What follows is an attempt to give the reader a flavor of the sumptuous meal that is offered by the United Methodist Church for those willing to sit at the Table of Fellowship. I'm offering this in response to the many confused looks I've received from visitors and members alike who enjoy the church experience but are curious as to how our style of worship developed. This summary is just that, a summary. It is not intended to be all inclusive, but to whet the appetite to know more. By following the life of John Wesley, we gain a better understanding of his focus on grace, perfection, and intentional discipleship.After several hundreds of years within the Church of England many were becoming restless with the spiritual state of the Church of England. One of those was a Church of England priest named John Wesley.Wesley was born in 1703 to Susanna and Samuel Wesley, who was himself a vicar in the Church of England. When Wesley went to Oxford to study to become a priest he formed a group of friends who met daily to hold one another accountable to self examination around various virtues. They used particular “methods” like journaling and soon became known as the “Methodists.” This was at the time not considered a term of endearment.In 1736 Wesley accepted an assignment as a missionary to the colony of Georgia. On the way to Georgia, his boat ran into a horrible storm on the Atlantic. There were a group of Moravian Christians on board who seemed to Wesley to have an amazing peace in Christ while looking death in the face. Even though he was a priest in the Church of England he didn’t have the same peace himself, and he wanted it. This experience eventually lead Wesley to develop his theology of “Assurance of Salvation.”When he got to Savannah, Georgia he was ill prepared for the reality of pastoral ministry in colonies and began what was ultimately a fairly disappointing ministry. His ministry came to a crisis point when he refused to offer communion to a woman, Sophy Hopkey, who had accepted the marriage proposal of another man rather than Wesley’s own marriage proposal! This was more than a theological issue about repentance and grace, it was considered liablous action by Wesley. At the time you could be denied Holy Communion if found to be in an unrepentant sinful condition. By denying Hopkey, now engaged to be married, communion, Wesley was letting the community know that she was in an unrepentant sinful state. I’ll leave it to the reader to figure out what people of the time thought that might be. Charges were filed against Wesley to produce evidence and a warrant was soon put our for Wesley’s arrest. After a few weeks of hand wringing and delicate dialogue, Wesley left to return to England, never to return to this hemisphere.As you can imagine, this was a particularly low point in Wesley’s spiritual life. Shortly after returning from Georgia in 1738 he tells us in his journal that he went “very unwillingly to a society in Alderstgate.” They were studying the book of Romans. While they were reading Martin Luther’s preface to the book of Romans, Wesley had the kind of experience he had been searching for all his life. He writes in his journal, “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.” This experience did not always stay with Wesley, but it did catapult him back into vigorous ministry.Wesley began preaching a heart-felt faith in the pulpits of the Church of England. One by one, these churches didn’t like what he preached and began barring him from ever preaching there again. So Wesley and his friends from his Oxford days, began taking the message to where the people were. They began preaching outside! Sound familiar? Remember 3 John 5:Dear friend, you are doing a good work for God when you take care of the traveling teachers who are passing through, even though they are strangers to you. (3 John 5, NLT).The response was amazing. People everywhere began making commitments to follow Jesus. A serious renewal movement swept through the Church of England. Wesley and his brother Charles, presided over this movement and sent preachers here and there to various groups of Methodists. Wesley believed that if the people heard only one preacher over and over, their faith would become stagnant, so he kept them on the move every three months or so.Wesley soon found that if the Methodists only heard sermons, they wouldn’t commit to the life-changing habits required to follow Jesus, so he set up small groups within the Methodist movement to help people grow in their faith. Every quarter the small group leader would review the spiritual lives of the members of the group and issue tickets to those who were taking things seriously. You had to have a ticket to come back the next quarter!These groups were split into three different sizes. The largest group was the Society. A Methodist Society was made up of all the Methodists in a given area, called a parish. This was not a separate church from the Church of England but a renewal society within the Church of England. It was at the society meetings that Methodists sang and heard the preachers. The focus here was on the head or gaining knowledge about faithfully following Jesus.Societies primarily focused on educational channels through which the tenets of Methodism were presented. These tenets were taught in a large classroom setting primarily through lecture, preaching, public reading, hymn singing, and "exhorting." In societies, people sat in rows, women and men separated, where they listened to a prepared lecture. They were not given opportunity to respond or give feedback.In societies leaders taught key Methodist doctrines: The perfectibility of humanity vs. Reformed and Calvinistic views of human depravity.The freedom of the human will vs. theological determinism.True religion manifested in human relationships vs. the mystics, who emphasized inner contemplation as the way to spiritual growth.ClassThe middle size group was the class. This was made of 10-12 people and was co-ed. If you were in a Methodist Society you were required to be in a Methodist Class. The focus of the class was on the hands or will power. These classes followed three simple rules:Do no harm.Do good.Stay in love with God.Sound familiar? These classes met regularly to help one another retain the will to avoid sin, love others, and stay close to God.BandThe smallest group within the Methodist society was called a band. This was an optional group made up of about six people. Bands were gender specific and also made up of people of similar age and marital status. The focus of the band was the heart or training one’s emotions. Bands met for serious accountability and intense spiritual growth. They provided a space for ruthless honesty and frank openness not just about what one was doing, but about one’s motivations for doing it. There were also several different kinds of bands. There were recovery bands for those seeking to escape the grip of addictions such as alcohol and there were “select” bands specifically for current and/or future leaders of the Methodist movement.A critical function of the band was what Wesley termed "close conversation." By this term he meant soul-searching examination, not so much of behavior and ideas, but of motive and heartfelt impressions.So how did we get from Wesley to First United Methodist Church? That’s the second half of the story.In 1771 Wesley sent a young Methodist Preacher named Francis Asbury to America to help provide direction and support to the Methodist movement which had already begun to spread in the American Colonies. At the time of the revolutionary war in 1776, one in eight-hundred Americans was a Methodist. In 1784 the American Methodist movement split from the Church of England and the British Methodist movement for fairly obvious reasons. What is surprising is how long they remained connected to their English parents after the American Revolution: eight years! In 1791 Wesley died and in that same year the number of Methodists in America exceeded the number in England. In 1795, four years after Wesley died, the British Methodists followed their American counterparts and left the Church of England to form their own church. By 1812 Methodism in American had grown at such a rate that one in thirty-six Americans was a Methodist!The story from there in America is much too complex to tell briefly, but it involved several more splits, particularly North and South over slavery, and reunifications, especially the North and South.As Methodism grew the numbers of people began to stretch the Methodist “method” of discipleship. It became respectable to be a Methodist in America. In 1866 the requirement to be in a class was dropped from Methodism. Methodism became more about a civic religion. It was the right thing to do as a good citizen. It became less about a real transformation of the will and heart. In many ways Methodists lost their desire for authentic life in Christ and their desire to grow. But that need not be so today!We read in 3 John that the traveling teachers “began their journey for the sake of Christ…so that we may become co-workers with the truth” (3 John 7-8, NRSV). The early traveling preachers of the Methodist church also began their journey for the sake of Christ. They did this so that we too may be their co-workers with the truth of Jesus Christ. They, John Wesley and the early Methodists, began their journey as itinerant traveling preachers for the sake of spreading the good news of Jesus Christ and the transformation of the world. Let us too continue to be co-workers with them by practicing three simple rules: do no harm, do good, and stay in love with God.
A BRIEF HISTORY
