A Movement on Fire:
A Social Faith Working Through Love

Second Sunday After Epiphany • January 19, 2020
Readings:  1 John 4:20
(adapted from the NRSV)
Excerpt adapted from John Wesley, Preface to Hymns and Sacred Poems (1739)

A Movement on Fire. That’s the supertitle of our new worship series. It refers to the Methodist movement. It does not mean that Methodism is burning down, although it seems that way sometimes. No, it means a movement with a fiery passion for loving God and neighbor. Today and over the next five Sundays, we are doing to explore why we might still want to claim the name “Methodist” and what parts of our heritage we may value and want to retain. We have a great line-up of preachers, including Jorge Lockward, Hannah Ervin, Rev. Dr. Art Pressley, and Fred Brewington. I encourage you not to miss any of these Sundays. 

I confess in advance that this sermon may sound a little “wonkish” in places. But after all, we are talking about Methodist history and theology, and I am definitely a Metho-nerd. Yes, I admit it. So, let’s just get right into it. 

Methodism began in England in 1729 among a group of students at Oxford University who agreed to meet and study the Christian classics together three or four nights a week. They also prayed and did works of charity, such as providing food to poor families, visiting people in prison, and teaching orphans how to read. They committed together to live a disciplined, holy life. Some university students mocked them as “The Holy Club” or “Methodists” because they were methodical in practicing their faith. 

John and Charles Wesley were brothers and PKs – preacher’s kids. In fact, their father and both grandfathers had been priests in the Church of England, although their paternal grandfather had been expelled for being a “dissenter.”

Their mother, Susanna, would have been prohibited at the time not only from priestly ordination, but from any role in worship, either inside or outside of the church building. In spite of that prohibition, she began a prayer and study group for her children and household servants  that became popular and drew persons from the surrounding area. She got into trouble for that, yet still she persisted. 

So John and Charles were trained by parents and grandparents who were faithful to God, but not always willing to go along with whatever the Church of England decreed. Methodist grew into a movement for the spiritual revitalization of the church that had become dull and rigid and failed to attract much of the English population. In a sermon titled, “On God’s Vineyard,” John Wesley the goal of Methodism: 

If it be said, “[God] could have made [the Methodists] a separate people, like the Moravian Brethren;" I answer, this would have been a direct contradiction to God’s whole design in raising them up; namely, to spread scriptural religion throughout the land, among people of every denomination, leaving every one to hold his own opinions, and to follow his own mode of worship. This could only be done effectually, by leaving these things as they were, and endeavouring to leaven the whole nation with that “faith works by love.” [1]

Over the next century, in spite of being condemned by much of the established Church, Methodism grew exponentially. After founding a separate denomination in the U.S. in 1784, it spread and grew rapidly during the first and second great awakenings to become the largest religious expression in the United States during the 1800s. Yet, over the same time, Methodism split into numerous denominational groups over racial prejudice, theological differences, and social questions like slavery.

John Wesley never intended or wanted to found a new denomination. That was forced upon him by circumstances in the U.S. and by the attitude of the powers that be in the Church of England. Methodism quickly spread from England through the British isles and then rapidly to British colonies. In the U.S., following the American Revolutionary War, when many Church of England priests who had opposed independence fled back to Britain, the Methodist Episcopal Church separated and spread like wildfire as colonists moved westward, seizing more and more territory from Native Americans and defeating other colonialist powers, like France and Spain.

Through the history of Methodism, there have been big conflicts, divisions, and even schisms. Yet, from the beginning there were aspects of Methodist theology and practice that made it very attractive to people. From early on, John Wesley had taken a strong position against John Calvin’s belief that our lives and whether or not we will be “saved” by God is predestined from the beginning of creation. That meant there was nothing human beings could do to change our destiny. Wesley thought that was awful and dangerous theology. On the contrary, he said, we are persons with free will and God desires us to use our freedom to do good in the world. And we are accountable to God for our actions, good or bad. As the reading from the First Letter of John says, in essence, “You can’t love God if you haven’t learned to love your sibling and your neighbor.” A teaching, often incorrectly attributed to Wesley but adopted widely by Methodists and others, puts this conviction into memorable form: 

“Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as you ever can.”

I do think Wesley would agree with the sentiment. 

Wesley did write these words that Adora read to us: 

“The gospel of Christ knows of no religion but social; no holiness but social holiness. “Faith working by love” is the length and breadth and depth and height of Christian perfection.”

From its beginning in the Holy Club, Methodism has been a social religion and faith working by love has been its foundational principle. Of course, we know from our own experience that “personal holiness” or “personal spirituality” are real, but they are not sufficient unto themselves. God means for us to be in community with one another and to grow in holiness in mutual relationship, support, and encouragement of one another. And Christian faith is not fulfilled unless it is put into practice with acts of love. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., trained in the black Social Gospel tradition, echoed this stance when he wrote,

Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.

I was baptized in the Methodist Episcopal Church eleven years before it merged with another denomination to become “United Methodist Church.” I remained active until my middle teens, but lost interest during my first year in high school. And by the time I got to college, I was radicalized by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements and the anti-Vietnam War movement. I rapidly moved toward committed atheism and Marxism. Right after college, I joined a small Trotskyist group that was very purist and very sectarian. The organization had only about 500 members worldwide, but we thought we were the only right-thinking Communists in the world. And we did whatever we could in our propaganda to delegitimize and destroy competing organizations. And don’t even get me started on the Democratic Socialists of America – the group that Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocacia-Cortez belong to. We considered them a lost cause – pro-capitalist shills for the Democratic Party. 

After I had a profound and prolonged spiritual reawakening about 18 years later, I stumbled into a Methodist Church. With God’s guidance, I had come back not just to Christianity, but to the social religion of my childhood. To my surprise, I discovered that Wesley and the Methodists affirmed and valued theological diversity. Imagine what a huge relief that was for me coming out of such rigid sectarianism. Of course, that theological tolerance has been severely diminished as Methodist traditions in the United Methodist Church has been subverted by people who wanted to remake it into an ideological twin of the Southern Baptist Church.

However, theological diversity was not the first thing that made me fall in love with Methodism after my long sojourn away from God and the church. In addition to a very welcoming and loving community, I found so much in Methodist beliefs and practice with which I resonated. Foremost was that the Methodists put a strong emphasis on advocating for social justice. I won’t say they always followed through on that, but they said it on paper. With my passion for justice, I could not have joined a church that did not espouse a deep integration of personal and social holiness. 

I also discovered the heritage of the Methodist class meeting system, intended as a way to build community and mutual accountability among the early Methodists. The Methodist class meetings are somewhat comparable to our Grow and Connect groups at the Church of the Village. From the start, class meetings were generally led by lay persons rather than clergy. They helped the early Methodist movement to grow rapidly and also to stay connected. Again, this system provided the foundation for a social religion that practiced faith working through love.

Not long after I joined Christ Church in Manhattan, I got together with seven other members to create a Covenant Discipleship group that was rooted in the same model. We met every week for the purpose of spiritual formation and growth. We learned to share deeply with each other about our lives, our struggles, our faith, and our hopes. We came to deeply love and support one another. It was profoundly meaningful for me as a new Christian and it was one of the experiences that ultimately propelled me toward hearing a call to ordained ministry. 

Through various moves and mergers going back from the Washington Square UMC and the Metropolitan Duane UMC, the Church of the Village traces its lineage back to at least 1797 with the founding of the third Methodist Church in Manhattan. Our community, spirituality, focus on inclusivity and justice, and so much more are profoundly shaped by our Methodist roots. This is true even though we have been in open rebellion against the majority opinion in our denomination for decades. 

Especially after the adoption of the so-called “Traditional Plan” at the Special General Conference last February, the reputation of the United Methodist Church became so toxic that millions of Methodists have distanced ourselves from the UM name and institutional expressions. The UM slogan, “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors,” had long ago become a bad joke for many of us. Many churches dropped the “United Methodist” label altogether, and sometimes dropped the cross and flame. 

Given the split that is going to occur in the United Methodist Church this year, one way or another, how should we view our spiritual heritage? We will have the opportunity to reclaim Methodism and polish its tarnished reputation. What should we want to keep and what to discard as we seek to be a community that is faithful to Jesus’ message of radically inclusive love? What theological stands and practices ought we to carry on from our Methodism? Exploring those questions is one of the motivations for holding this worship series.  

There are imperfections and inadequacies in the theology espoused by the Wesleys in the 1700s, which is still largely the theological foundation of the UMC. Wesleyan theology alone is not enough. We have needed to update it with the wisdom of many scholars and theologians and other traditions. We have done some healthy borrowing from the social gospel theology of Walter Rauschenbusch and Martin Luther King Jr., from liberation theology, black theology, feminist, womanist, and queer theology, and contemporary process theology. 

Yet, while I don’t want to limit us solely to harvesting the fruit of our Methodist roots, I do not want to incorporate the best of that tradition into goals of building a progressive, radically inclusive, and liberationist church. I want to retain the foundational belief that God’s grace is available and offered to all people. I want to continue to make use of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral – employing scripture, tradition, reason, and experience in our discernment. Surely, we will continue to practice faith working through love, with special focus on liberating the downtrodden, marginalized, exploited, and oppressed. Let us proudly claim the name Methodist, as at least one name we use for the modern-day movement for spiritual revitalization of the church. 

Copyright © 2019 by Jeff Wells
All rights reserved.

[1] Excerpt adapted from John Wesley, “On God’s Vineyard” (Sermon 107, Works)

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