The Church in the Shadow of Wesley
Panel Presentation at the Wesleyan Theological Society Meeting
Seattle Pacific University, March 5, 2005

John Wesley casts a very small shadow over the church today, even among, maybe especially among, those who call upon his name as a founder of their distinct brand of ecclesial existence and thought. The fundamental structure of the 18th century Methodist practices have been transformed by the rise of the modernist liberal nation-state that reduced the Methodists and their heirs to “denominations.” Wesley’s thought became interpreted within a modernist tradition of theological correlationist thought called “the Wesleyan.”

Perhaps it is even wrong to ask Wesley to cast a shadow – to ask for a “Wesleyan shadow” over the church is to violate what Wesley was about, to show how little we have really learned from his witness, how we have read his text through concerns to make him relevant to legitimate our own agendas of respectability within the demographic groups that we believe can afford us more influence. We have come to be everything that Wesley feared his Methodists would become through assimilation into structures provided by a world that stressed upward socio-economic mobility in order to exert greater and greater political influence within host societies. I personally am the epitome of what Wesley feared his Methodists might become.

If we were to repent, if we would let Wesley’s witness be a means of grace for my sanctification, what sort of embodied commitments would we bring to the Table? First, the Table would have to be the Table of the Lord, the Lord’s Supper, incorporation into body of Christ through the body and blood of Jesus in the bread and the cup. We could not be at a table of protest, a protestant table; we must be gathered at the table of Thanksgiving, a Eucharistic table. The Lord’s Table is found only within the church catholic. We would not seek to belong to a group of protesters, for we are all guests at the Table; Christ is the host. We would join with the saints through the ages in thanksgiving for the gifts of God for the people of God through the Son by the power of the Holy Spirit.

The requirement would not be to protest others as we gather, but to engage in repentance ourselves. We would be a people who were willing to learn that we are sinners in order to repent of inward sin, asking for the removal of my evil tempers in order to be filled with holy tempers, in perfect love of God and neighbor. We would seek to emulate the saints, particular those who lived and died for Christ before Constantine’s conversion – the grand blow against true religion.

Of course, given that we have been so deeply malformed by desires implanted in us by the world, to undergo genuine repentance, either as an unbeliever or within the believer, would be to join a group of disciplined Christian ascetics, much like catholic monastics, willing to devote our lives to the works of mercy and devotion as described by the church catholic. It would be to make all we can, save all we can, and give all we can for the redistribution of wealth to the poor, especially the poor of the church. We would to take personally responsibility to visit the poor, feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit the sick and those in prison. We would refuse frivolous activities, fast, pray, search the Scriptures, not return evil for evil, but overcome evil with good. We would be part of a constant catechism much like that found in the baptismal catechism of Hippolytus from the early second century.

In sum, we would reject the distortions of ecclesial life placed upon us by the Reformation and then, modernity, and return to the life of the church as witnessed before Constantine. We would learn to live the practices of this pre-Constantinian church today, supported by deep immersion into the Augustinian/Thomistic tradition of Christian reflection upon God for the sake of being perfect as our Father in Heaven is perfect, as we await the consummation of all things in Christ. Maybe it is not a shadow that we need from Wesley, but a future.