I want to tell you something about John Wesley that might surprise you.

Actually — it might embarrass you. It embarrassed me.

Most modern Methodists celebrate communion monthly. Some quarterly. Some considerably less. We think of it as a memorial — a symbolic remembrance of what Jesus did at the cross. A meaningful ritual. A box to check on the liturgical calendar before moving on to the announcements.

Wesley had a very different approach.

What Did John Wesley Believe About Communion?

In 1787 — fifty years into his ministry, near the end of his long life, having preached 40,000 sermons and ridden 250,000 miles on horseback — Wesley published a sermon called “The Duty of Constant Communion.” And in it he argued, passionately and without apology, that every Christian should receive communion as often as possible.

As often as you can. This may land hard on our modern ears.

He and his brother Charles were so convinced of this that in 1745 they published a collection of 166 hymns — all about Holy Communion. Not about salvation broadly. Not about the cross in general. Specifically, entirely, about the Lord’s Supper. One hundred and sixty-six hymns.

You don’t write 166 hymns about something you consider optional or symbolic. Communion was a regular grace that told the story of good news for all. It was and is important.

Communion as a Means of Grace

Book Four of The Christian’s Pattern is entirely devoted to Holy Communion — and it is the section that reveals most clearly why Wesley treasured this book above all others except the Bible. À Kempis writes about the sacrament with a devotion and intimacy that most modern Methodists have never encountered. He writes about coming to the table as a genuine encounter with the living Christ — not a symbol, not a memorial, but a means of grace through which God actually meets us, forgives us, strengthens us, and transforms us.

Wesley called communion a “means of grace” — one of the primary ways God meets his people. Not the only way. But a real way. A powerful way. A way that Wesley believed most Christians were tragically underusing.

This is not Catholic transubstantiation. Wesley was clear about that. His view is best described as a “real spiritual presence” — Christ is truly present in the sacrament, but spiritually rather than physically. It is a middle path between Rome’s doctrine and the bare memorialism that has quietly taken over much of Protestant practice. Christ truly meets us at the table. Something actually happens there. Grace is genuinely conveyed.

À Kempis makes the case for frequent communion with disarming simplicity:

“I must often come to you and receive you for my soul’s well-being, or I’ll collapse along the way.”

That’s not poetry. That’s diagnosis. We sometimes treat communion as optional. À Kempis says: your soul cannot survive without it. The same way your body collapses without food, your soul collapses without the regular nourishment of Christ’s presence at the table. Wesley understood this viscerally — which is why he received communion every Sunday and took it whenever it was offered.

This convicted me while writing this section of the book. I have been a Methodist pastor for over thirty-five years. I have presided at communion hundreds of times. And if I am honest — and à Kempis has a way of making honesty unavoidable — there have been Sundays when I have gone through the motions. When the words were familiar enough to say without really hearing them. When I distributed the elements efficiently rather than reverently. When I treated the table as a pastoral duty rather than a throne of grace.

Book Four is an invitation — urgent and personal — to recover what we’ve lost:

“Come to the table hungry. Expect to meet Christ there. Confess your sins beforehand. Surrender yourself completely. Receive grace gratefully. Leave transformed.”

That’s Wesley’s vision. That’s what à Kempis invites you into. And the devastating truth is that most of us have settled for something considerably less.

Is the Lord’s Supper a Converting Ordinance?

Wesley went even further than most modern Methodists realize. In his sermon The Means of Grace, he made one of the most distinctive — and at the time, most controversial — claims of his entire theology: that the Lord’s Supper is not just a means of grace for the already-converted, but is itself a converting ordinance. “Experience shows the gross falsehood of that assertion, that the Lord’s Supper is not a converting ordinance,” he wrote. “Ye are the witnesses. For many now present know, the very beginning of your conversion to God — perhaps, in some, the first deep conviction — was wrought at the Lord’s Supper.” The table, in other words, is not a reward for those who have figured things out. It is one of the primary ways God meets people — wherever they are on the journey, whatever grace they need that day — and invites them more deeply into the life of God.

Here is what I want to say to my fellow pastors and leaders: we have lost something. Not deliberately, not maliciously, but quietly and gradually over generations, we have allowed the Lord’s Supper to shrink in our practice and our theology until it has become, for many of our congregations, a perfunctory addition to the service rather than its holy center.

Wesley knew better. À Kempis knew it six centuries before Wesley. The early church knew it before either of them — gathering week by week, sometimes at great personal risk, around the broken bread and the shared cup, because they understood that this was where the risen Christ met his people in a particular and powerful way.

Recovering Frequent Communion in the Methodist Church

Book Four of The Christian’s Pattern is an invitation to recover that vision. Not to become Catholic. Not to abandon our Protestant convictions. But to recover what Wesley never abandoned — the conviction that the table is a means of grace, that Christ meets us there, that something happens when we come with humble and hungry hearts.

The Wesleys closed their great collection of communion hymns with a prayer that has become mine as I have worked through this book:

“Sure and real is the grace, the manner be unknown.”

Sure and real is the grace. We may not be able to explain precisely how Christ meets us at the table. The manner may indeed be unknown, and perhaps unknowable this side of glory. But Wesley insisted — and à Kempis before him — that the grace is sure. The grace is real. And we receive it by coming, humbly and repeatedly, to the table Christ has prepared.

That is not a small thing.

That is everything.

The Christian’s Pattern: A Simple Guide to Follow Jesus Every Day released June 16th from Invite Press. Order now at inviteministries.org. We will be having an interview live with the author on July 2nd at 10:00 AM Eastern United States Time about The Christian’s Pattern for our Book Club. Join us at this link: https://worldmethodist-org.zoom.us/j/86258336454?pwd=TxpUBYoozhBSqareTbglAkoGwaTY3f.1

All quotations from Thomas à Kempis are taken from The Christian’s Pattern: A Simple Guide to Follow Jesus Every Day by J. David Juliano (Invite Press, June 16, 2026). The closing Wesley hymn is from Hymns on the Lord’s Supper (John and Charles Wesley, 1745).

This is the third installment on the Christian Pattern. Click here for part one and part two.

The Inner Life and the Voice We’ve Stopped Hearing

There is a spiritual condition that most pastors recognize but few talk about publicly.

It goes by different names in the tradition. The desert fathers called it acedia. The medieval mystics called it desolation. John of the Cross called it the dark night of the soul. Whatever you call it, it amounts to the same thing: a season when God feels absent, when prayer feels hollow, when the disciplines that once fed you now feel empty, when you are going through the motions of a faith that has temporarily lost its pulse.

I know this condition. I suspect you do too.

Books Two and Three of John Wesley’s The Christian’s Pattern address it with an honesty I haven’t found anywhere else in Christian literature — and they do so in ways that surprised me deeply when I sat down to modernize them.

Book Two is about the inner life. If Book One asked what your life is really about, Book Two asks something harder: what is actually happening inside you? Not your theology, not your public ministry, not your carefully maintained pastoral persona. The actual interior landscape of your soul — the fears, the hungers, the secret motives, the places where you are still running on empty no matter how full your calendar looks.

Why Ministry Activity Can Hide a Neglected Inner Life

À Kempis opens Book Two with a distinction sharp enough to cut:

“If you seek Jesus in all things, you’ll surely find Jesus. But if you seek yourself, you’ll also find yourself — but to your own destruction.”

That is not comfortable reading for those of us who have spent decades in ministry. Because the honest truth is that ministry can become — if we are not ruthlessly watchful — a sophisticated form of self-seeking. The platform, the reputation, the sense of being needed, the identity that comes from being the person with answers. None of these things are evil in themselves. But when they become the point, when Jesus becomes the means by which we build the life we want rather than the Lord to whom we surrender the life we have — we find ourselves. And that, à Kempis says with terrible clarity, is not good news.

How to Respond When God Feels Absent

Then comes the chapter on desolation. And here À Kempis does something unexpected: he doesn’t fix it. He doesn’t offer a program or a technique or a series of steps for recovering the sense of God’s presence. He simply says:

“There’s no better remedy than patience and surrendering my will to the will of God.”

Patience. And surrender.

I confess I wanted something more actionable than that. I am a pastor. I like solutions. But the longer I sat with this chapter while writing the modern reflection, the more I recognized its wisdom. Some seasons of the soul cannot be fixed. They can only be endured, with open hands and surrendered will. The attempt to engineer your way out of desolation — to manufacture the feeling of God’s presence through increased religious activity — usually makes things worse. Sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is simply wait.

Book Three shifts everything. Suddenly you are not reading a devotional manual. You are listening to a conversation.

Learning to Listen: Hearing God’s Voice in a Noisy World

À Kempis wrote Book Three as a dialogue — an intimate exchange between the Christian soul and Christ himself. The believer speaks. Christ responds. Back and forth, chapter after chapter, the two voices weaving together in what à Kempis imagined as the interior life of authentic prayer. Not prayer as a monologue aimed at the ceiling. Prayer as a conversation with someone who actually answers.
It opens with a posture that I have been trying to practice ever since I took on this task:

“I will listen to what the Lord God speaks within me.”

Not “I will tell God what I need.” Not “I will present my requests and await results.” Just: I will listen. I will position my soul to receive rather than demand. I will be quiet enough to hear.

In a culture that has made noise a virtue and silence a problem, this is genuinely countercultural. We have lost the ability to be alone with our thoughts, let alone alone with God. The moment we have a free minute, we reach for our phones. The moment silence descends, we fill it. We are afraid of what we might hear — or more honestly, afraid of what we might not hear — if we actually stopped and listened.

But Christ speaks. À Kempis is insistent about this. The question is not whether God is speaking. The question is whether we have become too noisy to hear.

There is a moment in Book One that has haunted me since I first read it — and that Book Three keeps pressing home:

“I’d rather experience genuine sorrow for my sins than merely understand the theological definition of repentance.”

I know the definitions. I have preached on repentance, on contrition, on the anatomy of godly sorrow. I have explained these things in confirmation classes and counseled people through them. But do I know them — in my bones, in the place where real change actually happens, in the gut rather than the head?
That is the question Books Two and Three keep asking. Not can you talk about this? But do you know this? Have you heard God’s voice on this? Have you sat still long enough to let him speak?

Wesley believed that the interior life was not a luxury for the spiritually advanced but the foundation of everything else. The outer ministry — the preaching, the organizing, the endless riding and writing — flowed from an inner life of prayer and self-examination that he maintained with fierce discipline throughout his life. He read à Kempis because à Kempis kept him honest about the interior. Kept him from mistaking activity for transformation.

We need that same honesty. Perhaps more urgently than ever.

In our noisy, distracted, endlessly performing age — where ministry has never been more visible and the interior life has never been more neglected — Books Two and Three of The Christian’s Pattern feel less like ancient wisdom and more like urgent medicine.

God is speaking.

The question is whether we are listening.

The Christian’s Pattern: A Simple Guide to Follow Jesus Every Day releases June 16th from Invite Press. Part 4: Wesley’s Lost Vision of Holy Communion follows in two weeks.

J. David Juliano is the pastor of First Sebring 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.

This is the second article in a series on the Christian Pattern. Read the first article here.

What Is Your Life Really About?

I have been a pastor for over thirty-five years.

In that time I have sat across from a lot of people in a lot of conversations — in hospital rooms, in counseling sessions, in coffee shops, in the aftermath of funerals. And one thing I’ve learned is that the gap between what people say their lives are about and what their lives are actually about is often — not always, but often — enormous.

I include myself in that observation.

Thomas à Kempis opens The Imitation of Christ without preamble or gentle introduction. He goes straight for the jugular. Not what do you believe, not what church do you attend, not how long have you been a Christian. Just this, in the very first chapter:

“What good does it do to argue brilliantly about the Trinity if you lack humility and thereby offend the very God you’re discussing?”

You can have impeccable theology and a cold heart. You can know everything about God and barely know God at all. You can preach grace and live performance. You can talk about transformation and remain fundamentally unchanged.

Wesley underlined this passage. He knew it described him before Aldersgate. The man had been ordained in the Church of England, had crossed the Atlantic to serve as a missionary in Georgia, had read every spiritual book he could find — and still wrote in his journal that he lacked the faith that would save him. He was, by any external measure, a successful minister. By his own internal reckoning, a man whose outer life had long since outpaced his inner one.

À Kempis had diagnosed him twenty years before the cure arrived on Aldersgate Street.

We must attend to our outer life — our actions, our disciplines, our choices and habits and public performances of faith. But the work of God keeps driving inward. Every chapter of The Christian Pattern asks the same underlying question in a different form: are you becoming more like Jesus, or merely more informed about Jesus?

When Theological Knowledge Replaces Spiritual Transformation

For those of us in ministry, this is a particularly uncomfortable question. We are professional Christians. We are paid to know things about God, to say things about God, to organize communities around God. The temptation — and I speak from experience — is to mistake fluency for transformation. To assume that because we can articulate the doctrine of sanctification, we must be making progress in it.

À Kempis will not let you make that assumption.

There is a chapter on reading and study that I find almost unbearable in its accuracy. He warns against the person who accumulates spiritual knowledge the way others accumulate possessions — as a form of pride, of status, of self-congratulation. Wesley himself, in a letter to a colleague, put it with characteristic bluntness:

“Beware that you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.” — John Wesley, letter to Joseph Benson, 1768

An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge. That sentence has been sitting with me for awhile now. How much of my reading life has been genuine hunger for God, and how much has been the intellectual equivalent of trophy collecting? How much of my studying has produced love, and how much has produced the ability to win arguments?

The Discipline of Silence in a Noisy World

There is a chapter on silence that feels genuinely radical in our age. À Kempis argues that the person who knows how to be quiet and still — who can close the door on the noise of the world and simply be present to God — is rarer than gold and worth considerably more. We live in the noisiest moment in human history. We have made noise a virtue and silence a problem to be solved. We fill every gap with content, every commute with podcasts, every moment of potential stillness with the next thing demanding our attention.

And in all that noise, something gets crowded out.

There is a chapter on friendship and trust that is remarkably practical and remarkably modern — à Kempis understood that intimacy requires discernment, that not everyone who wants access to your inner life should have it, that pastoral ministry in particular requires wisdom about who you allow to shape you.

Overcoming the Fear of Real Spiritual Growth

And then there is the chapter about going all in. No half measures, no spiritual hobby, no comfortable Christianity that asks little and delivers accordingly. À Kempis writes:

“One thing holds many people back from spiritual progress and real growth: fear of difficulty or the struggle involved. But those who grow the most spiritually are the ones who work hardest to overcome the things that are most difficult and contrary to them.”

I read that and felt the weight of it. Because it’s true in a way that is both clarifying and uncomfortable. We would rather make grand dramatic gestures than do the quiet, unglamorous, daily work of actually changing. We would rather announce a commitment to transformation than submit to the slow, painful process of being transformed.

Book One of The Christian’s Pattern will not let you stay comfortable. It holds up a mirror and keeps it there until you stop flinching.

But here is what I want to say to my fellow pastors and leaders specifically: this book is not an indictment. It is an invitation. À Kempis is not trying to crush you with guilt. He is trying to free you from the exhausting performance of a Christianity that never quite reaches your heart.

Wesley read this book throughout his entire ministry. Not once, not as a young man before he knew better, but repeatedly, across six decades, finding new depths each time he returned to it. He recommended it constantly to early Methodists — not as an academic exercise but as a companion for the journey of holiness.

That journey begins with a question.

What is your life really about — not what you say, but what your choices reveal?

The Christian’s Pattern: A Simple Guide to Follow Jesus Every Day releases June 16th from Invite Press. Part 3 — The Inner Life and Hearing God’s Voice — follows in two weeks.

J. David Juliano is the pastor of First Sebring 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.

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.