gospel entered America. And while their children are now upper middle class, they were originally the salt of American earth.

Our more specific roots were founded in the abolitionist movement, as the Wesleyan Methodist Connection withdrew from the Methodist Episcopal Church for its refusal to take a stand against slavery. The women’s rights movement—something some modern Wesleyans are embarrassed about—is usually dated from a meeting in a Wesleyan Church in the late 1800’s in Seneca Falls, New York. And the sermon on that occasion was preached by none other than Luther Lee, cofounder of the Wesleyan Methodist Church. I proudly celebrate that our fathers and mothers were fighting for women to be able to vote when other Christians were emphasizing that women should stay in their “place.”

And so I question the right of individuals to call themselves “Wesleyan” when they have questions about women in ministry or would place Pharisaic restrictions on what a woman can do in the home. Such a person has lost sight of the “head” of our tradition, and I don’t mean John Wesley. This type person would have opposed women voting back when we were leading the way of the Spirit in the cause of “full salvation” for women as well as men. These were the Methodists whose Judaizing tendencies led you to keep quiet in the days of slavery or even oppose their emancipation. They would fit better in some other more impoverished tradition.

In the early 1900’s there was no stigma to a woman minister in our churches. It was only after WW2, when men came home from the war to find women empowered in the workplace and increasingly in society, that the numbers of women in ministry began to decline in our churches. They had lots of children in the baby boom, no doubt diverting many from ministry. Meanwhile, some men felt intimidated by the increasing power of women in society, and the result was a backlash among bigots and the insecure who hid behind the mask of the Bible. But now the disease has infected even the well-intentioned, people like Dobson who—with Nazarene roots—should know better.

This social dimension passed on into many of the Methodist offshoots of the late 1800’s. The Salvation Army is a perfect example of the spirit that was also a part of our forebears. It has survived at the grass roots level of the Wesleyan Church—what Wesleyan Church has not kept a food pantry for the homeless or needy who might come to the parsonage door? While many other conservatives oppose helping the needy as if it were actually unchristian in some way, many of our most conservative holiness churches—the ones we have sometimes disdained as legalistic—have continued to reach out to the poor and needy.

Wesley also saw one of his tasks as “the spreading of Scriptural holiness throughout the land.” This man was not perfect. Indeed, one of his “sins” was that he did so much mission that he did not give appropriate attention to his marriage. This man circled England again and again and again preaching the good news to anyone who would hear. He was a church planter, an evangelist, a discipler whose class meetings set up incredible accountability for individual Christians. His writings are a treasure trove of resources for the next generation of Wesleyans to plunder.

These are some of the key beliefs, emphases, and practices that the Wesleyan Church has in common with Wesley. They have significant impact on what a Wesleyan college or university should look like. We will return to them when we ask how the beliefs of a denominational college should impact its universities.