The Christian Pattern (Part 1) by David Juliano

I was nineteen years old when I wandered into the First Methodist Church of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and fell in love with John Wesley.

I didn’t know much about him at first. But the more I read, the more I was captivated — by the way God had raised him up, by his faltering journey to faith, by his struggles with works-righteousness and his never quite feeling that he measured up. I recognized myself in Wesley before I’d lived enough life to know why.

 

The Three Books That Shaped John Wesley’s Faith

It didn’t take long before I was reading everything I could find. And in every biography, every account of Wesley’s early spiritual formation, three books kept appearing — the books that had shaped his faith and set him on the road to Aldersgate. Jeremy Taylor’s Rules for Holy Living and Dying, William Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, and Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ.

I read all three. Each of them painted a thrilling vision of a life fully devoted to God. But the one that stayed with me — the one that Wesley himself kept returning to throughout his entire life, calling it a book “next to the Bible” — was à Kempis.

I bought a copy. I read it. I put it on my shelf.

That was more than forty years ago.

The book moved with me through seminary, through four years of ministry in the Tennessee Conference, then four years in the British Methodist Church, through the move to Florida, through thirty-five years of pastoral ministry. It survived six children, three houses, and more committee meetings than I care to count. It sat on my study shelf in Sebring, Florida, a little battered, the spine soft with age, waiting.

Last year my church gave me a sabbatical. Ten years as their pastor, no real break in twenty, running on fumes in ways I was only beginning to admit. Coming out of that sabbatical I made a decision: I was going to be more intentional about my daily devotional life. No more fits and starts.

I looked at my shelf. My eye went straight to that old familiar copy.

 

Why The Imitation of Christ Is Still Hard to Read (And What to Do About It)

I took it down and started reading a chapter a day.

And the first thing I thought was: this is hard. Considerably harder than I remembered from nineteen. The language was dense, the demands uncompromising, the medieval framework not exactly designed for someone living in Florida in the age of doom-scrolling. I found myself rereading paragraphs, losing the thread, struggling to connect à Kempis’s 15th century monastery world with my 21st century pastoral life.

And then the idea hit me.

Wesley had done this before me. In 1725, a young Oxford student picked up The Imitation of Christ while preparing for ordination. Something in it grabbed him — the same thing that had grabbed me at nineteen, that same vision of a life fully surrendered to God. Ten years later, in 1735, he produced his first English translation from the Latin — dense, academic, scholarly. But it was his 1741 edition that changed everything. By then Wesley was leading a movement, and he wanted à Kempis in the hands of ordinary people — farmers, miners, mill workers, the men and women flooding into his Methodist societies. So he revised and simplified, producing an edition directed at a general readership rather than Oxford scholars.

 

What Wesley Did for His Generation — A Modern Devotional for Ours

What Wesley did for his generation, I wanted to do for ours.

What if someone took Wesley’s translation — all four books, all 88 chapters — and modernized it for contemporary readers? Added reflections connecting each chapter to the world we actually live in? Prayers to help you respond to what you’ve read?

That’s the book I spent the last year writing.

The Christian’s Pattern: A Simple Guide to Follow Jesus Every Day releases June 16th from Invite Press.

Over the next three articles I want to take you inside the four books — what they contain, what they challenged in me, and why I think Wesley was right that this is the book every Christian needs after the Bible.

But for now, I want to leave you with something Wesley wrote about why he treasured à Kempis above all other books except Scripture:

“True religion is seated in the heart. God’s law extends to all our thoughts as well as words and actions.”

— John Wesley, Journal

That insight — that Christianity is fundamentally an interior transformation, not merely an outward performance — is what à Kempis gave Wesley. And here’s what strikes me most: this isn’t a message just for Methodists, or for pastors, or for people who’ve been in church their whole lives. À Kempis wrote for anyone who suspects there might be more to the Christian life than they’ve yet experienced. Anyone who is tired of going through the motions. Anyone who longs for a faith that reaches past the head and into the heart. Six centuries after he wrote it, and nearly three centuries after Wesley translated it, that invitation is as urgent and as open as it has ever been.

The book has been waiting on my shelf for forty years.

It’s been waiting for you too.

 

David Juliano is the pastor of First Sebring Methodist Church in Sebring, Florida, and the author of The Christian’s Pattern: A Simple Guide to Follow Jesus Every Day (Invite Press, June 16, 2026). Pre-order at inviteministries.org. Learn more at jdavidjuliano.com and follow his writing at Walking the Edges on Substack.