The Genius of Wesleyanism

For some reason, I’m enamored with the scene of the laying of the foundation stone at what was then the New Chapel on City Road, London, in 1777. John Wesley was happy with the rain that day, something anyone who has been to the British Isle knows all too well. There is a reason these islands are so green. He was happy with it, though, not because of the greenery but because it limited the size of the crowds. Wesley liked crowds to an extent, but he liked them to be controlled. And crowds in London in the eighteenth century were not always the best behaved. It had been a number of years since the last mob attacked a Methodist preacher, including Wesley, but the memories of those events were likely seared in his memory. Early Methodist chapels had been built with rowdy mobs in mind, including ways for any preacher quickly to exit the building when necessary.

But by the late 1770s, when the chapel in question was finished, things were different. By then the trans-Atlantic Evangelical Revival, of which Wesley’s Methodism was a part, had been going on for almost forty years. The “showers of grace” as they were called kept falling and the Wesley brothers and so many other evangelicals in the Church of England had done their best to keep up with them, chasing these outbursts of the Spirit around Britain, Ireland, and even into the Americas. There were still concerns that Methodists were out to undermine the social and political order, and the rumblings of revolution on the European continent did not help assuage these suspicions, but most of these concerns were dying down. Here on City Road, in the rain, on what was then the outskirts of a quickly expanding London, and just a few feet from his mother’s grave, Wesley preached a sermon that outlined his vision for Methodism.

I encourage you to read the sermon that Wesley preached that day, “On Laying the Foundation of the New Chapel.” In fact, I encourage you to read all 151 Wesley sermons that we have. They’re in eighteenth-century English so you have to get used to the different cadence of their sentence structure, but they’re not difficult to read once you’ve figured that out. For English-speakers, one of the beautiful aspects of the Wesleyan tradition is that its foundational documents are all accessible, even in an eighteenth-century hue. But if you can read this article, you can read Wesley.

In his sermon, Wesley provides an historical outline that is mainly accurate, but the point isn’t the history lesson, the point is his definition of Methodism. Against its many foes, he argued:

What is Methodism? What does this new word mean? Is it not a new religion? This is a very common, nay, almost an universal supposition. But nothing can be more remote from the truth. It is a mistake all over. Methodism, so called, is the old religion, the religion of the Bible, the religion of the primitive church, the religion of the Church of England.

One of the mistakes of modern Wesleyans is to forget that Methodism began—and to an extent is always meant to be—a movement of renewal or restoration without group or later denominational limits. This is very clearly seen in Wesley’s description, as he believed that what Methodists were doing in their society meetings, their bands, their street preaching, their clinics for the poor, and their continued adherence to the Church of England, was to restore the best of the past by bringing it to the present. This—bringing the best of the past to the present—was the very definition of “progress” in the eighteenth century. It can easily be seen in the architecture of the period, the clean lines, columns, and porticos that we call neoclassical, the quintessentially eighteenth-century architectural movement, wonderfully inspired by ancient Greece and Rome.

But this approach to progress, or restoration, entails a certain level of intentionality and intellectual rigor. Note how different neoclassical architecture is to its medieval and baroque predecessors. It’s an obvious and tangible means to highlight an approach marked by rationality or reason, the favored word at the time, and to reject aesthetics known for their extravagance and mystery. Wesley’s praise for the newly finished chapel was that it was “neat but not fine.” In other words, it embraced the rational mindset of the time. At its best, Methodism, even in its more revivalistic periods, has valued the mind, the contribution of faithful scholars, and the insights learned from years of study and formation. This intellectual gift is not greater than any other, of course, but Methodism maintains its trajectory by means of thoughtful leaders who are attuned to the Spirit’s work and to the gift of wisdom. Unlike Luther, Wesley embraced reason. Knowledge and vital piety, to borrow from Charles Wesley, are not in opposition to one another.

Wesley believed, however, that Methodism was called to renew or restore the heart of the church’s witness: a transforming encounter with the crucified and risen Christ, a witness that spoke to our transformation here and to the ultimate wholeness that God has for all creation. Proclamation, encounter, and Methodism go together. And in his sermon, he outlined the ways in which, at its best, Methodism was doing just that.

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Ryan N. Danker is the founding director of the John Wesley Institute, Washington, D.C., and Assistant Lead Editor of Firebrand.