For the past several months, I have used this space to work through a Wesleyan understanding of grace and salvation. Throughout that journey, I have done two things: First, I used the traditional theological language (prevenient, sanctification, etc.). This was to introduce the terms to anyone who might not already be familiar with them, and to make it clear how these discussions might show up in other places.
The other thing I did on purpose, though it is up to the reader to determine how successful it was, was to try to use that technical language as little as possible, with the goal of placing the emphasis on ways we might actually use the concepts in our lives. If we can learn to express our Wesleyan convictions in the language of our day-to-day lives, we will find that we can not only speak in a Wesleyan way, but think and even live in a Wesleyan way.
It has generally been the goal of the Global Methodist Church to reclaim our Wesleyan heritage. It is, however, one thing to begin to utilize some Wesleyan language and emphasize some of the things that Wesley emphasized. It is something else altogether to begin to, so to speak, speak Wesleyan convictions as our native language.
Anyone who has learned a language in high school or after has realized that it is much different trying to speak a language that you are learning than it is to speak the one you grew up using. It takes long, sustained effort to learn a new language. In the early days, the only way to use the new language is to prepare your thoughts in your native language, then translate them into the new language. When someone achieves fluency in a new language, they not only begin to be able to express more ideas in it, they begin to be able to think in that new language. The language becomes less and less something they have to work at and, at the same time, it becomes a more and more transparent tool to express themselves.
Learning a new theological language is a similar process. The truth that we need to grapple with is that comparatively few people speak natively or fluently from a Wesleyan perspective. Part of this is because many, if not most, American Methodists have not been immersed in the Wesleyan tradition. This might be because pastors have not always been sufficiently grounded in the theological tradition by their education and practice, or else because so many other voices in our world are so much louder. When I did a search for “Bible teachers in America,” none of the list that came up on my screen were Wesleyans.
In my own experience, I have found that many people are quite capable of articulating some of their basic Christian convictions: That God loves us, that Jesus is our Lord and Savior, that the cross is the center of salvation, and things of that nature. However, when expanding both what all of these mean in practical terms and how we should live in response, they often fall back into distinctly non-Wesleyan ways of speaking.
Back in the 1990s, a term was coined to describe the way young people at the time were growing up and developing. They were called “digital natives.” They were people who grew up with digital technology to such a degree that it tended to “make sense” to them. Those who grew up before this kind of digital technology became widespread were called “digital immigrants.” They might be able to learn how to use computers and other devices, but they would always be foreigners to that way of thinking and living. That was the theory, in any case.
We can think of one of our challenges at this moment in the life of the Global Methodist Church is that we are a church that is still, largely, made up of Wesleyan immigrants, people whose theological vocabulary and way of thinking and living has been shaped by many sources other than the tradition we are seeking to reclaim.
We have two major tasks ahead of us. One of these is to learn to speak fluently in a Wesleyan way. If it is too late for us to become Wesleyan natives, we should at least strive to become Wesleyan immigrants. This is a difficult thing to do for anyone who has already learned other ways to speak of their faith. We will always tend to gravitate toward how we have been used to hearing things. If we have mostly learned the gospel from non-Wesleyans, we will tend to also speak in a non-Wesleyan way. If we are not well practiced in it, we will need to practice focusing on grace, on the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, on the call to holiness and Christian Perfection.
The transformation and development that we need also has to go deeper than just using that kind of language from time to time. John Wesley was so deeply immersed in the language of the Bible that he couldn’t help but fill his sermons with snippets from various verses. He wasn’t trying to impress people or to signal how Biblically rooted he was by quoting the Bible a lot. He simply couldn’t help it. Wesley was so deeply rooted in the scriptures that they spontaneously poured out of him. John Wesley was a Bible native.
In our turn, we should be so deeply rooted in the Wesleyan heritage that we do not only draw on Wesleyan insights when we sit down to make a show of it. Those convictions should be so deeply interwoven with the way that we understand the gospel that we cannot help but talk about the gospel in a Wesleyan way. It should overflow from us, even when we aren’t deliberately thinking about it.
The other thing we need to do is be about the business of raising the next generations so that they can be Wesleyan natives in ways that we may not have been able to be. Note well that this task will be totally impossible if we are not working on the first task. We need to become the kind of people who are working hard enough at speaking our Wesleyan theological convictions fluently enough that others will grow up in our midst learning it as their first theological language, so that they will not need to unlearn anything.
To be clear, the reason why this is important is not because Wesley was infallible or that we want him to take the place of Jesus. Far from it. The reason why this is important for the Global Methodist Church is because we are a people who are shaped, in large part, by the conviction that the Wesleyan heritage is a better, more robust, and more consistent way of reading the Bible than the alternatives. If we fundamentally disagree with that conviction, then the Global Methodist Church is probably not the place where we will feel most at home. We try to speak as native Wesleyans because we believe that, by doing so, we can be more fully and consistently Christian in our own lives.
There is a group of people I interact with on a somewhat regular basis who are, as a rule, members of the Reformed theological tradition, often looking to people like John Calvin as their inspiration (though this group also looks to more recent theologians like Karl Barth and Thomas F. Torrance). We share some convictions in common. Certainly we all cling to Christ. However, I cannot be with that group for long before it becomes abundantly clear that I am a Wesleyan and most of them are not. It cannot be helped. They don’t bring it up, but I find that I need to name it out loud from time to time because it so completely explains why I say what I say and why we disagree with each other, when disagreement happens.
If you spend time with people who are not Wesleyans, you will be able to tell how much of a native speaker of the Wesleyan tradition you have become so far. You will find yourself wondering why they get so bothered about things that seem so clear to you. You will wonder why they can’t seem to understand what you see so clearly in the Bible. You will get odd looks from time to time as if you had said something strange, or that you have said something that they would never have said. They may even think you are being a bit bold when you thought you were just talking about the gospel.
The Methodists have always been a peculiar people, but not because they tried to do it; it is because it can’t be helped. The Wesleyan theological tradition is deeply Biblical, it is beautiful, it is powerful, and it is worth claiming and passing on. Like learning any new language, it takes work, and it takes time, but it is worth it. The whole point of starting a denomination like the Global Methodist Church was the conviction that the world needs a vital and vibrant Wesleyan witness to the Gospel. We need to be a church full of people who speak that way like natives, not stumbling over what we know to be true.
A note to help those who want to become a Wesleyan immigrant if not a native:
Studying Wesley could take a lifetime, but has to start somewhere. A great place to start is to work on reading his “standard sermons.” They are in the public domain and can be read for free. I also made recordings (of varying quality and accuracy of Greek pronunciation) of all of them. Here is a link to the Substack Article where I include links to those: https://travisstevick.substack.com/p/audio-recordings-of-john-wesleys
