Category: Methodism

What is a Methodist?

A question that I often get, especially from visitors or new members of our church, is some version of “What is a Methodist?”

That is a good question. Unfortunately, if you search for “United Methodist Church” on Google these days, you are likely to get a lot of different answers to that question. For me, the best answer to such questions is to look back at the beginning of the movement that would become the Methodist church. It started in the 1700s in England with John and Charles Wesley and a small group of young men who were convinced the church needed renewal.

One of John Wesley’s writings that I most appreciate is a tract he wrote to answer the questions people still ask. What is a Methodist? Are we different from other Christians? What makes us different. Wesley wrote “The Character of a Methodist” to speak to his fellow Christians who were confused by this energetic new movement in the church.

His initial description of a Methodist is simple on its surface: “A Methodist is one who has ‘the love of God shed abroad in his heart by the Holy Ghost given unto him;’ one who ‘loves the Lord his God with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his strength.'” Such a person is filled with the joy of God. Such people are full of thanks and hope and peace.

They take Scripture as their guide in all matters of faith and practice. They pray without ceasing. Their hearts are purified by the love of God so as to banish all envy, malice, wrath, and pride from them. They are humble and possessed of a single desire: to do the will of God in all things, to avoid all things that God has forbidden and to do all things that he has commanded. They do good to all men and women, especially by attempting to save the lost and build them up in faith.

These are the marks of a Methodist, Wesley writes. To Wesley, these marks should not be remarkable at all among Christians. Indeed, he never understood himself to be establishing a new sect or denomination within Christianity. What he preached and taught were, he thought, just plain and simple Christianity itself.

He understood Methodists to be very sharply distinguished from the unbelieving world around them. By “unbelievers” Wesley meant not only atheists but also Jews, Muslims, Hindus, pagans and all other forms of non-Christian belief. He understood there to be a clear distinction between Christians and non-Christians. Among the believers, his desire was for there to be no distinction between Methodists and all other “real” Christians, those who are inwardly and outwardly conformed to the will of God, who think, speak, and live according to the word of Jesus Christ, who are renewed in an image and righteousness of God, and who walk as Christ walked.

To be clear, Wesley believed there were a lot of people who went by the name of Christian who were not Christians in the only sense that mattered. There were many who had the outward form of Christianity but they had not the power of it. They had neither the power that declares them righteous before God nor that triumphs over sin in their own lives.

In the end, his pamphlet is an appeal for unity among the true Christians in England who shared a Savior but might differ when it comes to modes of worship or church governance or other non-essential matters.

I think all Christians, and certainly all Methodists, should be able to “amen” that. We believe there are true Christians in every expression of Christianity. We also believe that in every denomination and church there are those who bear the name of Christian but do not bear the image of Christ. The true unity of the church has less to do with formal agreements among the institutional structures of the various denominations. The true unity is when Christians recognize, pray for, pray with, and share in gospel work with other Christians regardless of what building they worship in on Sunday morning or what non-essential differences may keep them from regular fellowship.

What is a Methodist? Perhaps the best simple answer is a Methodist is a Christian who is determined to follow Jesus in all things. We Methodists don’t want to build walls between Christians who go by other names — Presbyterian, Catholic, Baptist, Pentecostal. We want to open the doors of fellowship with all who bear the unremarkable biblical marks of true Christianity.

Scattered for the kingdom

“So his master said, ‘Go out into the country lanes and behind the hedges and urge anyone you find to come, so that the house will be full.'” (Luke 14:23, NLT)

I was listening to a program today about the Willow Creek Community Church in Chicago and its massive influence on the shape of American Christianity. It is an hour long, but worth a listen if you are interested in how the church has become what it is today.

One of the many interesting ideas that stood out to me in the conversation was the idea that the church is not meant to sit back and attract people to it. The church is meant to go out and find the people who God is drawing to himself.

The Willow Creek model of church was once called the “Seeker Sensitive” church. The idea was to make church attractive to people who did not like church. Every element of the Sunday service, every element of the programming of the church, was and is carefully thought out and managed with excellence. Attending Willow Creek or any of the myriad of churches that have been influenced by its methods was and is unlike anything the church had ever seen. And make no mistake, this model has been wildly successful.

In the program I linked above, one of the hosts points out the model gets something very wrong if we take the Bible as our guide. Jesus did not model or teach the attractional model. He did not wait for people to come to him. He went out to the people. He sought them out. His goal was not to attract seekers. His goal was to seek the lost.

I would argue that was also the model of Paul and the apostles, for the most part. There is any interesting exception in the Book of Acts. After Pentecost and the initial rush of new converts, the Jerusalem church did appear to gain a lot of converts by attractional means. The people were in awe of the church and the signs and wonders it produced. God did keep adding to their numbers, but at some point, it appears, God decided a change was in order.

With the arrest of Stephen and his martyrdom, the pattern changed. The church was forced to obey the command of Jesus that it spread out from Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria, and all the world. It was forced to do this by persecution and death. God gave us a push, whether we wanted it or not.

Perhaps today that is what is happening in the American church. Perhaps we are being pushed out of Jerusalem. Perhaps God is breaking and shaking so many churches and church leaders these days because the settled ways we have developed for being the church in America is failing to reach people outside our walls.

I really do not know what future God has for us. I suppose those Christians who were scattered by persecution in Jerusalem did not either. They were not so much heroic pioneers as holy refugees. But through them, God did some pretty amazing things. Perhaps he still has similar things in store for us.

There is more

It was a question that I believe changed the history of Christianity. A young John Wesley was heading to the American colonies with a plan to evangelize native Americans. His real hope, however, was to save himself. Although he was a priest in the Church of England, had been raised the son of a priest, and had been extremely serious and active in his faith, he was restless. He felt little joy in his faith and little confidence in his salvation.

In this midst of his passage over the Atlantic Ocean, he had observed the faith of a band of German Christians who were also aboard the little ship. He was impressed with their peace even in the midst of storms and swells that shook Wesley. His fear of dying at sea was a sharp contrast to the faith of these Germans who sang hymns as the ship plunged through the raging caverns of the ocean.

Amazed and desperate to understand this faith, Wesley inquired about how such things were possible. His questions led to the following exchange with a German pastor.

Pastor: “Do you know Jesus Christ?”

Wesley: “I know he is the Savior of the world.”

Pastor: “True, but do you know he has saved you?”

Wesley: “I hope he has died to save me.”

Pastor: “Do you know yourself?”

Wesley: “I do.”

Wesley, however, had no confidence in his final answer. It was something he said because he was to embarrassed to answer any other way. The truth was that he did not know. He did not have the witness of the Holy Spirit with his spirit that he was a child of God. He knew about salvation, but he did not know himself to be saved.

It would be two years before he was given that assurance. In the new dawn of that faith, he would lead a movement that changed England and changed the history of Christianity, but I believe that if John Wesley had died in obscurity his story would have been no less remarkable. The salvation of a single soul is a miracle of God.

How many Christians today are like that terrified ship-bound would-be missionary? How many of us are set about trying to be good Christians but without the true gift that God wants to give us? We know about Jesus. We have some grasp of what it means to be saved, but we have no inner witness of our own salvation. We can pray the prayers and sing the songs but the words are not our own. We are singing someone else’s song. We can recite the Psalm about fearing no evil when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, but we feel naked and alone when the waves crash down and the deck drops from beneath our feet.

God wants to give you the kind of faith that carries you through storms.

It is a gift he wants to give us all.

The tricky part is that we cannot force that part to happen. We can only be ready to receive it. We can only walk in obedience in the means that God has laid out for us to walk until that day when he — in words Wesley would later write — strangely warms our heart.

Do not miss this point.

There are things for us to do. We need to repent. We need to know our own sin and reject it. We need to do the things we would do if we truly loved God and truly loved our neighbors. We need to act as if we have the faith that we are waiting to be given, not because we are hypocrites play-acting at faith but because it is in these modes of living and being that God gives us the grace that draws us toward the faith we lack.

We cannot force God to give us faith, but we can show up at the places and in the activities he has appointed for the gifts to be given.

We need to pray for forgiveness and offer our lives to Christ, but the prayer must be lived. There are no magic tricks in faith. The things we pray, yes, the songs we sing, too, call us to live in conformity to the words we say and sing. We must stand by the words we utter. If we would find faith, we must obey the one who gives it.

But we must expect that there is more than so many of us have. Trust that the God who wants to save you also wants you to know that you are saved.

We do not need to settle. Indeed, we should not settle for a cold, rational system of logic and evidence. We dare not cling to a faith that we have to bind up with barbed wire because we know it cannot withstand close and critical inspection. The faith of Christ is not fragile nor is it illogical, but in the end it does not require the mind of a philosophy professor to have such faith, only the heart of a child.

Jesus showed us what such faith looks like. He gave that faith to John Wesley. He offers this very faith to us. He offers it to you.

And so, I close with that same question a fellow minister of Christ once asked John Wesley: “Do you know Jesus Christ?”

If you, like Wesley, struggle to answer this, come talk to me about it. Let me help you find what God wants you to have. I don’t promise you it will come easily or quickly, but there is more to this faith than so many Christians settle for.