It’s so awkward…

Your spouse meets someone while they’re out. “The kids play so well together.” She says. “He’s pretty cool.” He tells you. “We’re alike in so many ways, it’s funny.” She says. “By the way, they’re coming over on Sunday.”

So, they had a connection. Now, you are forced into trying to achieve the same connection with the other spouse…who probably feels just as awkward about things as you do. Yet, neither of you dare mention it. You know better. Plus, it really wouldn’t help matters.

Sometimes, the connection comes. It’s a relief when it does. You like the same struggling sports team (Let’s Go Mountaineers?!). You drink the same soda. Whatever it is, sometimes it’s a fit. It’s great when that happens.

Then, there are those other times…

Sometimes, it just doesn’t work. You plan, you try, you fail. Your attempt at conversation is met by a lackluster, “yup” and you know it’s gonna be a long day.

It reminds me of the current model of evangelism we have in the church.

Let me explain:

We want our congregation to grow, so we invite people to church. We have evangelism plans designed to add to the church. We ask people to volunteer in the church. We have people give to the church. We have folks make commitments to the church. We ask people to join the church so they can be members of the church. If we’re successful with all this inviting to church and asking for church, we basically end up creating people for church – church people.

Then, when these church people begin to act petty, when they argue over ridiculous things that don’t really matter, when feelings get hurt and dysfunction becomes king, we ask, “Why? How? The church was growing, why are people acting like this?”

But how could they not?

All we’ve done is invite them to bring their baggage, their selfishness and everything else, into a camp meeting that’s already so full of nasty baggage it looks more like a landfill than a church. And that’s when we ask Jesus to step in…and it’s just plain awkward. If, as the Bible says, the Church is the bride of Christ, it’s exactly like your husband or wife inviting the other couple to your house.

Up until now we haven’t really talked about Jesus. We didn’t tell people about the transformational nature of Jesus. We didn’t talk about self-sacrifice. We invited people to become church members, not Jesus-followers.

And that’s what we got. Now, Jesus is saying, “So, what am I supposed to talk to her about? You’ve invited them to be in church. They’ve been there for years and sit on your boards. They’re your friend. You didn’t ask my opinion before now. What do you want me to do?”

Luckily, Jesus can step in and fix things.

I’ve got a plan to avoid all the headaches, angry emails, heated meetings, and sleepless nights. It won’t fix everything, but I think it’s a huge first step:

Stop inviting people to church! Stop it! Right Now!

Don’t invite people to your church. We know the results of that. It rarely works anyway. Even when people actually show up, most don’t stick around for long. They sense the discontentment. They recognize the troubles. They head for the door.

Invite them, instead, to follow Jesus. No, it’s not the same thing. Following Jesus means I’m not the most important person in the world…not even in this room…even when I’m alone.

Following Jesus is about turning over my desires, my wants, my needs to him. It’s about putting to death my own selfishness, narcissism, greed, desire for control, etc. When we follow Jesus, things change, churches become places of hope, restoration, and redemption, and communities are transformed.

It’s a game-changer. Meetings become inspiring, evangelism becomes more about the Kingdom of God than it does about growing a local congregation, marriages are healed, chains of addiction are broken, and death gives way to life! Following Jesus is exciting stuff!

Don’t mistake what I’m saying. We need to be connected to other believers. The best way to do that is through a local congregation. I’m in the beginning stages of starting a new church, so I am surely not anti-church. I just realize there are more important things…like Jesus.

I want people to come to the church. I want every church to be filled. I just want them to be filled with, and invited to become, Jesus followers and not church members.

So instead of inviting people to church, let’s invite them to follow Jesus.

I recently returned from a two-week trip to Nigeria. I will be processing my experiences there for quite some time, but one encounter impressed me greatly and returned to my mind when I read a recent post by John Meunier – We Are All Disabled. Like John, my thoughts are not fully formed on the theological issues raised by disability – I’ve never been encouraged to actually contemplate it. But for some reason, I keep returning to it as a significant topic of reflection. While in Lagos, my conversation with Ayuba Buri Gufram intensified that interest.

Ayuba contracted polio as a child and has never walked upright on his feet. Instead, at least until he was a young adult, he crawled on the ground like most other polo survivors in Nigeria. Unlike others, however, his family kept him in their home rather than turning him out to survive alone by begging, or, as some families do, place him as an apprentice with a more experienced beggar in order to develop his skills, before then turning him out to go solo. Rather than these options, Ayuba’s family kept him at home. He was able to go to school for a while, but the fees were expensive and his father did not see the need to continue to send him.

The turning point came when Ayuba was able to obtain a wheelchair. That was a game changer. He was able to go to school for the first time in years, he met his future wife, and he discovered his life mission – to give polio survivors the opportunity to stop crawling on the ground.

Ayuba founded Beautiful Gate, an organization dedicated to building uniquely designed wheelchairs for children disabled by polio. This is definitely a cause worth supporting, but that’s not what I want to explore here.

The name, Beautiful Gate, is taken from the story of Peter and the crippled beggar in Acts 3. Peter and John go to the temple for prayers and encounter a crippled beggar at the entrance area called The Beautiful Gate. Every day this man’s friends would bring him to the Beautiful Gate where he would beg for money. The climax of the story is when Peter heals this man, and rightly so. But from Ayuba’s perspective two other details are significant.

First, the man’s friends brought him to the Beautiful Gate each day. For Ayuba, that was a sign of caring and devotion. But his next question is a valid one: Why did they leave him at the gate? Why not take him all the way in? Did they not understand that he had spiritual needs as well?

Now I understand that there are all kinds of scholarly answers to Ayuba’s question – laws about purity, understandings of sin, disease, and punishment. But those scholarly answers make his question even more poignant, did they not understand that he had spiritual needs?

For Ayuba, the fact that the beggar had spiritual needs is emphasized by what happens when Peter heals him – the man immediately enters the temple praising God. Certainly, his praise is appropriate; after all, he’s just been healed. As significant as the healing is, however, Ayuba goes on to ask another question: Might the man have wanted to praise God before he was healed? Each day, as he sat outside the temple, might he have wanted to bring all kinds of things to God in worship and prayer – his praise, his supplication, his intercession?

Obviously the beggar’s healing is worthy of praise, and it provides the opportunity for Peter to preach to the crowd that gathers, which is of course, a main focus of the overall story. But what about the man? Was he only defined by his crippled condition, which others determined placed him outside the context of worship? Was he only defined by his crippled condition, which others assumed gave him no reason to praise?

Ayuba left me much to think about. My tendency is to move to the theoretical – to ask wide open questions like, as Christians, who are we leaving at the gate? Or, what are our preconceived notions about praise and our reasons for offering it? Those are good questions, worthy of contemplation and conversation.

But Ayuba is less interested in the theoretical than the practical. And so he asks, what about this man, this crippled beggar who is sitting at the gate, this man with spiritual needs and reasons for praise? What about him? And I’m left thinking that’s where I need to start as well.

This statement sounds counterintuitive, but I love Ash Wednesday.

“What?” you might think. “How could anyone love a day set apart for repentance?”

Actually, that’s one reason that makes this day special and, in a sense, worth loving—one reason among many that this is a day to observe wholeheartedly. I love Ash Wednesday for at least three reasons.

First, Ash Wednesday interrupts our normal schedule with a piercing call for us to remember our mortality and mourn our sins. Like the shrill cacophony of an alarm clock, it wakes us up out of our spiritual slumber. There is no concealing our ungodliness on Ash Wednesday, no time for prideful pretending. No, our souls are laid bare, our self-constructed façades of righteousness shattered. On this day, in a way unlike any other, the church boldly beckons us to repent and believe the Gospel. As strange as it may sound, I love that about Ash Wednesday.

Second, Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent, the season of focusing with particular clarity on the significance of the suffering and cross of Christ for our salvation. Because it reminds us of the forty days that Jesus fasted and prayed for us, Ash Wednesday is a fitting time for us to fast and pray in the way of Jesus. In an age when we usually try to avoid suffering at all costs, Ash Wednesday helps us see the redemptive value of the suffering of Jesus for us, and that profound truth casts our own inevitable suffering in a new light. I love that about Ash Wednesday as well.

Third, Ash Wednesday prepares us to celebrate more fully the joy of Easter. That, of course, is ultimately the point—for us to be drawn into the saving mystery of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection as we observe the season of self-examination and repentance that begins on this holy day. On Ash Wednesday, we recall through word and ritual, and even rejoice in, the fact that the Lord our God can bring new life out of the ashes of our brokenness. Death gives way to life, and the ashes on our foreheads bear the sign of the cross, which is the supreme symbol of God’s victory for us in the crucified and risen Christ. This, most of all, is what I love about Ash Wednesday.

These reasons and others find poetic expression in a great hymn of our faith by Claudia F. Hernaman:

Lord, who throughout these forty days
for us didst fast and pray,
teach us with thee to mourn our sins
and close by thee to stay.

As thou with Satan didst contend,
and didst the victory win,
O give us strength in thee to fight,
in thee to conquer sin.

As thou didst hunger bear, and thirst,
so teach us, gracious Lord,
to die to self, and chiefly live
by thy most holy word.

And through these days of penitence,
and through thy passiontide,
yea, evermore in life and death,
Jesus, with us abide.

Abide with us, that so, this life
of suffering over past,
an Easter of unending joy
we may attain at last.

Acts 17:16-34 contains Paul’s message to the Athenians at the Areopagus. Athens was considered the intellectual capital of the world. It was home to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Paul came to Athens during his second mission trip, seeking refuge. Earlier, he had been run out of Thessalonica by the synagogue crowd. He found a more congenial reception in Beroea, until the ruffians from Thessalonica arrived and ran him out of town again.

Interestingly, the Gospel tends to generate two responses in its hearers: repentance, leading to conversion; and resistance, leading to hostility. Things became so heated on this mission that Paul’s colleagues felt it best to get him out of Beroea until things simmered down. And so they sent him to Athens for a brief respite, before moving on to Corinth. But Paul was never one to take a holiday from the main business of his life, so he found ample opportunity to share his witness.

—

Someone stopped by the office recently to say hello. He shook my hand and said something rather odd: “You staying out of trouble?” I wasn’t sure if it was a greeting, or a question. I wanted to say something cute. But I decided to treat it as a legitimate question. I said: “I try to stay out of trouble, but trouble seems to find me! In fact, I’ve about decided that the nature of ministry is trouble.” There was an awkward silence. He gave me one of those funny looks, as if to say, “I’m sorry I brought it up.” I’ve thought about it since. And I’ve come to a conclusion: if you’re looking to stay out of trouble, don’t follow Jesus!

The more I study Acts, the better I understand, that trouble follows Jesus. And trouble follows those who follow Jesus. If you’re earnestly seeking to be a witness, trouble will come to you!

Early on in ministry, I think I envisioned discipleship as a perpetual safety net, a safe haven, a warm blanket. But it isn’t true. Discipleship always leads to a cross. Disciples don’t avoid trouble. They inhabit trouble!

While Paul was seeking refuge in Athens, he runs into trouble.

The text begins with the angst of the apostle: “While Paul was waiting for them in Athens. He was deeply distressed.” The word for distressed is paroxyno. It’s a medical term for a seizure, an epileptic fit. We use it today when someone gets upset. “She had a fit.” “He spazzed out!” Another translation says Paul was “irked.” For good reason!

The city was full of idols. Nothing irks a Jewish Christian more than idolatry. It’s a violation of the Shema, the Jewish confession of faith, which begins, “The Lord our God is one.” Our theology is rooted in monotheism. One God. Athens was a violation of the first two commandments: No other gods before me, and no graven images. A monotheist in a polytheistic town? Of course, he was irked.

Nothing evokes the ire of God more than idolatry. Isaiah 42:8 says, “I am the Lord, that is my name; my glory I give to no other, nor my praise to idols.”

One of the ancient historians said of Athens: “Its easier to find a god there, than a man.” Everywhere Paul looked, there were shrines and temples. There was one to Athenia, Zeus, Ares, Mars, Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, Bacchus, Neptune, Diana. Athens was a veritable forest of idols.

Normally, when Paul visited a new town, he went first to the synagogue. He had connections there. He found hospitality there. A place to stay. Food to eat. A bed to rest. Community. And there he would teach on the Sabbath and explain the Scriptures. But on this trip, he also did some street preaching. He didn’t just stay in the synagogue, he went into the marketplace. And this is where the trouble begins. As long as you keep your faith private, in the church, its okay. But when you go public, there’s trouble!

But despite the fact that Paul was irked by the culture, he didn’t detach himself from the people. He engaged the community. It’s impossible to be a witness if you don’t engage the culture. It’s impossible to influence the world, if you never leave the church. For the bread to rise, the yeast has to penetrate the loaf.

During Jesus’ ministry, he didn’t settle in the synagogue. He went out to where people lived and worked and played. In fact, Jesus didn’t call a single disciple at the synagogue. He called disciples at the dock, at the tax office, on the hillside. Luke 5 says, Jesus invited Peter to follow him while Jesus was sitting in Peter’s boat.

You can’t catch fish unless you go where the fish are! Jesus calls us to be fishers of people, not keepers of the aquarium. And Paul knew it. He goes where the fish are. He goes to the marketplace. He goes to the Agora. The gathering place. The hub. The place where people assembled to get the news, to share information, to exchange ideas.

The agora was the central spot in Greek city-states. In Athens, a university town, academicians and philosophers gathered there, and debated, argued and discussed the latest ideology. So Paul went there.

Paul himself was no slouch intellectually speaking. He was a graduate of UT (University of Tarsus), educated in Jerusalem by the finest Jewish scholar of the 1^st century, Gamaliel (5:34), a PhD in the Jewish law. Gamaliel was the grandson of Hillel the Elder, one of the great minds of his day. Paul could stand toe to toe with these sophisticated elites. It’s interesting also, that at first he didn’t just lecture and preach to get the word out. He used an Athenian technique. The Socratic method. Q&A. Dialogue. So he’s not just using Jewish methodology, he’s playing by their rules.

The initial response was fairly brutal. They called him a babbler, a cock sparrow, a bird-brain. Spermologos. A retailer of second-hand scraps of philosophy. A picker-up of learning’s crumbs. Others referred to him as a propagandist for foreign deities. Suffice it to say, many of these cultural elites were not buying what Paul was selling. Paul would later say in 1 Corinthinians 1:23, that the Gospel message is a stumbling block to Jews, and foolishness to Greeks.

Some however, were impressed enough to invite a second hearing. Verse 19 says: they brought him to the Areopagus, the hill of Ares, the Greek God of War, the son of Zeus. The Roman name for Ares is Mars. They took him to Mars Hill, the place where the Supreme Court of ancient Greece gathered. And here at the place built in honor of the son of Zeus, Paul proclaims the son of the one true God.

In many ways, this is Paul’s finest preaching. He’s having to adapt. He’s communicating to people who do not share his Bible. These Athenians don’t know the Scriptures. The Bible is not their story. It has no authority for them. Of course, as people belonging to the way, the Bible is our starting place. But how do you teach/preach to people who have no concept of Scripture? Who don’t recognize the Bible as inspired, God-breathed, sacred?

Paul has to find a bridge, a cultural connection whereby he can begin to teach biblical truth. So watch what he does. Though he’s irked by their idolatry, he actually uses their idolatry as a point of contact.

“Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way.” It’s an under-handed compliment. In other words, I appreciate your piety. I thought I was pretty spiritual, ’til I met you. But you guys take the cake! You’re up to your ears in religiosity! You see what he’s doing? Rather than using their idols to beat ‘em up, he uses their idols to relate. “You guys are so spiritual!” I see it in your statues and shrines. And I applaud that!

“But as I looked carefully at your objects of worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘to an unknown god.’ What you therefore worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.” And starting with creation, he tells the Gospel story. He shares his witness.

It’s interesting that when we don’t really know God, anything and everything can assume the place of God.

When I’m not living in devotion to God, anything can become God. A form of government. A political party. The church. Drugs. Alcohol. A relationship. Self. A job. Money. Sex. Power. Food. Porn. Knowledge. You may never ever actually build a shrine or burn an offering, but our attachments and obsessions reveal our idols.

We’re all made with a god-shaped hole in our hearts, and we often try to fill it with god-substitutes, which cannot satisfy. Indeed, they only serve to make us dissatisfied. But everybody’s looking, everybody’s searching, groping. We all have an instinct for God. “We are His offspring,” says Paul. Notice, that’s a direct quote from one of their poets, Aratus. Then he quotes another, “In Him we live and move, and have our being.” Talk about connecting. Paul knows the music of Athens, the poets, the culture. Paul has been studying the culture, not because its cool, but so he can relate, connect, and bridge the gap between the unknown and the known.

The better you know the culture, the better you can empathize with the people, the better you’re able to be a conduit to God. As a missionary, you must not only be a student of theology, you must be a student of the culture!

This is incarnational ministry. Think about it. When God chose to make himself known to the world, He didn’t come as some weird alien that nobody understood. The shepherds didn’t come to Bethlehem, and say, “What is it?!” They said, “Its a baby.” And the unknowable became knowable! Not in a generic child, but in a Jewish kid. God is a Jewish boy? Yea. From Nazareth? A carpenter? A teacher? Who is betrayed? Who’s nailed to a tree? Like a lamb that is slain? And He rises from the dead on the third day? And is coming again to judge the earth? He’s not just a divine mystery. You can know Him! In fact, He wants very much to know you, right now, in this moment. Indeed, He is not far from you! Proverbs 18:24, “There is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.”

This is what Incarnation means. Its not just our theology. It’s our ecclesiology. It’s the way we do church. We seek to make known the unknown, by building bridges. Chuck Swindoll has said, “People who inspire others are those who see invisible bridges at the end of dead-end streets.” That’s what it means to be a witness, to build invisible bridges, so that the unknown God becomes known!

Sometimes you see it. We saw it in the life of Barbara Redmond. She died unexpectly last year. We had her homegoing service a few days later. Her father was one of the original sculptors of Stone Mountain. He died when she was a teenager. Her mother had to go to work, and she helped raise her siblings. She cooked, cleaned, washed, nurtured and loved. For many years she worked at Dekalb Community College. She had a love for the students there, particularly the foreign students who were far from home. She adopted many of them. She fed them and cared for them. In one situation, she moved an entire family into her own home. The family was Buddhist. Another was Muslim. They didn’t even share her faith, but because of her faith she loved them, and cared for them.

Often, I’m told she would take a plate of barbeque and peach muffins to the men who serviced her car. She loved her doctor, her chiropractor, and both of them wept when they got the news. She was a bridge.

Her daughter told me that she even learned how to text on her cell phone. Nearly 80! But she learned. You know why? Because she loved her grandchildren. She wanted to be a part of their lives. And that’s the way they communicate. So she learned their way. She connected, on their turf, to their world, and showed love on their terms. Because they were “worth the trouble,” she said. That’s what God has done for us in Christ!

She spoke a language that is cross-cultural and cross-generational. She spoke Gospel. She was fluent! She was a witness!

Staying out of trouble? Not a chance! Not in this lifetime. I’m a witness!

I received an e-mail from a pastor in Tennessee a few days ago posing this question:

A church member asked me to recommend a biography on John Wesley, and I didn’t know what to suggest. Wondering if you could suggest something?

That’s not an infrequent request to get for a seminary professor who teaches Methodist history. When I get an e-mail or a phone call along those lines, there are always a few book titles I suggest. We are living in a time where there are a lot of top-notch Wesleyan historians and theologians working on different aspects of the Wesleyan tradition. So fortunately, there are a number of good books you can pick up depending on the specific area of your interest.

Here are a few titles I’ve recommended in the past with some notes about how they can be used fruitfully:

A Real Christian: The Life of John Wesley (Kenneth J. Collins)

• Kenneth J. Collins’ book, A Real Christian: The Life of John Wesley (Abingdon, 2000), is a relatively brief treatment of John Wesley’s life. It is a true biography in that its subject matter is the person of John Wesley, from his birth to his death. If you are looking for a relatively short book and one that focuses solely on the figure of Wesley, then this is probably the way to go.

Wesley and the People Called Methodists (Richard Heitzenrater)

• Richard Heitzenrater’s book, Wesley and the People Called Methodists (2nd ed., Abingdon, 2013), is a longer work that focuses on Wesley in the context of the rise and development of early Methodism. Heitzenrater includes background material in an opening chapter on the English Reformation and the development of the Church of England in the late 16th and the 17th centuries. He also includes some material on the early development of American Methodism in the late 18th century as well. So this book is a biography as well, but it is more like a biography of early Methodism (with Wesley, of course, as the main character). Naturally, learning about the broader context of early Methodism is a very helpful way to understand Wesley himself better. For someone who wants to understand not just the man John Wesley but also the movement to which he committed himself for most of his adult life, this is the book to choose.

Both of the authors—Collins and Heitzenrater—are top-notch historians. Both also have a real gift for historical prose writing. The quality of their books is at an academic level, but both books are written so well that they are easily accessible by a lay audience. So if you are interested in a very readable account of John Wesley’s life and ministry, you can’t go wrong with either one!

Sometimes I’ll also get requests from people who are less interested in a biography than they are in a book that explains Wesleyan theology in a way that can be really embraced by a congregational audience. For people who are interested in the distinctives of the Wesleyan approach to spirituality and discipleship, I often recommend these books:

Recapturing the Wesleys’ Vision (Paul W. Chilcote)

• Paul W. Chilcote has written one of the most compelling books on Wesleyan theology for a popular audience with Recapturing the Wesleys’ Vision: An Introduction to the Faith of John and Charles Wesley (Intervarsity, 2004). He divides his subject matter up into broad topics that arise from the Wesleyan approach to the Christian life: Message, Community, Discipline, and Servanthood. If that sounds so broad that it’s hard to get your mind around what he’s talking about, I think you’ll find that the individual chapter titles explain where he’s going well enough. The section on “Message” includes chapters on the Wesleyan understanding of grace; “Community” has chapters on the importance of growing in discipleship within a fellowship of believers; etc. Chilcote has chosen an effective arrangement of his subject matter, which highlights the way in which the Wesleyan vision embraces the “both/and” rather than the “either/or” in various areas of the Christian life. So in the choice between faith or works, the Wesleyan approach is to hold both faith and works together. In the question of whether faith should be embraced rationally by the head or affectively by the heart, the Wesleyan approach is to say that it is both head and heart. (You can draw out such pairings at length: form and power, law and gospel, pulpit and altar, justification and sanctification, God’s grace and human response, etc.) Chilcote refers to these as the “conjunctions” in Wesleyan theology. Encountering the richness of such a holistic conception of the life of discipleship reveals why the Wesleyan tradition is so utterly compelling.

John Wesley: Holiness of Heart and Life (Charles Yrigoyen, Jr.)

• Charles Yrigoyen, Jr.’s, John Wesley: Holiness of Heart and Life (Abingdon, 1996) is a book that covers a number of themes in Wesleyan discipleship. Yrigoyen’s opening chapter offers a short biographical background on Wesley’s life before moving into a series of chapters that focus on the framework of Wesley’s theology (grace, salvation, etc.) and the practices known as the means of grace (which Yrigoyen identifies by the Wesleyan terms “works of piety” and “works of mercy”). He then adds chapters on Methodism in the American context and on the possibility of Wesleyan renewal in the present. It is a book that has a little of everything, which makes it a good introduction for someone who doesn’t know much about Methodism. There is one caveat to mention, though, which is Yrigoyen has written the book from a self-consciously United Methodist perspective. Wesleyans from other denominational backgrounds might find all the references to the UMC a bit off-putting. A helpful feature of the book is that it includes a substantial study guide, prepared by Ruth A. Daugherty. The guide—which is somewhat misnamed and ought to be called a “teaching guide” in that it is designed for a teacher to use in preparing a series of lessons—could be used profitably in small group or Sunday school settings.

A Blueprint for Discipleship (Kevin M. Watson)

• Kevin M. Watson’s A Blueprint for Discipleship: Wesley’s General Rules as a Guide for Christian Living (Discipleship Resources, 2009) is the best book available on the General Rules of early Methodism. These three rules—which consisted of doing no harm, doing good, and attending upon the “ordinances of God”—were developed by John Wesley to guide the life of the early Methodist Societies. They served both as the pattern for how Methodists understood their engagement with the means of grace and as a disciplinary mechanism that defined what was required to remain in the membership of a class meeting. There has been a great deal of interest in the General Rules in recent years because of their potential to help form mature Christian discipleship today, and Watson’s treatment of them is the best resource available.

I’m always encouraged when pastors and laypeople express an interest in finding out more about our tradition. Ultimately however, if we want not only to learn about Wesley but also to become Wesleyan, we should take John Wesley’s approach to the Christian life seriously. It isn’t just about becoming familiar with a fascinating figure in church history. It is about letting that figure serve as a guide to point us toward Jesus Christ and the salvation that he wants to give us. In that sense, I always hope that those who go off to buy books on Wesley or Wesleyan theology do so with the intention of using them as a resource for their own practice of discipleship.

In “Thoughts upon Methodism,” John Wesley wrote:

I am not afraid that the people called Methodists should ever cease to exist either in Europe or America. But I am afraid lest they should only exist as a dead sect, having the form of religion without the power. And this undoubtedly will be the case unless they hold fast both the doctrine, spirit, and discipline with which they first set out. (Wesley, Bicentennial Edition of the Works of John Wesley, 9:527)

This post is the third in a series that explores the basics of Christianity with a Wesleyan Accent, especially focusing on the doctrine, spirit, and discipline that Wesley believed made Methodism a powerful movement of God. My first post emphasized that Wesleyans are more passionate about being Christian than about being Wesley, but that they do proclaim Christ with a recognizable accent. The second post discussed the doctrines that are at the heart of a Wesleyan proclamation of the gospel. This post considers the spirit that was essential to early Methodism.

So, what did Wesley mean when he urged Methodists to “hold fast” to the spirit with which they first set out?

Though it may seem to be the most difficult to define of the three, Wesley insists on including spirit with doctrine and discipline because right doctrine (belief) and right discipline (practice) are not enough in themselves. The key passage in “Thoughts upon Methodism” that gives insight into what Wesley meant by the spirit of Methodism is where he discusses the way that religion leads to increased productivity and frugalness, which leads to riches. He then turns from religion in general to Methodism in particular:

“How then is it possible that Methodism, that is, the religion of the heart, though it flourishes now as a green bay-tree, should continue in this state? For the Methodists in every place grow diligent and frugal; consequently they increase in goods. Hence they proportionably increase in pride, in anger, in the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life. So, although the form of religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away” (530).

In the last years of his life, Wesley was deeply concerned by the upward mobility of many Methodists, because he witnessed an increase in wealth leading to a transfer of loyalty from loving God and neighbor to riches.

But Methodists were people who were zealous, above all else, even to the exclusion of all else, for “holiness of heart and life” (529). Wesley worried about Methodists becoming rich because experience taught him that it was very rare that someone who became rich continued growing in love of God and neighbor. Instead, as people became rich, they tended to become more selfish and increasingly concerned with providing for themselves, instead of for others.

In “The Character of a Methodist”, Wesley described Methodism in a way that provides a nice description of his hopes for the spirit of a Methodist:

A Methodist is one who has ‘the love of God shed abroad in his heart by the Holy Ghost given unto him’; one who ‘loves the Lord his God with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his mind, and with all his strength’. God is the joy of his heart, and the desire of his soul, which is constantly crying out, ‘Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee!’ My God and my all! Thou are the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever! (BE, 9:35)

Christians who live and proclaim the gospel in a Wesleyan accent will do so in a way that evidences a deep and abiding love for God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. And we will do all that we can to help all people come to know and love the God who first loved them.

For Wesleyans, love of God instinctively leads to love of neighbor. And so, in the above essay, Wesley immediately moves from love of God to love of neighbor, “while he thus always exercises his love to God… he who loveth God, loves his brother also. And he accordingly ‘loves his neighbour as himself’; and loves every man as his own soul” (BE, 9:37).

Wesleyans not only believe in a God who wants to save us “to the uttermost,” we are desperate to know this God as fully and intimately as we can. Methodism is a “religion of the heart,” because it is not only beliefs and practices, but beliefs that are put into practice with the expectation that the living God can be known and experienced in our lives.

A Wesley spirit is an approach to Christianity that is enlivened moment by moment by the living God. Wesley described this in a moving passage in his sermon “The Great Privilege of those that are Born of God.” He described the “continual inspiration of God’s Holy Spirit,” where “God breathes into the soul, and the soul breathes back what it first receives from God; a continual action of God upon the soul, the re-action of the soul upon God; and unceasing presence of God.” (BE, 1:442)

Just as our physical lives are dependent on constantly breathing in oxygen, may the Holy Spirit breathe life into our souls each moment. And may this Spirit-breathed life enable us to respond with praise, thanksgiving, and faithful living.

There is a phrase in Wesleyan theology that holds the key to understanding most everything about present salvation. The phrase is “holiness of heart and life.” This is one of those terms that seems simple at first glance and yet is packed with meaning on multiple levels.

It’s also a term worth exploring, and I want to explore it here. But first a little detour about theological language in general.

The language we use

Conventional wisdom from “experts” dictates that we should find ordinary or commonplace words to describe Christian concepts so we can avoid putting up barriers between the Church and would-be believers. Our evangelism can be hindered, so this thinking goes, by the vocabulary we use to talk about the Christian faith.

I’ve heard some version of this perspective many times over the course of my ministry. And I’ve always had questions about it. To what length should we take this advice? Are we talking about avoiding the technical vocabulary of theology, or should we avoid core biblical terms as well? I’ve heard people suggest that we shouldn’t use the language of sin and salvation, either because it is off-putting or because it conjures up lowbrow images that good, sophisticated Christians should want to avoid. Is that a good idea?

At times, I wonder whether this point-of-view is just a concession to mainstream consumer culture. Many churches have emptied their membership requirements of anything that actually looks like, well, a requirement. The idea is to attract more people to the churches in question by becoming “seeker sensitive”—but does the evidence show that such a strategy really results in congregations filled with mature disciples of Jesus Christ?

Maybe emptying our language of its robustly Christian inflections is just another version of the almost irresistible urge to mimic the larger culture in the hopes of getting that culture’s blessing for what we Christians are doing. I think that’s likely the case. I also think it is a reason to consider an alternative strategy: Namely, embracing with gusto the vocabulary of both the Bible and the historic Wesleyan tradition. Such a strategy would seem particularly important if certain words or phrases themselves have great explanatory power for how we understand the nature of God, human beings, salvation, and discipleship.

The meaning of holiness

In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul explains the nature of sanctification as a life of holiness. He describes it to the church at Thessalonica in this way: “It is God’s will that you should be sanctified … For God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life. Therefore, he who rejects this instruction does not reject man but God, who gives you his Holy Spirit” (1 Thessalonians 4:3, 7-8; NIV).

John Wesley was captivated by the biblical notion of holiness. He equated the life of holiness with present salvation. In one sense, holiness is that state of being purified from wickedness—in thought, word, and deed. But for Wesley, to understand the root meaning of holiness for us, we have to understand what God’s holiness really means first.

We can see the character of divine holiness, according to Wesley, in the First Letter of John. (This is the book of the Bible that Wesley once called “the deepest part of the Holy Scripture.”) It is 1 John that connects how we are to love one another with how God loves us. 1 John 4:7-8 reads, “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love” (NRSV).

In his Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament, Wesley keys on this passage in 1 John as capturing the real substance of biblical holiness. His comment on verse 8 reads in part, “God is often characterized as holy, righteous, wise; but not holiness, righteousness, or wisdom in the abstract, as he is said to be love; intimating that this is his darling, his reigning attribute, the attribute that shed an amiable glory on all his other perfections.”

Thus, to become holy is to have your heart so transformed by God’s love that love itself becomes the defining mark of your very person. Wesley paints an image of what he means by this transformation in the 1741 sermon, “The Almost Christian.” He writes, “Such a love of God is this as engrosses the whole heart, as takes up all the affections, as fills the entire capacity of the soul, and employs the utmost extent of all its faculties.”

So holiness is not a static concept. It isn’t a condition where a Christian desperately tries to avoid thinking the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing, lest his spotless purity be marred by sin. Instead, it is the dynamic reality of love—transforming the believer’s life and giving the believer a new set of values and commitments that are in harmony with God’s desires for his children.

On Wesley’s account, this is the heart of the Christian life. Those who are growing in holiness are experiencing what we mean by salvation in this present life.

Holiness … from heart to life

The Wesleyan conception of holiness requires one more element in order to adequately explain how it takes root in the lives of Christian believers. This element is wrapped up in the phrase, “of heart and life” that we attach to the core term “holiness.”

When reading John Wesley’s writing on salvation, you’ll encounter some version of the phrase “holiness of heart and life” over and over again. A related phrase is “inward and outward holiness” by which Wesley means essentially the same thing.

The “heart and life” and the “inward and outward” act as qualifiers on the core term “holiness.” One way to grasp why they are important is to recognize that we never see them in the reverse order: it is never holiness of life and heart, for instance, but always holiness of heart and life.

In the church today, we often shy away from anything that emphasizes the need to experience something inwardly that we do not have any control over. We like the language of discipleship, because discipleship strikes us as something you go out “there” and “do.” What does it mean to be a Christian, we ask? And the answer is always something about getting outside the four walls of the church, making a difference, transforming the world, etc.

There is a Wesleyan critique to make to this approach to discipleship that is found in the view that holiness always moves from heart to life. Wesley himself was always highly skeptical of Christians who thought that their good works were the substance of their faith. He thought that such a view relied on what he called the “outward form of religion” while denying religion’s true power.

To put the matter another way: Wesley does not believe that you can work your way into faith, hope, and love. He rather believes that these core Christian virtues are “wrought in us (be it swiftly or slowly) by the Spirit of God,” as he puts it in a 1745 letter. And thus it is crucial that we have our hearts transformed inwardly in order for anything we do outwardly to be pleasing in God’s sight.

Commenting on Jesus’ teaching that “blessed are the pure in heart,” Wesley says that God is always well pleased with “a pure and holy heart” but “he is also well pleased with all that outward service which arises from the heart” (“Upon our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, IV”). The logic of this movement from heart to life Wesley states in this way: the “latter naturally [results] from the former; for a good tree will bring forth good fruit” (“Heaviness through Manifold Temptations”). This is all simply a way of saying that salvation is something God does—not us.

If we want to live in this present life as God desires us to live, then we need an outpouring of his grace into our lives. We will never be able to fake true holiness through the mechanical actions of daily life—even when those actions have a religious character to them. And who we truly are inwardly will finally be shown by our outward attitudes, words, and deeds in the world. So if you want your life to be marked by holiness in an honest and authentic way, it must be lived out of a holy heart that has been made holy by the action of the Holy Spirit.

All of this means that we can’t discard a phrase like holiness of heart and life only to replace it with something more pedestrian: “learning to be more loving,” or “becoming a better person,” or some such collection of words that seems less intimidating. The phrase itself communicates a powerful message. It is about holiness—biblical holiness—that we should be concerned. That holiness only comes about in us in a particular kind of way, and it is a way that calls for us to throw ourselves on the mercy of God.

Those recent trends to give up the traditional language of both the Bible and the Christian tradition in order to make the faith more palatable to outsiders are deeply misguided. When we go that route, we inevitably present Christianity as something less than it really is. So perhaps what we need to do is not change our language but rather repent and recognize that becoming a Christian involves a conversion—in every aspect of heart and life.