The Wesleyan Church Today

The material I did before was too much for my current piece, so here is a reader's digest version. By the way, did anyone notice that Bounds has a blog now!! http://www.cbounds.blogspot.com

The Wesleyan Church Today
A church does not necessarily have a fixed identity. Churches can ebb and flow in their priorities; they can even reject who they have been in the past in favor of some different future. With the holiness movement pronounced dead, the church growth movement in decline, and the cultural shift away from centralized denominations, the Wesleyan Church has sometimes seemed to coast in recent times without a clear sense of direction. It is in these times that a group needs to revisit its past in dialog with its present. The goal is to re-present its past in a way that enables it to redefine itself for the future.

I have done something like this in my brief retelling of the history of The Wesleyan Church and its location within broader Christendom. So let me suggest three characteristics of its past that fittingly might define it as the church moves forward into the future:

1. Wesleyans are people of the Spirit.
We are a revivalist denomination that was Pentecostal before tongues came in the Asuza street revivals of a century ago. As I will suggest below when considering a Wesleyan model for the integration of faith and learning, we are a church of the heart first and the head second. At times, we have been so emotionally and experientially oriented that we have bordered on anti-intellectualism. Obviously we cannot even have academic institutions if this is our true identity. It is not. But as a church we are first interested in where you are at in your relationship with God and only then with what your head is thinking.

One of the implications of this emphasis is that things like the fundamentalist modernist controversy--arguments about higher criticism, the virgin birth, evolution--these things were pretty far removed from us when they were taking place. We were looking for the Pentecostal power at the time, understood as entire sanctification rather than tongues. These debates of the broader culture had little overall affect on our tradition. A few of our academics paid notice, but the bulk did not.

So as the post-modern age dawns, the Wesleyan Church as a whole can by pass some of the quirks of modernism and catch right up with where the flow of history is at the moment. Here I have particularly in mind mistaking certain cultural paradigms in any number of disciplines for the correct or even Christian ones. Admittedly, Wesleyan institutions of higher learning are more likely to have taken on modernist baggage than the broader church. By their very nature, our colleges have been more engaged with the intellectual issues of the age than the broader church. Houghton College in particular was a bastion of modernist evangelicalism in the late twentieth century.

Yet most of our Wesleyan colleges and universities have thus far been more about teaching than about pushing the bounds of knowledge. Most of our colleges have been content to teach the basics than to engage directly the intellectual currents of the day. Few Wesleyan faculty publish in anything like mainstream academic journals. And, rightly or wrongly, a conflict between the Wesleyan Church and Houghton castrated its academic hubris in the early 90's. I believe this pruning and time of recuperation, along with the academic growth that has taken place at all the Wesleyan institutions, puts us in a good position to begin to "find our head." We've had a heart all along. Let us declare open season on a new age in Wesleyan academics, when our professors will find themselves putting a Christian voice out there in the leading academic journals and publications of all disciplines.

Let me finally remention the Pilgrim Holiness motto of "in essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, and in all things, charity." This spirit of limited, but generous orthodoxy befits a Wesleyan educational institution. This spirit will play into my suggestions for a Wesleyan model for the integration of faith and learning. In particular, it would seem that a Wesleyan model should allow for a greater diversity of the mind than a Wheaton or a Calvin, because the greatest defining characteristic of unity is the heart. As Wesley said, "If your heart is as my heart, then put your hand in mine."

Next summaries of people of the Bible and Wesley-an.