I have been blessed to be a part of the Free Methodist family for a handful of years now, a family that has welcomed me and provided a loving home. I come from several generations of mainline Methodists and have spent most of my life within the United Methodist Church, and it’s been a pleasure to start living within a holiness expression of the Wesleyan family.
One thing that has stood out to me that seems somewhat ambiguous, though, is the emphasis that’s frequently placed on Free Methodism (and Wesleyan denominations more generally) being a “movement.” I don’t mean it’s ambiguous in the sense that there isn’t a precedent for its use, because of course there is: John Wesley’s original Methodism is frequently called a movement, so it’s logical that any group associated with him would also be known as a movement. The ambiguity is with the term itself.
I think the FMC has done a good job of honing in on what it means to it, though: its website explicitly states in the “About” section that “Free Methodists seek the power of the Holy Spirit to visit our churches and communities, igniting a Spirit-Fueled Movement in our day. We desire to see the wounded healed, the broken-hearted encouraged, the lame walk, the dead be brought back to life, the darkness overcome with the light of Christ, and the Kingdom of God advance.”
The ambiguity isn’t in the definition but rather in the assumed historical connotation (the baggage, if you will) that the term carries with it. If you know your American religious history you know it’s nearly impossible to talk about movement unless you’re also talking about revival.
The History of Revival – Are There Issues?
Having grown up in a small, rural, southern Methodist congregation, I have some experience with “revival meetings” in which a local church often invites a guest evangelist or exhorter of some kind to charge up the church with the Holy Spirit – frequently through strong emotional appeals – to be invigorated to go about doing its work. But that is only a limited meaning for what revival is or can be.
Revivalism is most recognized as the society-wide religious renewals that characterized America in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Methodism began within this paradigm and, its fast spread owes in large part to the way in which the Holy Spirit powerfully moved through the work of itinerant preachers leading large camp meetings where the Spirit’s power was manifest.
Historian John H. Wigger notes in his book Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America that Methodism’s emphasis on the experience of God was central to its appeal and to its spread. “Mere orthodoxy was never enough; religion that was not directly experienced was essentially worthless,” he writes. “It was this emphasis on the necessity of direct personal experience that defined the Wesleyan way of salvation.”
He later adds, “It may not be an exaggeration to say that this quest for the supernatural in everyday life was the most distinctive characteristic of early American Methodism.”
What could be bad about any of that?
Nothing in itself – any time the Spirit moves is a cause for celebration, and when the Spirit moves in massive, powerful ways, it’s that much more of a good thing. And God – being God – obviously is always able to do whatever God wants, however God wants, at any place and any time.
But there’s a problem when we demand God manifest on our terms, when we in essence demand God show up in big and flashy ways when, in reality, throughout the 2,000-year history of Christianity, most of the growth of the Kingdom comes quietly and slowly, person by person, inch by inch, through the steady work of anonymous saints.
My concern is that evangelical Christians have a fixation on revival that threatens to border on idolatry – God doesn’t have to move in big and bold ways to nonetheless be effectively moving and changing hearts and lives, and I suspect part of our obsession may owe to our predilection for celebrity and fame: we want to be noticed and celebrated, and that doesn’t happen in the still and quiet moments.
There should also be hesitation when we expect that our actions will necessarily result in a specific response from God. That’s the logic of the Prosperity Gospel and treating God like a genie in a bottle: if I do “X,” then God will do “Y.” If I just believe hard enough, God will give me what I want.
I respectfully suggest there may be a hint of that logic in the sentence that follows from what’s quoted above on the FMC website: “Movements like this can only happen when the Holy Spirit is unleashed through people who surrender themselves entirely to the Lord and His service.”
Can only happen? God can do whatever God wants whenever God wants. God is not dependent on our behavior. Nor should we expect God to react in the ways we anticipate if we are able to collectively reach some level of surrender.
What, then, should we expect God to do within a faithful movement of Christianity in our current American context?
The Limitations of Methodist Belief in Personal Experience
Only God knows how God will respond at any moment in the future. And it doesn’t rule out that, indeed, revival as we anticipate it could still happen (it did not very long ago at Asbury). We just shouldn’t have an attitude of “Revival or bust” or “Go big or go home.” The Holy Spirit still moves powerfully and still does the miraculous; the Spirit just doesn’t always have to do that in a large group of people that makes headlines.
As valuable as it is to learn from our Methodist heritage, we also need to come to grips with both the limitations of some Wesleyan beliefs and how the initial success of Methodism owes much to the unique sociohistorical situation it found itself in, a situation that can’t be reproduced.
First, we need to be painfully honest about the limits of the Wesleyan (and evangelical) emphasis on personal experience. Experiencing the movement of the Holy Spirit in our hearts is indeed a powerful testament to faith, but it can both fade in memory and be misunderstood or abused.
John Wesley himself wrote an infamous letter to his brother Charles in 1766 that should give any Methodist pause regarding the lasting effect of experience. Granted, the letter should be taken with a large grain of salt as it was personal correspondence with his brother during a challenging time in his life and ministry, and Wesley sometimes seemed to have what we might describe today as manic episodes (especially in his dealings with women he was romantically interested in), but even still, I was surprised by these words (even if they only reflect how he felt in a moment) from the man whose life was changed by his infamous heart-warming experience in 1738 (this letter is transcribed – it included shorthand – by Richard P. Heitzenrater in The Elusive Mr. Wesley: John Wesley His Own Biographer, Volume 1):
“I do not feel the wrath of God abiding on me; nor can I believe it does. And yet (this is the mystery) I do not love God. I never did. Therefore I never believed in the Christian sense of the word. Therefore I am only an honest heathen, a proselyte of the Temple, one of the God-fearers. And yet to be so employed by God! and so hedged in that I can neither get forward nor backward! Surely there never was such an instance before, from the beginning of the world! If I ever have had that faith, it would not be so strange. But I never had any other evidence of the eternal or invisible world than I have now; and that is none at all, unless such as faintly shines from reason’s glimmering ray. I have no direct witness, I do not say that I am a child of God, but of anything invisible or eternal.
“And yet I dare not preach otherwise than I do, either concerning faith, or love, or justification, or perfection. And yet I find rather an increase than a decrease of zeal for the whole work of God and every part of it. I am borne along, I know not how, that I can’t stand still. I want all the world to come to what I do not know. Neither am I impelled to this by fear of any kind. I have no more fear than love. Or if I have any fear, it is not that of falling into hell but of falling into nothing.”
If Wesley had lived long enough to witness the rise of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the mid-1800s, he might also have realized that spiritual experience can be dangerously misleading or misunderstood. Mormon missionaries rely heavily on spiritual experience in their appeals to potential converts – a common strategy is to gift a copy of The Book of Mormon and ask a potential convert to follow the advice of Moroni 10:3-5, which states that a person should pray with a sincere heart whether it (The Book of Mormon) is true, at which point God will make it known to him or her.
Indeed, several years ago I spoke with a Mormon friend about how trustworthy Joseph Smith was, and no matter what issues I raised, my friend fell back to the experience he had when he prayed that prayer. His definitive response was, “David, I know what I felt.” When I told him I didn’t question his feelings but suggested there might be multiple ways of interpreting what his feelings meant or where the feelings came from, he again said, “David, I know what I felt.”
Spiritual experiences and emotions can also be easily manipulated. Research in brain science that has been ongoing since at least the early 2000s when Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief was published has studied how the brain reacts to perceived spiritual stimuli – everything we understand to be a spiritual experience (from the highs of intense worship to the peace of deep meditative trances) has a strong, measurable reaction in our brains, which leaves us to wonder: do spiritual experiences create our brain’s responses, or do our brain’s responses create perceived spiritual experiences?
That doesn’t mean there are no real spiritual experiences (God created our brain, so we’d expect it to be involved in whatever we experience); it just means that an experience by itself can’t be used to determine whether God is active – as a former longtime worship leader, I’ve long noticed the identical emotional reactions between a powerful worship set and a powerful secular rock concert, for example (I’m confident non-Christians also recognize that similarity and find us to be disingenuous if we’re relying on music alone to create moments of transcendence).
We can’t rely on our experiences or feelings by themselves to determine our beliefs or our perceptions of reality, and we should be mindful of what is spoken to us during transcendent experiences as these can qualify as altered states of consciousness in which we are more vulnerable and susceptible to influence.
The Uniqueness of Methodism’s Past, and Future Implications
Lastly, we need to appreciate that the sociohistorical reality that existed during the rise of Methodism isn’t replicable. As Wigger explains, the cultural climate in America immediately following the Revolution was distinctly receptive to what Methodism had to offer. For the first time in history, a nation advocated equality and democracy, empowering lower social classes who became eager for more control of their lives, and the decidedly lay-lead Methodism fit that paradigm for religion.
“Throughout the early national period, Methodism appealed to men and women of ambition – to those who were beginning on society’s margins,” Wigger states. “Methodism offered ordinary Americans the opportunity to seize control of their own spiritual destiny in much the same way that many were striving to determine their social and economic destinies.”
The Revolution resulted in an upheaval of society. “With the abandonment of so much that had been a familiar part of colonial American society, Methodist discipline promised to provide a much needed supplement to family, community and church ties, a way for ordinary people to re-order and control their own lives,” Wigger says. “In short, Methodism encouraged the new values necessary for ‘improvement’ in a market-driven society, imbuing ordinary people with the belief that they as individuals and as communities could overcome folly and vice and improve their lot.”
That helps explain how the fervor caused by camp meetings resulted in the distinctives of Methodism – the class and band system of accountability, the belief in the achievability of Christian perfection – taking root in new communities along the western frontier. And it also explains how, once that societal dynamic shifted (once the newness of revolution faded and fewer new communities were established, and people became more settled), Methodism’s power and influence slowly waned.
This makes clear why modeling the identical methods of our early Methodist forebears has not resulted in the same success they had – our situation is different.
“Early American Methodism demonstrated both the power of popular religious movements in post-revolutionary America’s religious free market, and their fundamental limitation,” Wigger writes. “It showed that well-organized, large-scale popular religious movements not only could thrive as countercultures and subcultures in American life but also could influence the basic character of American society. But the history of early American Methodism also demonstrates the degree to which popular religious movements are limited by the boundaries of the broader culture in which they take shape.”
With that last sentence, therein lies the rub. To quote Wigger one last time: “To a great extent, the early Methodist itinerants were not burdened with the task of converting their audiences to a new worldview. They had only to tap into powerful undercurrents of popular belief that had heretofore found little institutional recognition.”
It’s a drastic understatement to say that is no longer the case in American society. The methods successfully modeled in scripture and the early church no longer apply: for the first time in human history (excepting the Soviet Union), a society exists that does not believe in the reality of the spiritual world at all, let alone a Judeo-Christian spiritual world.
In the New Testament, Paul could appeal to the Greek Areopagus because they believed in the reality of gods, and he could segue into presenting a new take on the spiritual realm. In the 1700s and 1800s, nearly everyone in American society took for granted that some variation of the Judeo-Christian understanding of the spiritual realm was true, so Methodists could work with that preexisting foundation. Today in Africa, South America, and many parts of Asia, cultures likewise believe in the reality of a spiritual world, so Christians can use that as a starting point to demonstrate the superior spiritual power of Jesus Christ.
But how do we evangelize to a people who don’t even believe there is a spiritual world? Where do we even start?
I don’t have unique answers to those questions beyond what many Christian thinkers have already proposed over the last 100 years or so, but I know whatever the ultimate answers are, they likely will be found (with God’s help) by praying together about what methods would be efficacious with a uniquely secular, humanistic culture with no spiritual baseline, just as the methods of our Wesleyan forebears were uniquely effective within their context.
Perhaps we should start with the Church itself, which has long had a broken process of discipling (and I don’t mean from a programmatic standpoint). How frequently do we see leaders really pour their lives into a handful of other people, and then see those people really pour their lives into others, ad infinitum? That’s genuine discipling, and I’ve rarely witnessed it. Maybe the next iteration of our movement should start there.
Regardless, it’s up to God and us to determine what moving forward faithfully looks like without demanding a miraculous answer from God in whatever form we might expect that to take, while nonetheless leaving the door open for God to do exactly that if God so desires. And we must remain open to the Spirit doing something completely and utterly unexpected and uncomfortable as the Spirit has so often done.
David S. Wisener 