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Commentary
GEN-X RISING: Preserving the Wesleyan tradition Andrew C. Thompson, Mar 26, 2009
Andrew Thompson
By Andrew C. Thompson UMR Columnist
I just returned a few days ago from the Wesleyan Theological Society’s (WTS) annual meeting in Anderson, Ind. Ever heard of it? Probably not. But you should have.
If you’re a Methodist who believes the Wesleyan approach to faith offers something vital to the larger church, the WTS is a very important organization.
By “Wesleyan approach,” I’m referring to what we find in the teaching and ministry of John Wesley. It involves the universal offer of God’s free grace in Jesus Christ, the grace-empowered need for human response to God, and the calling for Jesus’ disciples to grow continually in grace through works of devotion and compassion.
It seeks “holiness”—not in the sense of “holier-than-thou,” but as the way to explain how God renews our souls through grace so that we overcome sin.
The more than 200 students, pastors and professors from churches and universities all over the country who attended the WTS meeting find that approach to the Christian life utterly compelling.
And through the work they do in the research, writing and discussion of Wesleyan theological ideas, they are helping to preserve and extend the Wesleyan tradition.
In the impatience of our contemporary life, most people don’t want to hear about the differences between church traditions. They want to think that Baptists, Methodists and Lutherans really believe about the same thing. Even more, they want to roll all distinctions into one big non-denominational megachurch.
It’s certainly true that different Christian denominations have more in common than not. But they also hold on to distinctive beliefs about salvation, human responsibility and the way that faith should be expressed in the world.
For United Methodists, those are Wesleyan beliefs.
As a reader of this column recently reminded me, Methodism is valuable only insofar as it proclaims a bold gospel and makes disciples of Jesus Christ. If the Wesleyan approach to faith fails to do those things, it should rightly be abandoned.
We live in a time when there are lots of influences on the church that have nothing to do with the Wesleyan tradition.
The values of secular culture creep into the church and try to pose as the gospel. The influence of the market invades our thinking and we’re tempted to think of everything in terms of prices and products. The growing dominance of digital media makes us think that the key to staying relevant is by being “cutting edge.”
The United Methodist Church must navigate all these forces, but the important thing to remember is that none of them is a part of our root tradition. They’re all cultural products that come to the church from outside. And many of them are harmful.
True, the church always exists in the larger society. That society is like a river, and the church needs to learn how to swim effectively in it. As I’ve argued before, we have to judge carefully about what parts of culture we accept and what parts we reject.
But if we still think it is important for Methodists to be Wesleyan in their approach to faith and discipleship, there is one thing we can never reject: our tradition.
We follow John Wesley’s teaching because we believe he had a powerful insight into how the gospel should be received and lived. We see how the Holy Spirit worked through his ministry so that thousands were brought to a knowledge of Jesus Christ as Lord. We lay claim to terms like “holiness of heart and life” because they point to the character of a Christian who is actively responding to God’s grace in her own life.
The pastors and scholars who gather in the Wesleyan Theological Society are committed to helping the church hold on to this vital tradition.
They’re not all United Methodists. They come from the Church of the Nazarene, the Free Methodist Church, the Wesleyan Church, the Church of God and others. But they all trace their roots to the early Methodist revival under John Wesley. And in that sense, they’re all cousins committed to a Wesleyan vision of the Christian life.
Regular church folk may never hear much about the Wesleyan Theological Society or any of the other “scholarly” societies. But they’re undoubtedly affected by such groups.
Because it is through the laboratory of the seminar room and the position paper that theological ideas get debated, refined and disseminated. Eventually they make their way into seminary classes, where students take them in over the course of training as pastors. And then as pastors, they take them into local churches, where the laity encounter them through preaching and teaching.
So take note: What was going on a few days ago in Anderson, Ind., may seem like a world away from your experience in local church life. But in reality, it was about the survival—and growth—of our tradition.
Andrew Thompson
