John Wesley, a Man for Our Times

Not long ago a package of books for review arrived from my denominational publishing house. One was by an Anglican, one by a Presbyterian, and one by a Baptist. Though different in several ways, all had one thing in common: they all mentioned John Wesley.

These references lend support to my observation that there has been, particularly in recent evangelical books and magazines, a rediscovery of John Wesley. We are discovering, I think, that his remarkable ministry in eighteenth-century England has much to say to us in the churches of twentieth-century America.

The Wesleyan revival brought perhaps the most thoroughgoing transformation of a society by the Gospel in history. This fact is particularly important for the Church in our chaotic era, for the Wesleyan Revival occurred during the period of upheaval that accompanied the Industrial Revolution in England.

The socio-political effects of the Wesleyan Revival have often been overdrawn. The thesis that Wesley saved England from a French-style political revolution is, at best, highly speculative and ignores important differences between French and English cultures of the day. Yet it is true that England improved considerably during the eighteenth century, and that the Wesleyan Revival was a major agent of this change.

The rediscovery of John Wesley can hardly be cause for pride by any present-day denomination. The Anglicans, by and large, turned their backs on Wesley. Methodists have to remember that Wesley died an Anglican and never officially became a “Methodist,” nor wanted Methodism to become a separate church. And most contemporary groups that consider themselves Methodist or Wesleyan have fallen into a rigidity and narrowness that is distinctly non-Wesleyan.

John Wesley is bigger than any one denomination. He belongs to the whole Christian Church, along with Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and others. All of us, “Wesleyans” and “non-Wesleyans” alike, can learn from his example.

Six elements of Wesley’s success impress me as especially pertinent to our day. Three of these have to do with Wesley’s message and three with his method.

John Wesley’s Message

John Wesley had a message to communicate, and its principal elements were these:

1. Personal salvation through Jesus Christ. Wesley emphasized the basic biblical teachings of man’s sin and lostness, Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection, and the transformation of the new birth. People listened and responded, by the thousands.

Wesley’s proclamation was clear. Though an Oxford scholar, he had no patience with high-sounding phrases that failed to communicate. It is said that Wesley would often preach a newly prepared sermon to his maid, a simple, uneducated girl, and have her stop him whenever she didn’t understand his words. His passion was to communicate with the masses. Preaching at Oxford, however, he might quote from Latin authors or from the Greek New Testament.

2. The Spirit-filled life. Wesley continually spoke of the need for the filling and continuing ministry of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer, and thousands of early Methodists found the experience a reality. In nearly every city he visited, Wesley carefully examined the members of the Methodist societies as to their Christian experience. Although he frequently found spiritual counterfeits, he also found much spiritual reality and power. The Holy Spirit was at work.

Wesley advocated much more than merely a crisis experience of the infilling of the Spirit; he stressed the need for ongoing Christian growth, the edification of the Church, the forming of the stature of Christ in each believer.

3. An active and involved social consciousness. Wesley was supremely an evangelist. And yet a list of his sermon titles, or of the pamphlets he published, reveals that his topics included such things as wealth, national sins, war, education, medical ethics, the Stamp Act, trade with North America, responsibility to the king, the liquor industry.

There was no question where Wesley stood on poverty and riches, sea piracy, smuggling, the slave trade, or other crucial issues of his day. And he did not think he was compromising his call as an evangelist when he preached on these issues on Sunday morning. Like the Old Testament prophets, he saw that the biblical faith touches every area of life and makes everyone morally responsible, from king to coal miner.

Wesley’s social concern got results. Why? First, because he awakened a new moral consciousness in the nation. Second, because others followed his example. Third, because his faithful evangelism resulted in thousands of transformed lives. He instilled in many converts this same social concern, thus producing a popular basis for social reform. He proved what church history from other times and places shows: there is no combination more potent than biblical evangelism plus biblical social concern, than Old Testament prophet plus New Testament evangelist.

Wesley did more than just talk about social reform. Among other things, he agitated for prison, liquor, and labor reform; set up loan funds for the poor; campaigned against the slave trade and smuggling; opened a dispensary and gave medicines to the poor; worked to solve unemployment; and personally gave away considerable sums of money to persons in need.

John Wesley’s Method

But his message is only part of the story, Wesley saw—or rather, learned—that the clearest, most biblical proclamation of the Gospel often had little effect if it was locked within the walls (literal or figurative) of the institutional church. Others before and since have preached as clearly and sincerely, but without half the results. Why? In part, because their message was encrusted in rigid, unbiblical ideas about the nature of the Church.

Wesley started out strictly high-church in his ecclesiology, but God didn’t let him stay there. Although to a considerable degree he was still a high-churchman at his death, in many ways he had learned to be remarkably flexible and unconventional.

This is shown by three aspects of Wesley’s ministry.

1. He did not restrict himself to the institutional church. John Wesley’s effectiveness dates from the time he began carrying the Gospel outside the four walls of the church.

It happened like this: Wesley’s friend the evangelist George Whitefield preached regularly to a large congregation of colliers (coal miners) at Kingswood, near Bristol. Whitefield’s method was “field preaching”—assembling a large crowd in an open field and there opening the Word. Wesley frowned on this at first, for he had been, in his words, “so tenacious of every point relating to decency and order that I should have thought the saving of souls a sin if it had not been done in church” (Journal, Epworth, II, 167).

Whitefield requested—practically insisted—that Wesley take over his congregation so he could return to America. Wesley did not want to accept, but after seeing Whitefield’s ministry he felt the call was from God. Says Wesley, “At four in the afternoon, I submitted to be more vile, and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation, speaking from an eminence in a ground adjoining to the city, to about three thousand people” (ibid., p. 172).

The crowds grew. Soon there were congregations in other places, and within a few years throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland. Wesley had discovered that when people do not come to the church, it’s time for the church to go to the people.

Wesley, his brother Charles, and Whitefield did not win ecclesiastical praise for their efforts. As Bishop Leslie R. Marston notes, “These three men were called mad enthusiasts because they would free the gospel from the confining gothic arches of established religion and release it to the masses in street and field, to the sick and unclean in hovel and gutter, to the wretched and condemned in Bedlam and prison” (From Age to Age a Living Witness, p. 66).

Wesley was a devout churchman. He had no intention of founding a new dissenting group; he urged his hearers and new converts to attend the regular Anglican services. He never preached in field or marketplace during times of stated worship services. But he was also a realist. He saw that many simply would not attend the traditional church services, and that those who did failed to receive all the spiritual help they needed. And this leads to the second aspect of Wesley’s method.

2. He created new and workable structures for “koinonia.” One of the first things Wesley did with his converts was to divide them into groups of a dozen, each group with its own leader. These were the famous Wesleyan “class meetings.” Wesley soon discovered the spiritual dynamic of this small group structure. He said in 1742:

I appointed several earnest and sensible men to meet me, to whom I showed the great difficulty I had long found of knowing the people who desired to be under my care. After much discourse, they all agreed there could be no better way to come to a sure, thorough knowledge of each person than to divide them into classes, like those at Bristol, under the inspection of those in whom I could most confide. This was the origin of our classes in London, for which I can never sufficiently praise God, the unspeakable usefulness of the institution having ever since been more and more manifest [quoted by John Stott in One People, p. 72].

What was the result? Wesley later wrote,

Many now happily experienced that Christian fellowship of which they had not so much as an idea before. They began to “bear one another’s burdens” and naturally to “care for each other” [“Plain Account of the People Called Methodists,” Works, Zondervan Edition, VIII, 254].

Wesley introduced other new ideas of church practice also, such as lay ministers and simple, unpretentious “preaching houses.” He felt free to make such innovations because he conceived of Methodism, not as a new denomination, but merely as a “society” within the Anglican church.

Wesley’s efforts along this line say much to the churches of today, many of which are trapped in rigid institutional patterns. Few of today’s traditional churches really experience that “fellowship of the Holy Spirit” of which the New Testament speaks. The same was true of eighteenth-century Anglicanism, and Wesley did something about it.

3. He preached the Gospel to the poor. One of the crucial signs of the Kingdom is to whom the Gospel is being ministered. John Wesley, like Jesus, preached to the poor. He sought out those whom no one else was seeking.

Reading his Journal, one is impressed with how many times Wesley preached early in the morning, at five o’clock, or in the marketplace at ten. Why was he so often preaching at five A.M.? Certainly not for his convenience, but for the convenience of the men and women who went to work in mine or factory at daybreak. Wesley assembled the colliers in the fields before they started work, or the crowds in the marketplace at midday. His passion was to preach the Gospel to the poor, and among them he had his greatest response.

John Wesley had a message, and he didn’t muffle it behind stained glass. He went outside the church, preaching the Gospel to the poor. He refused to allow newborn babes to die of spiritual malnutrition, but provided spiritual homes and foster parents for them. He created new church forms—new wineskins—for those who responded. He matched a biblical message with methods in harmony with a biblical ecclesiology.

John Wesley’s Secret

How did Wesley “happen” to find this happy marriage of message and method? We face here, of course, the mystery of the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit. But we can see at least some of the ways the Spirit worked in Wesley’s life.

Wesley was not primarily a theologian, though he was theologically competent. He “theologized” sufficiently to find biblical answers to the basic questions of Christian experience and to confront social issues with biblical revelation. But he never worked out a consistent theological system. His theology was a mixture of high-church traditionalism, believer’s church pietism, and evangelistic pragmatism. On some questions, such as infant baptism, he never developed a firm position but held seemingly contradictory opinions.

There is not even unanimous agreement about whether Wesley was at heart an Arminian or a Calvinist! While he has generally been considered an Arminian, he was careful not to fall into antinomianism, and some have argued that his theology was basically Calvinistic.

So John Wesley’s secret was not essentially theological. But it was essentially biblical. Wesley, the scholar, the author and editor of many books, was a man of one book—the Bible. He accepted it implicitly and practiced it resolutely. This was his secret: the Word of God.

Wesley held the common-sense view that if the Bible was true, it would show itself true in human experience. So his points of reference were first the Bible and secondly experience—not church tradition, contemporary philosophy, or the opinions of others. What was said in the Bible and proved true in human experience was true, regardless of what others thought.

Wesley had his faults. He was something of an anti-Catholic bigot (although his personal relations with individual Catholics were above reproach). Some will choke on the fact that he was a pro-monarchy political conservative with little patience for upstart American revolutionary radicals.

He also had other things going for him than what we have mentioned here. He was a gifted administrator and chooser of men (even though some of the leaders he chose later betrayed him). His editing, condensing, and publishing of books—a complete library from history to medicine—was a ministry in itself. And he received immeasurable help from his brother Charles, who wrote hundreds of hymns that were sung to popular tunes of the day. (The early Methodists held an intelligible faith partly because they memorized much of it in the hymns of Charles Wesley.)

John Wesley was born June 17, 1703; was converted in Aldersgate Street on May 24, 1738; and died on March 2, 1791. Because he was biblical, because he walked where Christ walked, John Wesley was a man for our times.

the new propriety

There is a spirit growing among young Americans, the spirit of the new propriety. Theological radicals tend to fawn over it, trying to nurse it into its “full stature,” that of a new morality or situation ethic. Evangelicals try to crush it among their youth, before contributions to their schools wither or the name of Christ comes into disrepute.

Both the gleeful and the fearful miss the point. Myopically self-centered, they dwell on appearances and interpret them as fundamental changes, either good or bad.

Young Christians have accepted cultural manifestations ranging from dress to dance. The cinema has come into its own as an art form, and young believers, no longer suspecting celluloid to be demon-possessed, freely choose which films to attend. Bad cinema can be more boring or nauseating than pernicious.

In an age of coed dorms and off-campus apartments, young Christians at secular schools watch television, study, play games, and talk together in the once forbidden privacy of their rooms. Most committed Christian students have a sense of spiritual responsibility both to Christ and to others. They know that their lives are constantly on display before the non-Christians who are their roommates and neighbors. Segregated-by-sex dorms do not stymie students bent on immorality, even on Christian campuses (fraudulent sign-out destinations and other subterfuges provide alternatives).

Coed dorms and long hair are manifestations of a new propriety, not a new morality. This change has come about slowly and naturally, by circumstance rather than by design. Away at school and free of the usual restrictions, the younger generation has formed a new culture, and young Christians are a part of it. It is not that they have departed from the faith. Rather, they are living it out amid new social patterns.

As C. S. Lewis pointed out in Christian Behavior, “a girl in the Pacific Islands wearing hardly any clothes and a Victorian lady completely covered in clothes might be equally ‘modest,’ proper, or decent, according to the standards of their own societies.…” Young Christians may accept the cultural phenomena of shortened skirts, lengthened hair, and twenty-four-hour visitation privileges without changing their moral standards. Few Christian girls venture out in public conspicuously braless. But while Christians do not succumb to the prevailing morality, neither do they recoil in horror and set up a monastic counter-counter-culture.

No one should impose a guilt complex on the young. As long as they use their discretion and do not act to excite passion or give occasion to sin, they are guiltless. Those who are older need not lose sleep or agonize in prayer over long hair and coed dorms. The young need (and grudgingly appreciate) the prayers of mature Christians for their real problems, but accusation, innuendo, and morbidly probing curiosity serve only to aid the devil. Each generation should ignore trivial differences and pray for the real spiritual needs of the other, for both sides of the “propriety gap” face basically the same temptations, albeit in different surroundings.

Young and old, we are brothers and sisters in Christ. Let us make a testimony to a world beset by schism and close the generation gap in the ranks of the redeemed. The first step together is gaining an understanding of differences in propriety and a mutual tolerance bred of the Holy Spirit.—ROGER WILLIAM BENNETT, student, Bradley University, and orderly, Methodist Hospital of Central Illinois, Peoria.

Howard A. Snyder is dean of the Free Methodist Theological Seminary in São Paulo, Brazil. He has the B.A. (Greenville College) and the B.D. (Asbury Seminary).

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