Author Archives: Matthew Sigler

Interestingly, John Wesley omitted the Lenten season from the Sunday Service of the Methodists in North America, his edition of the Book of Common Prayer that he sent to the Methodists in America. His omission is likely because of the emphasis he placed on the constant practice of scriptural holiness. Methodists were not to limit their pursuit of holiness to particular times of the year. Wesley’s omission is more of an indictment of the nominalism of much of the Church of England during his day than it is on Lent itself. Yet this was my response when, as a college student, I was asked over lunch what I was giving up for Lent. My rather self-righteous reply was “I don’t need a particular season in order to practice fasting.” Since then, however, my position on observing Lent has taken quite a different turn. Here are three reasons why I observe Lent as a Wesleyan.

One Great Motivation

The Christian practice of observing Lent is motivated by one great longing: “I want to know Christ…” Paul’s words are the cry of all of us who love the Christ. Every attempt at knowing Jesus leads us to the cross. We are reminded of Jesus’ words in Matthew 16 that if we want to “come after” Jesus, we too must go to the cross. This is the godly motivation of observing Lent; something that can all too easily get obscured by the giving up of trifle indulgences on the one hand, or self-flagellation on the other—the type of Lenten practices Wesley rejected.

Full Surrender is the Catalyst for Christian Perfection

Observing the season of Lent forces us to be intentional about dying with Christ. Lent provides us the opportunity to journey with Christ in the desert and remember that all of the devil’s promises are rooted in one great lie: that we can find ultimate fulfillment on our own terms. The spiritual practice of fasting—something Wesley did weekly—is given pinpoint focus during this time. We fast to remind ourselves that only Jesus is enough. And in this time we are called to fully surrender our lives to Him. This is an exercise of our will, a laying down of all that we are. As Wesleyans, we should note that fully surrendering our lives to Christ is the prime catalyst for sanctification.

Amplifying Easter

It should come as no surprise that Wesley kept Easter in the Sunday Service as the primary Christian feast. He, like most Christians, recognized the centrality of the Resurrection. Lent, in fact, is ultimately about Easter. A celebration of Easter without a prior descent into the grave is dishonest and naïve, just as observing Lent without the uncompromising proclamation of the Resurrection is hopeless. The liturgy that bookends the Lenten/Easter journey reminds us of this. It begins with acknowledging our mortality and utter need for the Lord: “From dust you have come, to dust you will return.” Lent ends with the ancient, joyous proclamation: “Christ is Risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!” During the Lenten season, we journey to the cross in hopes that we might die with Christ to be raised to life with Him. In observing Lent as a Wesleyan, I am reminded that John and Charles Wesley were persons clearly gripped by the Story of God. This is what Lent is ultimately about: living more fully into that Story.

About five years after my conversation in the college cafeteria, I decided to dive into the season of Lent for the first time. My desire was simply to follow Christ into His Story. It was a powerful forty days that ended with the Easter Vigil, an ancient service that traces the story of God’s salvation in Christ, marking the transition from Lent to Easter. During the service, I was struck, in a way too deep for words, with the reality that I had died and my life was now “hidden with Christ in God.” The memory of that moment continues to be one filled with grace.

John Wesley did not live to see the significant changes that were made during the Second Vatican Council. He was never impacted by the Liturgical Renewal Movement of the 20^th century. In many respects, both movements sought to reform the observance of Lent in a direction that Wesley would have been quite pleased with. As a Wesleyan, I fully embrace the season of Lent as a season of renewal; not a time of temporarily embracing certain spiritual disciplines, but a season to dive deeper into the Story—an opportunity for God to continue His sanctifying work in me.

This post originally appeared on Wesleyan Accent in 2014.

I grew up in a family of Methodist pastors and music ministers. You can imagine that our family gatherings were often filled with conversations about various ongoings within the church. In 1989 I remember there being quite a bit of discussion about the new hymnal and the orders of worship provided in the book. While I didn’t fully understand the conversations—I was only ten years old at the time—it was clear to me that whatever was in the red hymnal was very different from what my family knew.

The 1989 United Methodist Hymnal and the companion 1992 Book of Worship marked the culmination of nearly 20 years of liturgical developments within American Methodism. Many Methodists were suspicious of the changes made in these new resources. They saw the greater emphasis on Word and Sacrament as a step in the wrong direction for Methodist worship. In order to understand the influences behind the ’89 Hymnal and ’92 Book of Worship, it’s helpful to consider the shifts in Methodist worship in the twentieth century that preceded these resources.

Aestheticism

The year 1905 marks a drastic change in Methodist worship practice. That year the northern and southern branches of the church published a joint hymnal that included, for the first time, an Order of Worship for the Sunday service. Nearly ten years earlier, the Methodist Episcopal Church had adopted a similar order of service at General Conference. Not only did both branches share a common Order of Worship—something that brought charges of “formalism” by many—but the hymnal included other changes. Bishop Nolan Harmon recalls:

the 1905 Hymnal came to be in full use with the systematic Responsive Readings…the saying of the Apostles Creed as a part of morning worship [and] with the Amen sung at the end of each hymn.

The 1905 Hymnal ushered in a period of aestheticism in Methodist worship that crescendoed into the 1930’s.

As Methodists became more respectable within society there was a growing stress on “enriching worship.” The prevalence of Methodist churches built in the Gothic style is a visual marker of this change. With the architectural shift came other changes. Liturgical scholar James White once remarked that when his home church in Vermont built a new Gothic building in the 1920’s, they also “resolved to discourage shouts of ‘amen’ during the sermon.”

The music used in Methodist worship was also influenced by this change. Increasingly the emphasis was on the “quality” of church music. A growing number of churches hired professional musicians. Choral responses sung by the choir often replaced the voice of the congregation. The 1935 Hymnal represents the high-water mark of growing musical sophistication among Methodists during this period.

Other streams within Methodism were not as entranced by the emphasis on “enriching” worship. They maintained that true Methodist worship was marked by evangelical zeal and freedom. Sung “amens,” processions, and the use of candles were all “pretty nothings carried out with an air of sacred mystery.”

Historicism

Two World Wars and the emergence of the Cold War brought an end to the period of Aestheticism. The horrors of Nazi death camps and the Atomic bomb shattered the illusion that humankind was on a steady march toward progress. Neo-orthodoxy reminded the Church that original sin was real and could not be overcome simply with education and innovation. The Church, as James White put it, “needed something stronger than aestheticism and found it in historicism.”

Liturgically, mainline churches began returning to their roots in the rites of the Reformation—many (re)discovering creeds and confession. Methodists began examining Wesley’s Sunday Service and its connection to the Book of Common Prayer. Where for years American Methodists had altered the forms of worship inherited from Anglicanism, many of the liturgical resources of the 1950’s and 60’s sought to reclaim this part of their tradition. In 1965, for example, Methodists incorporated into the Book of Worship the penitential preface that Cranmer had added to the service of Morning Prayer in 1552.

Liturgical Renewal(s)

The 1965 Methodist Book of Worship went to press around the same time drastic changes began occurring elsewhere in Christian worship. Writing in 1972, James White—the principle author of what would become Word and Table I—defended why the Commission on Worship published a new communion service “for the second time in eight years.” He writes:

It is because the eight years between the 1964 and the 1972 General Conferences span some of the most rapid changes in Christian worship since the Reformation in the 1500s…The middle ages in Catholic worship lasted until December, 1963 when the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy was promulgated…

In contrast with previous changes to the Methodist communion service, which were primarily revisions within the Anglican pattern, White celebrated that Methodists had finally “broken the habit of simply revising within the Anglican-Methodist pattern and opted for one that reflects the breadth of modern Christianity and the depth of classical practice.”

While some saw the greater emphasis on Word and Sacrament in worship as a deviation from true Methodist worship, White understood this breaking free from the classical Anglican/Methodist pattern to be in harmony with a Wesleyan liturgical piety. As Methodists walked through the periods of Aestheticism and Historicism in the first half of the twentieth century, many in the Roman Catholic Church had been (re)discovering early sources on worship. Among these was On the Apostolic Tradition, credited to Hippolytus. White argued that Wesley was a patristic scholar who, had he been aware of Apostolic Tradition, would have embraced its implications for worship practice. Throughout his life, White would maintain that the work he and others did in reforming Methodist liturgical praxis by incorporating aspects of Apostolic Tradition actually made Methodist worship “more Wesleyan, than Wesley’s [Sunday Service].” Of course, many Methodists saw the changes as “too Catholic” and felt that White and others had moved Methodists away from true Methodist worship.

Just as Methodists did not foresee the liturgical changes that would be brought about by the Second Vatican Council, those who crafted the resources that eventually found their way into the 1989 Hymnal did not anticipate the deep influence of what would become known as “contemporary worship.” The efforts at Methodist liturgical revision that culminated in the 1989 United Methodist Hymnal and 1992 Book of Worship were often disregarded by those seeking to make their worship services more “contemporary.” As “contemporary worship” became an increasingly viable option for Methodists, many completely rejected the hymnal or anything that appeared to be rooted in the past. While Methodist “contemporary” worship frequently infused life into dry services, it often looked just like the Baptist “contemporary” service down the street. In rejecting the historic forms of their worship, Methodists suffered from an identity crisis in their worship services.

Future Prospects

So let me return to my initial post where I suggested that in our effort to design services that are more faithful to the past, we must be careful not to “cut and paste” the content of our services. As Methodist congregations consider how to be faithful to their own liturgical heritage while being attuned to the particularities of their own context, it might be helpful to consider the following:

First, one must consider if speaking of form versus freedom in Methodist worship is to speak of a false dichotomy. Certainly this is a helpful way to understand the history of the various liturgical trends in Methodist history, yet when one speaks prescriptively about Methodist worship, one might be better served to speak of form and freedom as different sides of the same coin.

Second, and perhaps most important, Methodists need to know their own liturgical history. One wonders how many Methodists today are aware of John Wesley’s Sunday Service. How many understand the history and impact of the liturgical renewal of the second half of the twentieth century? White put it well when he suggested that to be ignorant of one’s own liturgical heritage is to be bound to the status quo.

Finally, knowing about one’s own liturgical heritage is only the starting point. The past must be embodied in the present if it is to have meaning. A distinct Methodist liturgical piety should transcend the various epochs of Methodist liturgical history. With some glaring deviations, Methodists have historically given equal value to the affections and intellect; Scripture and sacrament; and form and freedom in worship. These values, coupled with the rich textual tradition of The Sunday Service and the hymns of Charles Wesley, provide limitless possibilities for the future of Methodist worship.

In my last post I showed that many Methodists remain unaware of their own liturgical heritage—something that is tragic given the fact that many are now longing for more historically resonant forms of worship. To be fair, it has often been difficult to point to a definitive period of Methodist worship because it has changed so much over time. This makes a basic knowledge of Methodist liturgical history even more important for those seeking to design worship services with a Wesleyan accent.

In this post we will travel through two centuries of American Methodist worship history. I began this brief history of American Methodist worship by looking at the prayer book John Wesley sent to the American Methodists following the end of the American Revolution. Again, you can learn more about The Sunday Service of the Methodists in North America here.

Untrammeled Freedom

The late bishop, Nolan Harmon, often likened the disuse of the Sunday Service by early American Methodists to a young David shedding Saul’s suit of armor on the eve of his battle with Goliath. The American context was quite different from British Methodism and, to quote Harmon: “The saddlebags [of the circuit riders] were too tightly packed to carry around copies of the Sunday Service…” At least by the end of the eighteenth century American Methodist worship looked significantly different from what John Wesley envisioned for his followers.

The primary venue that came to shape Methodist worship in these early days was the Quarterly Meeting. These gatherings allowed for extended periods of preaching and were punctuated by celebrations of the Love Feast, the Lord’s Supper, baptisms, and even funerals. Worship at Quarterly Meetings was full of vibrant expressions of faith. Accounts from this time period are replete with examples of “the work of God” or “the melting time”—phrases early Methodists often used to describe their experience of God in worship. Writing of “the work of God” witnessed during his appointment on the eastern shore of Maryland in 1785, Ezekiel Cooper recalled: “The power of God so fell upon the people that many cried out aloud; others fell dumbfounded to the floor.” Jesse Lee recalled a similar scene from a New England quarterly meeting in in 1802:

“The meeting continued till sun sitting, in which time, it was said, sixteen souls were converted…About the going down of the sun, a young lad got converted…One of the preachers shouted aloud, and praised God that the Christians had taken the field, and kept the ground for there was not a sinner left.”

Methodists often used the phrase “a little heaven below” to describe their experience of worship at Quarterly Meetings. It is no wonder why Methodists easily embraced the Camp Meeting as it mirrored many of the liturgical activities they had already been celebrating.

Depending on your liturgical persuasion this period in Methodist worship is either idyllic or uncouth. For many years, the dominant scholarship narrated this part of the Methodist story as one in which American Methodists squandered the high eucharistic piety of the Wesleys for banal emotionalism. On the other hand, many from the evangelical tradition have viewed this period of freedom from constricting forms as the definitive period of Methodist worship. Both perspectives do well to recall that Wesley advised American Methodists to use a blend of set forms with extemporaneous prayers; and valued the affections alongside a robust sacramental piety.

Uniformity

There is evidence that Methodists were sensing a need for greater uniformity in their worship as early as 1820 —the Discipline that year rather vaguely calls for regularity in public worship on the Lord’s Day. With Methodism’s explosive growth came calls by many for faithfulness to the Ritual and other forms of public worship. One of the louder voices was Thomas O. Summers, who, among other roles, served as the head of the MEC, South’s publishing house from 1850 until his death in 1882. Summers held that uniformity within worship practice was important in maintaining the “peculiar” identity of Methodists. To this end Summers called for greater fidelity to the Ritual and even reissued John Wesley’s Sunday Service.

The great challenge for Summers was to convince Methodists that the use of forms did not mean succumbing to formalism. Within the context of nineteenth century American Methodism,  Summers often found himself swimming upstream against a current that was driven by skepticism toward any type of scripted prayer. In a letter written by Bishop John Early to Summers, which was published in the Quarterly Review in 1860, the bishop writes:

“Our people are so much opposed to excessive forms that they neglect their own services, and it is high time that our ministers call their attention to the neglect, and by both precept and example correct the error. ”

At issue was the question of what made Methodist worship distinctly Methodist. Drawing from Wesley’s example, Summers argued that form and freedom should go hand in hand in Methodist worship. By the last decade of the century Summers was not alone in his efforts at nudging Methodists toward the greater use of forms in their worship. For example, in 1891 Charles S. Harrower published a collection of psalms, prayers, and parts of Wesley’s Sunday Service to serve as a sort of Methodist Book of Common Prayer. Of course many Methodists shuddered at the thought of resembling anything remotely like an Episcopalian in their worship. Others, reveling in a new found sense of privilege and respectability embraced these developments as a natural outcome of a maturing denomination.

Even today these disagreements over what makes Methodist worship “Methodist” continue. For all the talk over “high” and “low” church; “spirit-led” and “ordered;” or “contemporary” and “traditional”—whatever the current iteration of the debate—we might do well to take a page from Wesley and Summers who both understood that form and freedom are two sides of the same coin for Methodists. Of course, the question of which “form” should guide Methodist worship also remains contended. In my next post I’ll explore the liturgical developments in Methodism during the twentieth century and how Methodist worship moved beyond the Anglican-Methodist pattern inherited via the Sunday Service.

Cutting and Pasting

A lot has been said in recent years about a growing number of young evangelicals who long to be “more liturgical.” I don’t have any statistics in front of me, though a simple search on the internet will yield a plethora of posts concerning this trend. There are a number of ways to parse the rather generic term “liturgical worship;” not the least of which is that, strictly speaking, all worship is “liturgical.” Oftentimes when people speak of becoming “more liturgical” what they are really saying is that they want to anchor worship in something beyond the moment.

Many seeking to reclaim a more historically resonant form of worship often employ a “cut and paste” approach in their design of such services. I’ve been guilty of this myself when, over a decade ago, I began softening to “liturgical” forms of worship. In my case, I would often open up the Anglican prayer book, find a collect that impressed me, and insert it into our church’s “contemporary” order of worship. I had little concept of the Christian Year, much less the historic function of the Collect of the Day in the Anglican order of worship. For example, I was quite happy to insert a collect from Pentecost into a service held in October simply because it echoed one of the worship songs we had planned to sing. The problem with the “cut and paste” approach is that it overlooks the fact that forms of worship, like collects, derive much of their meaning from what comes before and after in the service.

Lest this sound like just the type of triviality upon which the “liturgy police” make a living, consider the impact of the hymn “Just As I Am” at a Billy Graham crusade in the 1950s. In most cases, the hymn was sung concurrent with the altar call. Those in attendance had just heard a sermon geared at calling sinners to repentance. An invitation to follow Christ had just been given. The simple text of the hymn takes on a much more poignant meaning when one understands how it was often used. Now consider what might be lost if one was to open up next years’ Easter Sunday service with “Just as I Am.” Would it be total disaster? No. Could God still use it? Of course. But it would not carry the same significance as it did at the close of a Billy Graham crusade. In extracting an element from a worship service without careful consideration as to how it functions in its original design, one is likely to miss out on the full impact of that prayer, song, response, etc. To return to my example of the collect for Pentecost, I later learned how much more powerful that particular prayer can be when it is surrounded with scriptures, songs, and a sermon centered on the giving of the Spirit.

The temptation to “cut and paste” in designing a worship service is all the more strong if you do not know the history of your own tradition. On several occasions in the last five years I have had people contact me seeking advice for designing a “more liturgical” service in their local Methodist congregation. In each case I have noted that many overlook the rich resources available within our own Methodist liturgical heritage. If it is true that many are gravitating to more historically resonant forms of worship, Methodists should know the resources within their own liturgical history. Quite frankly, I find that many of us don’t know what we have in our American Methodist liturgical heritage. With this in mind, I’d like to devote the remainder of this post and a few subsequent posts to giving a brief overview of the history of the American Methodist liturgical tradition and the resources that have emerged from within that heritage. As will be seen, Methodists have a rich liturgical heritage that values both form and freedom in worship.

The Sunday Service

Any discussion of American Methodist worship must begin with the prayer book Wesley sent to America. A year after the signing of the Treaty of Paris, John Wesley sent his edited version of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer to the newly formed United States. The Sunday Service of the Methodists in North America was a fairly conservative reworking of the English prayer book—most of the changes being made by deletion rather than the insertion of new material. Wesley’s desire was to simplify the prayer book so that it could be used more effectively and affectively. Along with the Sunday Service, Wesley sent a letter that was often bound with copies of the prayer book. In the letter John Wesley advises “all the travelling-preachers to use [the Sunday Service] on the Lord’s day, and in all their congregations, reading the litany only on Wednesday and Fridays, and praying extempore on all other days.” He continues: “I also advise the elders to administer the supper of the Lord on every Lord’s day.”[1] Wesley envisioned that the Sunday Service would be infused with the singing of hymns—a fact demonstrated in the inclusion of A Collection of Psalms and Hymns for the Lord’s Day with many of the copies of the Sunday Service. The use of hymns among the Methodists had been quite an innovation within the context of 18^th century British Anglicanism, and American Methodists now inherited the treasury of hymns written primarily by Charles Wesley.

Wesley was clear in his expectation that American Methodists use the Sunday Service as their primary service book in worship. Rather than a lifeless, dry formalism, he considered the liturgical forms he bequeathed to the American Methodists to be a platform for the affections in worship—something that both anchored emotions while also giving expression to the affections. The forms of Methodist worship, when embraced with “heart, mind, soul and strength,” should allow for reverent spontaneity and holy emotion. The use of liturgical forms, for Wesley, actually led to freedom in worship—a fact quickly lost on his American descendants. Indeed, American Methodists waited until their founder passed away before they quietly put aside the Sunday Service. The early American Methodist minister, Jesse Lee, summed up how many Methodists felt about the Sunday Service when he observed that Methodists could pray better with their eyes shut than their eyes open. Printed prayers were considered dry and lifeless by many American Methodists, so the Sunday Service went into disuse.

While the Sunday Service would be lost to relative obscurity for at least seven decades (Thomas O. Summers reissued a version of The Sunday Service in 1867), in 1792 the rites for baptism, the Lord’s Supper, weddings, funerals and ordination were extracted from the Sunday Service to form the backbone of what would later be called the Ritual. For nearly two hundred years, whenever Methodists used the Ritual they were following in this Anglican/Methodist pattern. Of course, Wesley’s hope for a Sunday service patterned after the Anglican form was rejected by the American Methodists. In my next post I’ll consider some of the changes in American Methodist worship during the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

[1] John Wesley, Sunday Service of the Methodists in North America, ed. James F. White (Nashville: Quarterly Review, 1984), ii.

With the lyrics of “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” still ringing in our ears we enter into the season of Eastertide. The joyous proclamation of the hymn is not “Christ the Lord was risen two-thousand years ago;” we sing in the present tense, “Christ is risen today!” Charles Wesley captures in his lyrics the mystery that we often gloss over when we participate in worship: time is a blurry thing in Christian worship. While the past events of scripture are not repeated literally; by the Spirit, time collapses as we engage the Story of God—hence, the lyrics “Christ is risen today.”

The trans-temporality of Christian worship is important to embrace as we enter into these fifty days of Eastertide. Often the weeks after Easter can seem like a letdown. With our energies expended on Easter sunrise services and the other events of the day, we trudge into the following Sundays frequently missing the richness of the post-Easter Day season. The Story does not end with Easter morning and the empty tomb. We have broiled fish to eat and sheep to feed. We need to hear Christ’s voice say “peace be with you” as we’re caught off-guard when he unexpectedly shows up in our midst. Like the disciples, we need to encounter the risen Christ as we continue on the journey. Here are a few reasons why the season of Eastertide is so important.

Verifying the Resurrection

Confusion leads to disbelief, doubt is shattered by encounter, and in the presence of the risen Lord, fear dissolves into unbounded joy. We struggle with many of the same concerns that the disciples struggled with in the weeks following Easter. Inevitably, CNN or the History Channel will run their one hour documentaries giving alternative possibilities to bodily resurrection. If Eastertide does anything, it forces us into the narrative where we encounter a very physically risen Lord—one who eats with us and invites us to touch his wounds. In worship we also are given the opportunity to encounter the same risen Lord in our midst.

Manifesting the Already-But-Not-Yetness of the Kingdom

For forty days the disciples lived in swirling awe of the risen Christ. One can’t blame them for taking some time before finally asking in Acts 1, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” Jesus’ answer takes them by surprise and it does us too: it’s not for us to know the times set by the Father. What the season of Eastertide does allow us to know for certain is that our current age is temporary. The resurrection validates all that Jesus taught about the kingdom of God: a kingdom that has already been established, but has not yet fully come. It also shows us our destiny in Christ, the first fruits of this new creation.

Pointing Us to the End of the Story

At the end of the forty days following the resurrection the disciples stand gazing up into heaven and are immediately given the promise that the ascended Christ will return one day. Ten days later they receive a down payment on that promise at Pentecost. During Eastertide we also are (re)oriented to the end of God’s story of salvation. We renew our hope in the sure and certain return of a King who is making all things new.

Sending Us on Mission

Similarly, Eastertide is also a season where we are called to mission. “Feed my sheep,” “Go and make disciples of all nations,” are words of commission for the followers of the risen Lord. We cannot stand around gazing at the heavens because we have encountered the risen One and know how the Story ends. These fifty days simultaneously remind us of the good news we proclaim as well as our deep need to be infused with the Spirit’s power for this mission.

Our Hearts Burning Within Us

As someone who plans and leads worship, I find my biblical imagination is captivated during this season of Eastertide for all the reasons noted above. And then there’s Emmaus. It’s no wonder why so many have read this text as model for worship—Jesus opens up the scriptures and manifests himself in the breaking of the bread. Regardless of your exegesis on this passage, the text stirs a desire to feel our own hearts burning within us as we encounter the Lord in the Story. The same Lord who met the disciples on the road to Emmaus longs to meet us during this season of Eastertide. As we seek him, he opens his Word to us, meets us in the breaking of the Bread, and stirs our hearts with his holy love in a way that makes it impossible to contain the news of his resurrection.

The Lenten season begins on Wednesday; but, interestingly John Wesley omitted this season from the Sunday Service of the Methodists in North America, his edition of the Book of Common Prayer that he sent to the Methodists in America. His omission is likely because of the emphasis he placed on the constant practice of scriptural holiness. Methodists were not to limit their pursuit of holiness to particular times of the year. Wesley’s omission is more of an indictment of the nominalism of much of the Church of England during his day than it is on Lent itself.

Yet this was my response when, as a college student, I was asked over lunch what I was giving up for Lent. My rather self-righteous reply was “I don’t need a particular season in order to practice fasting.” Since then, however, my position on observing Lent has taken quite a different turn. Here are three reasons why I observe Lent as a Wesleyan.

One Great Motivation

The Christian practice of observing Lent is motivated by one great longing: “I want to know Christ…” Paul’s words are the cry of all of us who love the Christ. Every attempt at knowing Jesus leads us to the cross. We are reminded of Jesus’ words in Matthew 16 that if we want to “come after” Jesus, we too must go to the cross. This is the godly motivation of observing Lent; something that can all too easily get obscured by the giving up of trifle indulgences on the one hand, or self-flagellation on the other—the type of Lenten practices Wesley rejected.

Full Surrender is the Catalyst for Christian Perfection

Observing the season of Lent forces us to be intentional about dying with Christ. Lent provides us the opportunity to journey with Christ in the desert and remember that all of the devil’s promises are rooted in one great lie: that we can find ultimate fulfillment on our own terms. The spiritual practice of fasting—something Wesley did weekly—is given pinpoint focus during this time. We fast to remind ourselves that only Jesus is enough. And in this time we are called to fully surrender our lives to him. This is an exercise of our will, a laying down of all that we are. As Wesleyans we should note that fully surrendering our lives to Christ is the prime catalyst for sanctification.

Amplifying Easter

It should come as no surprise that Wesley kept Easter in the Sunday Service as the primary Christian feast. He, like most Christians, recognized the centrality of the Resurrection. Lent, in fact, is ultimately about Easter.

A celebration of Easter without a prior descent into the grave is dishonest and naïve, just as observing Lent without the uncompromising proclamation of the Resurrection is hopeless.

The liturgy that bookends the Lenten/Easter journey reminds us of this. It begins with acknowledging our mortality and utter need for the Lord: “From dust you have come, to dust you will return.” Lent ends with the ancient, joyous proclamation: “Christ is Risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!” During the Lenten season, we journey to the cross in hopes that we might die with Christ to be raised to life with Him. In observing Lent as a Wesleyan, I am reminded that John and Charles Wesley were persons clearly gripped by the Story of God. This is what Lent is ultimately about: living more fully into that Story.

About five years after my conversation in the college cafeteria, I decided to dive into the season of Lent for the first time. My desire was simply to follow Christ into his Story. It was a powerful forty days that ended with the Easter Vigil, an ancient service that traces the story of God’s salvation in Christ, marking the transition from Lent to Easter. During the service I was struck, in a way too deep for words, with the reality that I had died and my life was now “hidden with Christ in God.” The memory of that moment continues to be one filled with grace.

John Wesley did not live to see the significant changes that were made during the Second Vatican Council. He was never impacted by the Liturgical Renewal Movement of the 20^th century. In many respects both movements sought to reform the observance of Lent in a direction that Wesley would have been quite pleased with.

As a Wesleyan, I fully embrace the season of Lent as a season of renewal; not a time of temporarily embracing certain spiritual disciplines, but a season to dive deeper into the Story—an opportunity for God to continue his sanctifying work in me.

Last week, while most of us were still engorged on leftovers from Thanksgiving, the church began a new year with the season of Advent. Many congregations marked the season by lighting of the first candle in the Advent wreath and, perhaps, with a few other changes in the liturgy. Some sang Advent hymns, though many immediately began with songs about the Nativity. Yet Advent is primarily about looking through the baby in the manger to see Christ the King coming on the clouds in glory. The problem for Methodists is that, for decades, we did not have a single hymn in the Methodist hymnal that explicitly referenced the Lord’s physical return.

Nolan Harmon, a Methodist bishop who served on several hymnal committees, recalls the debate that ensued in the 1930 hymnal commission about Charles Wesley’s hymn, “Lo! He Comes with Clouds, Descending.” In spite of Harmon’s argument that “the New Testament does teach that the Lord will come again—as does the Creed” the hymn was voted out.[1] Speaking against the hymn, one committee member argued that the final verse, which in the original version ends “Jah, Jehovah, Everlasting God come down,” was “the invocation of an old Hebrew God, and doesn’t belong with us.”[2] Reflecting the predominance of liberal theology of the day, the committee also struck out other references to the second coming of Christ. Another Wesley hymn, “Rejoice, the Lord is King,” was included in the hymnal, but with the traditional closing line “Jesus the judge shall come” omitted.[3] So for nearly thirty years, Methodists had zero hymns in their hymnal that spoke of the sure and certain return of Christ.

The Second Advent

In contrast to our current hymnal, which has an entire section devoted to the “Return and Reign of the Lord,” the 1932 hymnal contains a fairly ambiguous section entitled, “The Everliving Christ.” Similarly, Advent and Nativity were conflated into one section in the hymnal. In practice, this is often the case today.

People are quite comfortable with the meek and mild baby in the manger; but to speak of a returning King with fire in his eyes and a sword in his hand, who comes to judge the living and the dead and to set all things right, is less popular.

Add to this a cultural context that continues to extend the “Christmas” season for commercial reasons, and the Church finds it nearly impossible to speak of the second Advent of Christ in the weeks leading to Christmas. In our silence have we capitulated to the dominant culture?

Lo! He Comes With Clouds, Descending

What was considered passé by the 1930 hymnal commission and by many today is the great hope for those of us who hold to classic Christianity. So, while we can and should sing of Christ’s return throughout the year, Advent presents a key opportunity to declare with clarity this crucial doctrine in our faith. And as Wesleyans we have a gem in Charles’ hymn, “Lo! He Comes With Clouds, Descending.” Here is a quick look at the hymn:

Lo! He comes with clouds descending,
Once for favored sinners slain!
Thousand, thousand saints attending,
Swell the triumph of his train:
Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
God appears, on earth to reign!

In this first stanza, Wesley is clear that Christ will physically return in glory. The imagery of thousands upon thousands of saints following in procession is particularly evocative.

Every eye shall now behold him
Robed in dreadful majesty,
Those who set at nought and sold him,
Pierced, and nailed him to the tree,
Deeply wailing, deeply wailing,
Shall the true Messiah see.

All will see the glorified Christ, as this lyrical paraphrase of Revelation 1:7 proclaims. It will be a time of judgment for those who have rejected Him.

The dear tokens of his passion
Still his dazzling body bears,
Cause of endless exultation
To his ransomed worshippers;
With what rapture, with what rapture,
Gaze we on those glorious scars!

For the redeemed, however, this occasion is one of unfathomable joy. The wounds that Christ still bears in His glorified body will be the inspiration for “endless exultation.”

Yea, Amen! Let all adore thee,
High on Thine eternal throne!
Savior, take the power and glory,
Claim the kingdom for Thine own,
O come quickly, o come quickly,
Everlasting God, come down.

Having spent the first three verses depicting the scene of Christ’s return, the final verse centers on the basic cry of the Church which is amplified during Advent, “Come, Lord Jesus!”

A Contemporary Expression?

The standard hymn tune for “Lo! He Comes With Clouds, Descending,” “Helmsley,” works nicely with the text. Some congregations, however, may find the tune difficult to sing. I have found that the hymn tune “St. Thomas (Webbe)” also works well. In fact, I have used a modern arrangement of “St. Thomas” (with bass, drums, keys, and guitar) while inserting the chorus of Chris Tomlin’s “How Great is Our God” in between the stanzas of “Lo! He Comes…” The point is that tune and style need not limit congregations in reclaiming this incredible hymn.

Connecting-the-Dots

If corporate worship should connect-the-dots—or tell the story of what God has done, and will do, for us in Christ—then worship is woefully incomplete when we fail to proclaim that Christ will come again. As Wesleyans we have in our lyrical heritage one of the best hymns on this topic in “Lo! He Comes with Clouds, Descending.” Consider this an appeal, then, to reclaim this hymn for the church during this season of Advent. My hope is that what was once lost in the Methodist church for thirty years will become a standard song in the future.