John Wesley is probably best known for his journal and sermons while his brother, Charles, for his hymns. But one prayer of John Wesley’s has become a well-beloved classic, particularly used around the turn of the new year: his Covenant Prayer. In contemporary American Methodist practice, this prayer is associated with a watch night service, a vigil, or some form of it. The service can be used throughout the year but is often associated with New Year’s Eve or the Sunday closest to it, a practice that can be traced to the London society itself. The prayer, found often in a Covenant Service, has also become a social media favorite.
Contemporary services for a Covenant Service can be found in the recently published My Great Redeemer’s Praise (2022), but also in the Methodist Church in Britain’s Methodist Service Book (1999) in which it is skillfully combined with a Eucharistic service, and also in the United Methodist Book of Worship (1992) among other places. I applaud all of these efforts to bring the riches of the tradition into practice, but the historian and antiquarian in me loves the original language best. No matter the words used, I still hear it in the eighteenth-century language, “I am no longer my own, but thine…”
It’s popularly thought that the watch night service and the covenant prayer are derivative of Moravian influence, but it’s more complicated than that. The covenant prayer itself is actually Puritan. Wesley owed much to the Moravians, but they often ignited in him dormant undercurrents from the English tradition itself. He was never a German divine, after all. The Moravians had a way of kindling this sort of response wherever they went, though, and that is part of their genius.
The Puritan influence on Wesley shouldn’t come as a surprise, although the average person today views the Puritans through an unfortunate and dare I say puritanical lens.
Continue reading at Firebrand here.
Ryan N. Danker is Director of the John Wesley Institute, Washington, DC, publisher of Good News Magazine, and assistant lead editor of Firebrand.
Comment by Salvatore Anthony Luiso on January 8, 2025 at 6:12 pm
Greetings in Christ from Williamsburg, Virginia.
I just read this article. Thank you for it. It’s excellent. I would like to tell many other people about it.
One way I would like to tell others about it is by writing and publishing a very short article about it, and which contains a link to it, at this website: https://reimaginenetwork.ning.com/
May I have your permission to do this?