God's Breathings 1

The Wesleyan tradition was not encased in stone with Wesley.  Wesley's heirs are a diverse collection of churches with more and less direct connections to him historically.  In the United States, Wesley's most direct heir is the United Methodist Church, which retains Wesley's sense of openness to those of a kindred spirit and perhaps a hint of his "methodical" personality.  However, the 1800s saw a host of Wesleyan denominations come into existence both because of various quarrels with the Methodist church and then in the late 1800s/early 1900s with a wave of revivalism that swept America.

These smaller Wesleyan denominations, such as my own, often were at one or two removes from many aspects of Wesley's own thought and practice.  For example, Wesley remained an Anglican his entire life.  He believed that infant baptism was important to wash away the original sin of Adam.  But if you look at the various Wesleyan denominations who reflect his influence, you will find some that have been more influenced by Anabaptist streams of American Christianity on such issues.  Indeed, the Salvation Army tends not to baptize at all, showing an affinity some Wesleyan denominations formed with Quaker streams.  And the smaller the Wesleyan denomination, the more likely it is to look more Baptist in its worship style than the high church Wesley.

Similarly, "Christian perfection" for Wesley was something that came on God's time schedule.  In his more pessimistic moments, Wesley saw it as something few would experience and, even then, most likely near the end of their lives.  By contrast, the "holiness revivals" of the late 1800s saw "entire sanctification" as something God wanted to give you as soon as possible, and a culture of spiritual experience resulted that would eventually lead to the Pentecostal revivals of the early twentieth century.  Both the holiness movement and the Pentecostal movement flowed from the same revivalist waters of the late 1800s.

The long and short of it is that John Wesley is more the grandfather of the Wesleyan tradition than its father.  Those of us in the Wesleyan tradition today face both the necessity and the opportunity to determine what elements of Wesleyan tradition we believe should come forward.  We have taken this perspective throughout these pages, trying to preserve the genius of Wesley without being a slave to his thinking or practice.  He was, after all, a child of his age as we are of ours...