Strangely Warmed

John Wesley was not the greatest preacher of his day. His occasional friend and sometime nemesis George Whitefield was that. “My brother Wesley acted wisely,” Whitefield said. “The souls that were awakened under his ministry he joined in societies, and thus preserved the fruit of his labor. This I neglected, and my people are a rope of sand .” .... Wesley himself used the image to describe the Christianity against which his people reacted in eighteenth-century England: “Those who were desirous to save their souls were no longer a rope of sand, but clave to one another, and began to watch over each other in love. Societies were formed, and Christian discipline was introduced in all its branches.” .... There are no Whitefieldian societies now. But there are tens of millions of Wesleyan believers around the world. Thus write   Jason Byassee and L. Gregory Jones of Duke Divinity School in a 2009 article at First Things . The article focuses on Wesley as the inventor of ...

Methodists frequently speak about something they call “prevenient grace,” or grace that “comes before.” Here’s how the United Methodist Book of Discipline defines it. We acknowledge God's prevenient grace, the divine love that surrounds all humanity and precedes any and all of our conscious impulses toward God. This grace prompts our first wish to please God, our first glimmer of understanding concerning God's will, and our "first slight transient conviction" of having sinned against God. This grace also awakens in us an earnest longing for deliverance from sin and death and moves us toward repentance and faith. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, actually had very little to say directly about the doctrine of prevenient grace, especially given the weight the doctrine carries within Wesleyan circles, and the volumes of material that came from the pen of Wesley. Wesley's treatise On Working Out Our Own Salvation contains the most comprehensive statemen...