Wesleyan Genetics: The Immediate Family

The Wesleyan Methodist Church
In 1843 a group of churches that had withdrawn from the Methodist Episcopal Church over the issue of slavery reorganized as The Wesleyan Methodist Church. This is the true beginning of the Wesleyan Church. Much has changed in America since 1843. For example, the Civil War removed the initial reason for the Wesleyan Methodist Church's existence. Many of its founding members returned to the broader Methodist Episcopal Church after the emancipation of the slaves. The church would reformulate its identity in the late 1800's around the holiness revivals of that era.

Nevertheless, the social values of the early Wesleyan Methodist Church are something for us to be proud of. History has shown it to have been on the right side of the slavery issue. It was also on the right side of the women's issue. The first ordination service of a woman in America was preached by Luther Lee, one of the founders of the Wesleyan Methodist Church. The women's rights movement traces its beginnings to a Wesleyan Methodist Church in Seneca Falls, New York. While the woman's rights movement today is sometimes considered "liberal," let us remember that many of these early efforts aimed at giving women the right to vote, something surely no Christian against women's rights today would try to argue against.

This is a strong warning to those who assume that God's position is always the so called "conservative"position. What is considered "conservative" largely derives from the issues of a particular context at a particular point in time--beyond question, it is a moving target. No one who knows anything about the history of the Wesleyan tradition would deny its ultra-conservatism in the earlier part of the twentieth century, yet it fully affirmed women in ministry as part of the Pentecostal leveling of the spiritual playing field. Today's conservatism is not yesterdays, nor will it be tomorrow's. Issues of conservatism do map uniformly from one generation to the next.

So while conservatives fought tooth and nail against the Equal Rights Amendment of the 70's, most political conservatives operate today as if it had passed--their predecessors would have considered them liberal. We had best always seek out God's position on an issue rather than what might seem to be culturally conservative at a particular point in time. I would argue that those conservative groups that refused to be a part of the Wesleyan merger in 1968 are largely stuck with the "look" of the Wesleyan church around the time they emerged as a distinct group (in other words, around the 50's). The Amish are similarly stuck with the "look" of their point of origin. Neither of these groups look anything like the early Christians.

By the end of the 1800's, the Wesleyan Methodist Church was swept up in the holiness revivals of that period. These revivalists preached entire sanctification more along the lines of Phoebe Palmer than John Wesley. They formulated the experience in terms of the Day of Pentecost in the book of Acts (which Wesley did not in his writings). And they preached a "shorter way" to sanctification that saw the experience's immediate availability rather than Wesley's sense that a person would have to wait for God's timing. On his more pessimistic days, Wesley not only questioned his own "perfection," but wondered if only a few would have the experience relatively late in life. On other days his timing would have sounded more similar to Palmer.

The typical Wesleyan church today does not look a lot like the churches of the holiness revivals, so much so that 10 years ago Keith Drury pronounced the holiness movement dead as a movement (not the doctrine). We might speculate on any number of causes. One of the main ones was likely the fact that the boomer generation associated holiness with the perceived legalism of their parents--which they rejected with a vengeance. They invested all their energies in the church growth movement and disdained the preaching of the previous generation. The newer generations do not share these experiences with them and are more open to the doctrine.

Yet there have been other detractors as well. You will search long and hard to find a Bible teacher at any Wesleyan college or seminary (or a kindred denomination)--let alone any other biblical scholar (among whom you will doubtfully find a single scholar)--who equates the Spirit fillings of Acts with a secondary experience of entire sanctification rather than the initial, defining Christian experience. In my opinion, the core truth of the doctrine biblically is the fact that the Spirit can empower us to be victorious over sin and temptation and that, indeed, Paul teaches that the Spirit frees us from the "law of sin," the "sin that dwells in our members." In other words, the Bible teaches freedom both from sin acts and the power of sin in our lives. This was always the core of the doctrine. It is Wesley's form of the doctrine. And it remains perhaps the greatest potential contribution of the Wesleyan tradition to the broader church.

The Pilgrim Holiness Church
As the holiness revivals took place, a collection of individual groups, marking their beginning in 1897, would eventually snowball into what became the Pilgrim Holiness Church. What I love about this church, my own roots, is that it represented a "getting together" rather than a "separating." Any group that defines itself by separation inevitably must defend the preposterous claim that there have been no Christians with true understanding until that group was formed.

These groups, usually with little or no real perspective on history, must inevitably see a huge gap between the early Christians (as they read them in the biblical text) and the formation of their group with the truth. Such a claim is so irrational that an intelligent person will scarcely be able to hold up the charade for long. It seems to me that there are only two sensical positions: 1) that God is less concerned about our heads being right than our hearts, and there will be a lot of Christians from countless different Christian groups in heaven or 2) that God is less concerned about our heads being right than our hearts, but there have only been a few at any point in the history of the church whose heart was truly right--from countless Christian groups. Even those who see the saved on a very, very narrow road must allow for the "heart more than head" clause. This is because no real understanding of history will conclude that any narrow group today is in real continuity with all the other points of Christian history.

There is no narrow ideological group of this sort that we can identify throughout all of church history. We cannot find medieval Christians preaching Palmer or Wesley style entire sanctification. We do not find "Jesus only" types in the third century who believed you are not a Christian if you do not speak in tongues. Nor will we find anyone immersing in the medieval period. We will go insane if we insist that God demands our heads be correct on the issues that splinter Protestant groups squabble over.

The Pilgrim Holiness Church was an amalgam of holiness groups, with a strong Quaker component. It tended to be a little more low church than the Wesleyan Methodist Church and a little less Wesley-an. It emphasized sacraments less and placed a little more emphasis on premillenialism than the WMC (Wesley was postmillenialist, as everyone before the 1800's basically was). But it had a great motto: "In essentials unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity." This limited, but generous orthodoxy has continued into the Wesleyan Church and is, I believe, one of its greatest strengths.

The Wesleyan Church
The current form of the The Wesleyan Church was formed in 1968 as the merger of the Wesleyan Methodist and Pilgrim Holiness churches. The Reformed Baptist Church of Canada was a holiness denomination as well that had merged with the Wesleyan Methodist Church not long before this broader merger.

For much of its history in the late 20th century, church growth rather than holiness became the "watchword and song" of The Wesleyan Church. But of course this movement was not unique to our church. And now that the church growth movement is in its death throes, the Wesleyan Church finds itself without a real identity. In the next post I will reiterate what I believe are its greatest strengths and the most likely candidates for its lasting identity in the days to come. It should come as no surprise that I have been highlighting various features of our history all along that flow naturally into what I believe makes The Wesleyan Church ripe for influence in the church of the next few decades.