Remembering Our Hope in a Broken Middle: Reflection #4 -- Testifying about the Import of the Wesleyan Tradition in the UMC
July 17, 2024
Once upon a time, I was selected to attend an Inter-Seminarians Conference held at Boston School of Theology, sponsored by the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry. I remember worship in Marsh Chapel, where the great Howard Thurman had held forth and were the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had done his doctoral study in the early 1950s. There were around 35-40 of us at that event. As a recall three people from each of the 13 seminaries. It wasn’t entirely clear what the purpose of the event was. We came together, introduced ourself and discovered that there was no agenda for conversation. We were supposed to talk about whatever concerned us.
Sometime during the first full day of the weekend conference, I recall several seminarians (including me) raised questions about whether this was a good use of limited funds available to GBHEM. I don’t recall having access to what other people had in mind in voicing this concern and I don’t recall consulting with the other two students from Duke Divinity School. I simply thought that there should be some agenda that contributed to our formation in ministry. It became pretty clear that this was a minority perspective. That did not surprised me so much as the fact that it became clear that my comments were received as a conservative stance. At that time, don’t think I would have described myself that way, but even then, I did not like left-right splits, in part as a consequence of growing up a fundamentalist and feeling quite ambivalent about whatever “liberalism” meant. In those days, I don’t recall having heard the term “post-liberalism” yet. I began reading Lindbeck and Frei the year later, but I had already been reading Hauerwas essays for several months at that point, and had recently completed my first essay.
Toward the end of the 1983 conference, I found myself in a conversation with Richard Yeager, who I later discovered was a United Methodist clergyman from Indiana, but who at that time was a staffer for GBHEM. I asked him about the role that this event played in the work of GBHEM. He briefly explained the frequency (as I recall, it was a quadrennial event). I said, “It feels like you all are here just to watch us. Don’t you think such voyeurism is odd?” Dick was pretty transparent that hosting this event did help GBHEM to see trends in theological education so that the staff could respond to emerging concerns.
That sort of made sense to me, but I pressed the point a bit. “Is that enough? Doesn’t it need to be formative for the students too?” Dick didn’t say much in response to that, although I think he go.t my point. This is one of those matters that in the 21st century, we have learned to talk about as “the curriculum beyond the curriculum” in higher education. But I don’t think that was on folks minds then.
When we got back to Durham, I debriefed with the committee that had selected us to go. I reported my puzzling conversation with Dick Yeager in the wake of the disagreement about what might constitute a proper agenda for the quadrennial Inter-Seminarians conference. At that time, Prof. Paul Mickey was an active leader in the Good News renewal movement in addition to teaching courses in pastoral care at Duke Divinity School I recall Paul smiling as I told my tale of going to Boston. He observed, “This often happens to students from Duke who go to such events. Seminarians discover that their seminary has a particular profile.” He said, Michael, “you may not see it this way in your classes at Duke Divinity School, but compared to other seminarians around the country students at Duke are conservative. That is something for you to think about as you move forward.” (Remember, this was in 1982-83. )
Paul and I went on to talk a bit more about the ways in which I had been formed to think that spiritual formation was important. In those days, I didn’t have a particularly strong practice of prayer, but during my years at Duke I came to believe that prayer was very important. Years later, I would have occasion to recall that weekend from time to time, particularly as I encountered some of these same folks in events at conferences or training events.
Formation matters, whether we choose to pay attention or not. The effects of education in particular institutions are never uniform, of course, but the presence or absence of particular interventions and engagements matter. Mentors matter. And we should not ignore the fact that there are consequences to staging events for which there is no clearly defined agenda other than observation by boards and agencies. (I will have more to say about theological education in a subsequent reflection, but my purpose for the moment is to describe how I came to understand the Wesleyan synthesis.)
A. My Discovery & Appropriation of the Wesleyan Synthesis
At several point in the first three reflections in this Mid-Summer series of reflections on the topic of “Remembering Our Hope in a Broken Middle,” I have referred to “the Wesleyan synthesis” in a functional sense of the phrase. Namely, the brothers Wesley pulled things together in generative way as described so well by Paul W. Chilcote in his book Recapturing the Wesley’s Vision (2004), but also conveyed to earlier generations by a variety of other authors. I am also indebted to Richard Heitzenrater’s Wesley and the People Called Methodists (1995). I have used both of these in my teaching with undergraduates and shorter term projects with seminarians here in Indiana. For those readers who may not feel that they have a sense of what it means talk about the Methodism as a “synthesis,” I commend these resources.
I was not born into the UMC, so it is actually quite easy for me to describe my experience of discovery of the Wesleyan tradition and the sense in which I understand the synthesis. I was raised as a Southern Baptist in Arkansas. I am quite sure that my embrace of the Wesleyan tradition has shaped both how I make sense of my previous experience as a Christian as well as my formal education experience since 1977. Along the ways, I have become more of a “both/and” thinker, intellectually speaking. To use Paul W. Chilcote’s straight-forward language, the faith of John and Charles Wesley was conjunctive, which is why it is so unfortunate that so many people who advocate a “traditionalist” path for the UMC think in disjunctive ways.
All or nothing thinking, tends to be fundamentalist when cast in terms of defending the tradition and progressivist when choosing to set it aside. Both overlook the possibilities for re-engagement with the sources — scripture and tradition, etc. — in the spirit of re-interpretation, re-appropriation and reincorporation. We dare not ignore the fact that this takes place in “a broken middle” of the UMC — namely the INUMC — but I believe it remains possible to remember our hope and we do that by acting together as a conference.
I am one of those persons who was invited to become part of the UMC while I was working for the UMC, an I was working as a staffer for the Appalachia Service Project in Kentucky (then operating out of the Board of Discipleship under the direction of Tex Evans) more than a year before I actually joined the UMC. I have benefited greatly from having found the UMC to be a portal through which I discovered the wider set of Christian tradition. My experience of the Wesleyan tradition has been both/and. Where I encounter either/or sensibilities, they tend to be from advocates who turn to progressive or orthodox frameworks because they have disengaged for the Wesleyan synthesis. You may have had a different experience, but I am offering my own testimony at the moment.
So I began being formed by the Wesleyan tradition while in college; I still have copies of some of the earliest books I read in those days as I learned about JW and the people called Methodists. I acquired a copy of Outler’s collection of writings by John Wesley published in the Library of Protestant Thought and the little purple book on the message of John Wesley when I went through the License to Preach School in Arkansas. In retrospect, I realize that I was taught by some of the finest clergy serving in the North Arkansas Conference at that time: Jim Beal and Victor Nixon, among others. These were seasoned pastors who used a Wesleyan vocabulary in an unself-conscious way and were social engaged in the civil rights struggle at that time. I wanted to be like them, even if I had an inkling that I was probably more conservative than they were.
I was in seminary at Duke Divinity School in 1979-80 when the Wesley Works began to be published, and I remember using them in courses as well as preparing my ordination papers with copies in hand. I associate the volume of the Wesley hymns with the season of my pastorate in a rural congregation (1983-85). I carried out a project to articulate a theology of ministry during a yearlong internship at the Hinton Rural Life Center where I worked with Rene Bideaux to provide resources for small membership churches in the Southeastern Jurisdiction. The Wesleyan synthesis served me well in those years, although it did not escape my attention that there were others who acted as if that synthesis did not exist.
A few years later, I served as a graduate student preceptor in the Methodism sequence for some 80 students during the 1987-88 academic year. It was a role that had been performed by none other than Paul Wesley Chilcote some years before when he served as the assistant to the venerable Frank Baker, who many think of as the founder of the “Wesley Studies” as an academic discipline. I benefited greatly from that experience. Along the way, I had some opportunities that I had to turn down. One of those would have been to spend a couple of years in Bristol as a teacher at “Wesley House.” Had I elected to do so, I am sure that too would have been formative, but I dare not predict what direction I would have taken at that point. Instead I chose to go to grad school to study theology and ethics at Duke studying with Stanley Hauerwas, Geoffrey Wainwright and David Steinmetz.
Some have called the 1970s and 1980s as a renaissance in Wesley studies. In a lecture that he gave here in Indiana in 2008, Richard Heitzenrater provided a fairly nuanced discussion of the sequential development of the conception of a tradition of Wesley Studies scholarship [note} but I leave that aside here. Looking back on it, from the distance of 45 years, I am aware that I felt as if I was part of a generation of pastors and scholars who were carrying forward the charism of that classic Wesleyan synthesis. I felt confident that we would be able to change things, and I was disappointed that sustained change was not occurring. And I was often puzzled to see that so-called Wesleyan traditionalists did not appear to see such possibilities. At times, I racked this up to temperament. At other times, I was tempted to think that these folks were simply not very smart. (That is an arrogance that I have learned to check.) More recently, I started to recognize that some of these folks did not have the kind of enriched opportunities for engagement with the Wesleyan synthesis that I had in my pilgrimage. Indeed, some of them are largely “self-taught” when it comes to matters of the Wesleyan tradition. It is not uncommon for autodidacts to find themselves caught out for not knowing what they don’t know. I sometimes wonder if that isn’t the case with some of the folks who have left the Indiana Conference UMC.
Going back to my days at Hinton Rural Life Center (1981-82), I have preferred worshiping in small and medium sized membership churches (congregations of less than 150 members, with worship attendance of 50-100), and I have tried to encourage lay preachers along the way including by teaching a Sunday School class called “Sweeter Than Honey,” a name that alludes to Psalm 19, that great hymn to the ways God’s Word informs the way we experience the cosmos, communities of interpretation (church and synagogue) and shapes who we are as persons of faith. I feel a calling to be a bridge-builder as a latter-day Barnabas living in a time of the culture wars.
I also taught in the UM Course of Study school for bi-vocational pastors in the 1980s and 1990s. There, I encountered some maverick methodists who resisted dealing with matters of doctrine and polity, believing that they did not need to wrestle with the relationship of scripture and tradition, and openly ignoring questions of polity as if they could get away with it. One of the reasons why I had the reputation of being a tough grader was that I held the line with students in the UM doctrine, history and polity course who proved to be recalcitrant about using the current edition of the Book of Discipline in answering questions for the assignments. Although it was not uncommon to have students in that course quote from 1980s era editions of the Discipline, I recall that one maverick student tempted fate by trying to get away with using a 1972 BOD! Like John Wesley, on such occasions, I did not suffer fools gladly.
I have also had occasion to learn about various versions of the “middle way” by studying the history of the Church of England and various other Protestant movements that have attempted to bridge divides.. These are not merely academic pursuits for me. At different points, I have received spiritual direction from Anglican monks (Society of St. John the Evangelists) as well as Benedictines. Even today I participate in a lectionary based Bible study with a small group of Episcopal lay-people. I have a deep appreciation for the liturgy of the church, but I tend to be informal.in the ways I dress and conduct myself. So I have found myself more comfortable participating in ministries of the Benedictine women’s community at Our Lady of Grace monastery in Beech Grove, Indiana. I have chosen not to become an oblate, but I have tried to incorporate aspects of Benedictine spirituality into my own rule of life.
B. The Wesleyan Synthesis Revisited — Taking the Measure of Early American Methodism and Ourselves
There are more than a few inconvenient facts about early American Methodism and our appropriation of the Wesleyan synthesis. ;Some of these matters need not be named on this occasion both in order to underline what has and has not changed in American Methodism as well as to clarify our own testimonies as clergy and lay members of the UMC in Indiana.
INCONVENIENT FACT #2
The first fact about early Methodist that cannot be ignored is the absence of the kind of theological formation that was needed in order to fathom the contributions of the Anglo-Catholic tradition (particularly with respect to sacraments and ordination) to Wesley’s reform movement (which makes sense when placed alongside features of the Anabaptist tradition). This is important to take into account for several reasons, including the fact that it makes the aforementioned resolve of the preachers all the more noteworthy.
This company of American Methodists preachers who recognized “the necessity of closer union with one another” were not well-read, but they were spiritually literate enough to recognize that they were not well-equipped to act independently even if the culture in which they were living at the time encouraged the spirit of individualism and independent initiative. The American Methodist preachers were humble about their situation. This did not mean, however, that they lacked confidence.
The 25 signatories to that 1778 document that was written in the absence of the provisional leadership from England placed their confidence first in the Holy Spirit to show them the way. Indeed, they were confident in the bonds they shared in the collective discipline laid out in the Minutes, which oriented them to the doctrines of the Church of England, which was integral to the synthesis that John Wesley had been teaching as the chief catechist of early Methodism on both sides of the Atlantic. Would that we had remembered that part of the story of the planting of American Methodism. As I have already said, I think we have not paid sufficient attention to what was at stake in this moment. Nor have we taken the measure of the kind of positive precedent it set for the Methodist mission in America.
Perhaps there are more recent scholarly inquiries that I need to read to catch up on my study of American Methodist history but my memory is that this was a telling incident, where the lack of preparation of the American-born Methodists was all too evidence. Indeed, Albert Outler did not mince words 1 when he forthrightly stated:
“In Wesley Scripture and tradition had been integrated, as the mutual interdependence of revelation and interpretation. No one among American Methodists knew enough about tradition to appropriate such an integration.”
This is important to take into account as we proceed, I believe. The fact that most of the American preachers did not act like Robert Strawbridge — when they easily could have during the early years of the American Revolution — is itself an important indicator that they had appropriated enough of the Wesleyan synthesis to avoid misrepresenting what Methodist discipline was about in a culture that was defined by the struggle for independence from England. And two decades later when the Bishops attempted to solidify that emergent understanding of the Wesleyan synthesis for the Methodist Episcopal Church, they stressed the collective impact of schism, the destruction of each person’s faith formation, the destruction of the coherence of the witness of scripture, and the effects on the lives of the People Called Methodists. There terse warning is worth memorizing in 2024, since it appears that we haven’t taken in its profound implications.
If we divide, we shall destroy ourselves, the Word of God, and the souls of our people.
— Coke & Asbury, 1798
I am well aware of the objections that maverick methodist evangelicals have thrown at Albert Outler’s so-called quadrilateral paradigm. I have participated in those discussions across the years. Some of them have been constructive. Others have been overblown, with blustering statements by all or nothing sentiments. By comparison, Mr. Wesley was careful. Many of us failed to learn our catechesis.
We should not make the mistake of failing to recognize the importance of his analysis of the problem that Francis Asbury & company faced in the period after 1771. This integration of scripture and tradition took place (in the 1740s and 1750s) in a context where the practice of discipleship as defined by the collective experience of the United Societies and Wesley’s own clearly reasoned narrative in A Plain Account.
The wholeness of Methodist discipline, to which each person could offer testimony, also is registered in the heart of the narrative of what it meant to cultivate Methodism once planted. This is the primary focus of the second question of the conference agenda: “How to teach?” We are talking about the tasks of catechesis, teaching for discipleship, what Wesley preferred to call “practical divinity.” Indeed, this observation has often been overlooked and/or ignored, but it should be a reminder that catechesis lies at the heart of the Wesleyan project.
JW was the catechist for early Methodism – and by extension Francis Asbury & company played that role on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean. The text A Plain Account of the People Called Methodists was among other things a narrative of what he and they had learned in the United Societies in the context of being driven forward by the Holy Spirit. Wesley never failed to remind the preachers that the experience of union was integral to their vocation as the people of God.
No one should be surprised that the lay preachers of the first generation in America struggled with the fact that discipline of ministers in American Methodism took shape within a clearly defined episcopal authority. Subsequent generations have struggled with patterns of separation — what I have described as “the pairs so long disjoined” 2 that I have come to believe are expansions of the broken middle of American Methodism. (I will have more to say about this in Reflection #5).
INCONVENIENT FACT #2
The second inconvenient fact pertains to us more than early Methodism, in part because it exposes how United Methodist congregations have come to be constituted by something other than the traditions of John and Charles Wesley. Paradoxically, this has been taking place despite the fact that more of the writings of the brothers Wesley are available to us known than ever before. Many of us who love the Wesleyan tradition have not paid sufficient attention to the fact that our appropriation of the tradition is not the resultof ecclesial formation. Much of what I learned about John Wesley, I learned in the context of my seminary and graduate education not through a local church..
I purchased my first Volume in the Wesley Works series in 1980. That was the same years that I was ordained a deacon. That sustained me in my work as a pastor. The publication of the volume of A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Wesley occurred while i was a pastor. A member of the congregation at Tabernacle United Methodist Church presented me with a copy of that expensive tome after I had led the congregation’s celebration of its 200th anniversary. Throughout my brief two year sojourn as a pastor of a rural congregations, I operated with a vivid sense of Wesley’s “via salutis” — the dynamic sense in which God’s grace is operative in each person’s life with the Holy Spirit working — preveniently — to bring men and women to experience the justifying grace of God through Jesus Christ. And as a consequence of appropriating JW’s more dynamic understanding of sanctifying grace, I was able to break out of some of the theological dead-ends that had bothered me before. Meanwhile, my participation in the Emmaus Walk (September 1981) helped me to begin understanding spiritual formation in less individualistic ways as part of covenant discipleship and reunion groups.
I came to love Charles Wesley’s great hymn, “Come., O Thou Traveler Unknown.” which was included in the 1989 Hymnal in a shorter version (386) and with all 14 verses (387). In due course, I came to realize that Wesley’s vision of salvation extended through sanctification to glorification (2 Corinthians 3:18) as human beings are changed from glory to glory. In those years, I preached with conviction about how God’s grace woos us. using hymns like “Sinners,Turn, Why Will You Die,” the lyrics of which are found in the UM Hymnal (1989) but sans musical setting, accessible for preaching purposes if not for congregational singing. (Although I found ways around that obstacle) I wrote about “the eucharistic theology of John and Charles Wesley”and became interested in the ways that their insights converged with the Eastern Orthodox understanding of sacramental theology. I mention the hymns and the eucharist or Lord’s supper because it makes little sense to me to talk about the Wesleyan synthesis apart from the practices, and in many way I have found the means of grace strand of Wesleyan spirituality to be the strongest part of my own piety.
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Wesley’s “Scripture Way of Salvation” [excerpted from unpublished manuscript of Remembering Our Hope: Protestant Traidtions of Spirituality by Michael G.Cartwright
Order of Salvation Personal Experience Corporate Context
Original sin
prevenient grace Serious Seeking Bands
repentance Class Meetings
justification Societies
regeneration Assurance of Salvation
sanctification Select Societies
Christian perfection Death
Resurrection and Last Judgment
glorification
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While I was in graduate school (1985-1988), I had the opportunity to use the four volumes of John Wesley’s Sermons, the 151 published texts edited by Albert Outler, in the Methodism, Doctrine and Polity sequence of courses. I was the preceptor for 75-80 students in the courses taught by Tom Langford, Dennis Campbell and Robert Wilson. My wife Mary (who studied at Duke1982-85) was iin first generation of seminarians to have the opportunity to read Wesley’s work int he context of the second and third generations of Wesley Studies scholarship. So. I have always had access to “the latest scholarship” about John and Charles Wesley. From 1985 to 1988, I was a recipient of the Society of John Wesley Scholarship offered by AFTE; I count it an honor and a privilege to have been a John Wesley Senior Fellow. My focus of studies was not American Methodism, per se, but the concern about the poverty of the use of Scripture in Christian ethics in American Protestant denominations was never far away from my thinking as analyzed patterns of theological interpretation of the Bible Anabaptist/Mennonite and Orthodox communion.
The first project I tackled after completing my doctorate while teaching at Allegheny College was to offer an analysis of the UM Council of Bishop’s pastoral letter Vital Congregations/Faithful Disciples: Vision for the Church (1990). I argued that the Bishops “reflected but did not resolve” the ongoing ecclesiological conundrum of American Methodism, which was famously articulated, in part at least, in Francis Asbury’s Valedictory Address of 1816: “We were a church and no church.”
Part of what I traced in that article on “The Pathos and Promise of American Methodist Ecclesiology (Asbury Theological Journal, 1992) was the ways that the disuse of “The General Rules of the United Societies” was central to the story line that I came to summarize as the disembodiment of Methodist discipline that accompanied the abandonment of the categories of probationary membership in the context of y American Methodism. It is a messy tale, and the trajectory did not take a single path, but across the decade the phrase “the doctrines and discipline” lost its conjunctive force, and many American methodists began to think and act as if the heart of the Methodist charism was not the performance of the General Rules as social embodiment of doctrine and discipline but instead the preaching of doctrine.
I also continued to learn about American Methodist disciplinary practice in the context of graduate education and participation in projects such as the United Methodism and American Culture Project funded by Lilly Endowment, Inc. in the 1990s. My own research for that project was Pan-Methodist study of disciplinary practices “in black and white” traditions. In the process, some of us have found ways to cross the color line by learning how the ways that clergy and laity in the A.M.E., A.M.E.Zion and C.M.E. churches engaged Methodist disciplinary practices in comparison with the practices of the M.E.C., M.E.C,, South, etc.
In those early years of my career, I continued my ecumenical explorations both in my writing about hermeneutics, contributing to the Dictionary of the Ecumenical Movement and exploring the “ecumenical vocation” of the Methodism. In both of these kinds of endeavors, I was influenced by the British Methodist, Geoffrey Wainwright, who was one of my mentors in graduate school and who offered another version of conjunctive thinking that opened outward to other traditions in his own kind of ecumenical reception. My involvement in ecumenism has always been animated by a sense that the charism of Christian unity is or ought to be central for Methodists and the fact that it is more often than not unrecognized has been a great disappointment to me.
In my lifetime,“The People Called Methodists” around the world have had greater access to the writings of John and Charles Wesley than all previous generations and there is seemingly little interest in reappropriating that heritage. I think that is at least partly because it has been presented in a flatfooted way as an all or nothing proposition. Like my friend Paul W. Chilcote, I have had the great privilege to engage in extended conversations, collaborations and correspondence with both men’s and women’s Benedictine communities about the ways that Methodists and Benedictines share a “possibilist” approach (as opposed to the more pessimistic Augustine, Calvinist, and Lutheran traditions of theological anthropology) that propels us outward to engage other Christians as well as makes integration possible through through the practice of the works of mercy and the works of piety (categories John Wesley re-worked in the General Rules and elsewhere).
In sum: my generation’s appropriation of John Wesley’s work has been enabled by our participation in the academy, which has its own version of a broken middle. On the one hand, we are in a position to see possibilities for ecumenical reception that have not been possible for previous generations, which sometimes makes it. possible to recognize aspects of convergence that we could not see before. At the same time, we continue to exist in more or less segregated communions and few UM congregations are shaped by the life and work of John Wesley, except when we celebrate Aldersgate Sunday, which also doubles as Heritage Day.
There have been some important exceptions. For example, I participated in the Oxford World Methodist Theological Conference in 1997. Had my career not taken an administrative turn, I imagine that I would have continued to participate in those gatherings every five years as some of my colleagues have done. Regardless, when I engage the Wesleyan synthesis, it is largely through the scholarly Works of John Wesley. This has made it possible to re-appropriate Mr. Wesley’s life and work, but I it is one of the exceptions that has proved the rule. Disengagement continues to be prevalent.
Andrew D. Kinsey and I have collaborated on several projects over the past 25 yrars. One of the by-products of our work together has been a small book about the General Rules of the United Societies interpreted through the lens of a rule of life for Spiritual Formation. 3 In keeping with our mutual concern about ecclesiology (explicating the doctrine of the church) we wrote it with the hope that it could help clergy and laity of the conference (particularly folks who are in the process of preparing for ordination and commissioning) to reappropriate the General Rules as a rule of life for the mission of the church. So I have continued to do what I can to promote constructive engagement with the Wesleyan tradition of the UMC. We do this work in a broken middle. It is wishful thinking to assume that systemic change is going to take place so long as clergy and laity are disengaged from one another and the practices of the Wesleyan tradition. But I also feel confident because it doesn’t have to be that way.
C. My Contributions as a Scholar and Teacher: Trying to Understand the Loss of the Wesleyan Synthesis
It is also important to understand how this circumstance came about. That has turned out to be central to my vocation as a sscholar and teachcer. In 1993, Danny Morris and Rene Bideaux commissioned me to put together a series of lectures on Protestant Spirituality for the Two-Year academy for Spiritual Formation. For more than two decades I had the opportunity to teach on average once a year. (The last time was in 2018.) Typically, I engaged participants in each academy during the seventh of eight weeks. Most of them were American Protestants and usually at least half were United Methodists. By the time they engaged me, they had learned a great deal about other religious traditions (Judaism, Catholucism, etc.) and I had the opportunity to help them put their own experience into conext. I very much enjoyed teaching in the context of “the monastic day” with times of prayer and silence for reflection.
One of the roles I performed in the Academy was to help United Methodists make sense of their own spiritual formation. I developed various “teaching aids” some of which I borrowed from my other scholarly engagements, such as my work as editor of essays by John Howard Yoder, the Mennonite ecumenist, and Stanley Hauerwas, who once described himself as a “High Church Mennonite.”
Donald Durnbaugh’s Typology for Describing Features of Wesleyan Eccclesiology
I have found Durnbaugh’s typology4 to be useful for several purposes, not the least of which is naming well the tensions between different approaches to the reformation of the Church, which was important for me in addressing an audience of Mennonites, Brethren, and Quakers at the Concept of the Believers Church Conference where I spoke in 1992.
Durnbaugh positions Methodism precisely at the center between the three patterns – Word, Spirit, and Tradition –he has identified as well as the ecclesial housing – the Chapel, the Meeting House, and the Cathedral – and the respective forms that communion takes in – Believers’ Churches and Classical Protestantism. Other aspects of this heuristic model – Mysticism and Catholicism – do not map well with Methodism until you focus on the location in this diagram between the Quaker (Religious Society of Friends) and the Anglican traditions. Then, it starts to come into focus how Methodism occupies a mediating position that mode as well.
I think Durnbaugh’s diagram also helps to account for both the tensions within American Methodism and for the aspiration for integration of piety that was so strongly present in the life and work of John Wesley. Where the tensions overwhelm the quest for integrity, we see various kinds of instability embodied by the groups that seek to live out that Wesleyan vision of the church. I brought these insights from the Believers’ church conferences together with Albert Outler’s judgment about John Wesley’s “most mature reflections” about the church – memorably phrased as “an unstable blend of Anglican and Anabaptist ecclesiologies.” 5
Twenty-five years ago I offered a compressed summary of the Methodist vision of the church, when viewed through that kind of lens: “Negotiating the ‘border between radical and moderate reformation,’ combined aspects that are recognizable to both Anglicans and Anabaptists: tradition is honored, and ‘Christian Antiquity’ is drawn upon for patterns of restitution in continuity with the New Testament.” 6 This is a both/and stance that remains challenging to enact, but I still am not ready to give up on it, even after having completed my forty years of service tot he UMC in 2023.
In the year 2024, I still think that is apt. At its best, John Wesley’s most mature theological reflection about the Church was an “unstable synthesis of Anglican and Anabaptist ecclesiologies.” This is especially important for registering the way JW thought about how schism works. It is possible to dissent from the Church’s teachings as contained in the 39 Articles of Religion, something John Wesley refused to do. Or one can sow division in the church – locally and visibly – which threatens the integrity of the Body of Christ in personal ways. This is the kind of error that destabilized the “practical divinity” of the class meetings. And I daresay it is still a problem in small groups in United Methodists congregations in the Indiana Conference in 2024
John Wesley wrote the following words about what it means to be “Methodists” in a short piece of “advice” that he published four years before A Plain Account,
“If you walk by this rule, continually endeavoring to know, and love, and resemble, and obey the great God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, as the God of love, of pardoning mercy; if from this principle of loving, obedient faith, you carefully abstain from all evil, and labour, as you have opportunity, to do good to all men, friends or enemies, if lastly you unite together to encourage and help each other in thus working out your salvation, and for that end watch over one another in love – you are they whom I mean by Methodists.” 7
In that particular instance, Mr. Wesley urged those to whom he was offering this “advice” to consider their own “peculiar circumstances.” That is no less applicable for us in 2024, where we have the opportunity to reappropriate the Wesleyan synthesis in our own time and place, here in Indiana.
I think that we should do that at this particular moment in early July 2024 in the wake of the 2020 2024 General Conference and our own annual session held at St. Luke’s UMC June 5-8. That is what I am encouraging us to do. What have you experienced across the years ? What is your testimony as a member of the people called Methodists? To paraphrase a writer from a different time and place, “the only way to see how this will work is to see how this will work.” Thus the need to talk with one another about our experiences of the Wesleyan synthesis and the legacies of American Methodism.
D. Concluding Thoughts:
I want to testify that part of what I have learned over the past forty years has been to pay attention to the wisdom of John Wesley, for whom it was not enough to intend to reform the church (to answer the question “what to teach?”), one must go about it in the right way (i.e. to ask the question “how to teach?”). And as I noted in the firsst of these reflections, Wesley understood the provisional nature of the General Rules.
“We are always open to instruction,
willing to be wiser every day than we were before,
and to change whatever we can change for the better.”
– John Wesley’s A Plain Account of the People Called Methodists (1749)
When early Methodist preachers began to preach an antinomian doctrine of Christian perfection, Wesley called them out. When Methodist preachers disobeyed the Church of England’s rules for administration of the sacraments in Ireland, Wesley rebuked them. And when leaders attempted to divide the church for reasons that were not doctrinal but because they did not value being united with other Methodists, JW called these out as harmful to the Body of Christ. In sum: “the necessity of union among ourselves” is a normative feature of the Wesleyan reform movement. Recall what Bishops Coke and Asbury said about this matter in their 1798 “notes” — they connected the dots not only with practical necessity but also with the integrity of the witness to the Word of God and the formation of disciples in the context of covenantal relationships with God and one another.
I cannot account for why so-called “traditionalists” like Riley Case and others in the INUMC have not learned these things in the context of their theological education, but in the wake of the disaffiliation process, I believe that these are things we must teach one another as members of the Indiana Conference of the UMC in the years to come. I will revisit this question in Reflections #7 and #8 later this month, when I try to “do my first works over” in thinking about what did and did not work with the Wesleyan Connexion Project (2006-2011). In the meantime, forty-five years after I began seminary, I am grateful to see that we have the opportunity to reappropriate the Wesleyan synthesis in the INUMC, and I hope we dare to do so in the midst of continuing to struggle with living through the time and place of a broken middle.
As I cast my gaze back across the four decades that have passed since I participated in the Inter-Seminarians Conference at Boston University School of Theology in Jan. 1983, I wonder what it might have been like if the 1983 cohort representing the thirteen United Methodist seminaries had been invited by Dick Yeager and his colleagues on the staff of GBHEM to talk about how we were coming to grips with the multiple legacies of John and Charles Wesley. I use the plural here because the tradition is multifaceted, and it is reasonable to expect that there are different emphases, and different strands of influence. For example, it is still possible to discern threads of the Methodist Protestant tradition present — more egalitarian, etc. — at Wesley Theological Seminary. And not all seminarians would have perceived there to be a synthesis (as I have stated earlier). But in 2024, all of us would have had an opportunity to develop our own ways of describing the legacy of John and Charles Wesley in the institution of the UMC.
What if we had learned at that juncture that there were different ways that people talked about these matters, not just because one person studied with Ted Runyon and another with Tom Langford, etc, but because our experience of the M. Div. curriculum and “the curriculum beyond the curriculum” of theological education was shaped by different patterns? In some ways, it would have given us a head start on how to engage one another over the course of our careers. I think most of the people with whom I went to seminary are retiring now or will do so int he next two years. . . . I dare not say that I know that it could have made a difference, but it would be interesting for GBHEM to do a survey of the 35-40 participants and see what they would say now that they have finished their course.
This brings me back to the text that I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, JW’s “A Plain Account of the People Called Methodists” I believe that the members of the INUMC need to become much more astute about how we engage appeals to tradition in the wake of this season of disaffiliation, which resulted in one in four congregations leaving the UMC over the past three years. We have let self-described “traditionalists” act as if the disagreements were primarily with the Bible, when in fact they need to come to terms with a central disagreement that many of them have with Mr. Wesley and Mr. Asbury about the importance of church unity. The shadow of Robert Strawbridge is ever-present in the midst of the culture wars, as if the problem is the tradition instead of the idiosyncrasy of folks on the left and the right who make it into an all or nothing contest. That is a minority perspective, I realize, but a reasoned one!
Lost in the circumstance of living in a broken middle, more often than not, has been the opportunity to revisit texts of the Bible, the voluminous writings of Mr. Wesley, who — like Augustine of Hippo centuries before him — lived long enough to retract some of his definitive statements and in a few cases wrote reflections that cast doubt on his own later retractions. Part of what it means to be part of a vital tradition is to be able to engage in ongoing argument with genuine affection for the fallibility of the founder and due respect for his own deep love for the Bible. Searching the Scriptures WITH Mr. Wesley should be an endeavor that we continue to do as opposed to citing Mr. Wesley of the most recent edition of the Book of Discipline as if that is the end of the story.
For the remainder of 2024 and beyond, I believe folks in the Indiana Conference UMC need to recover this neglected narrative thread in American Methodism, which is at one and the same time ecclesiological and catechetical. A Plain Account of the People Called Methodist in America in the 21st century must dare to name the pattern of maverick Methodism in the context of reasserting the wholeness of Methodist covenant discipleship as the basis for clergy discipline.
Going forward, as a company of clergy in the Indiana Conference UMC, I believe we have to speak plainly with one another about the need to abide by the wholeness of the conception of discipline in the face of those who persistently elect to take the kind of populist course of action. The point is not that one side is “revisionist” and the other is “consistent” or on the other hand that one side is “old school” and the other side is “new school.” The point, I believe, is that it is a persistent temptation for us to give an account of our heritage that is truncated. This was true as early as the 1770s. So we need to put the actions of so-called traditionalists in context. This has been is a persistent strain in American Methodism, and we seem to have had our share of these folks in the state of Indiana. This way of thinking reflects a poor understanding of our history as Methodists in American culture.
I believe the topic deserves comment about the tendency to lop off the story of the various rises of Methodism that took place prior to the American experience and the willful disregard for the accumulated experience of John Wesley & the People Called Methodists. So in Reflection #5, I am going to take this opportunity to spell out the fuller dimensions of the story of American Methodism deserves to be processed beyond the walls of the seminary classroom.
Michael G. Cartwright, July 17, 2024
NOTES
Albert Outler, “Biblical Primitivism in Early American Methodistm” reprinted essay (page 151). quoted in Cartwright, 25. See footnote 51 for full citation of Outler
Michael G. Cartwright, “The American Methodist Experience of Chruch Discipline,” in Wesleyan Theological Journal Vol. 34, No. 2., Fall 1999, 51.
Watching Over One Another In Love (Wipf & Stock, 2011).
Donald Durnbaugh, The Concept of the Believers Church: The History and Character of Radical Protestantism (Macmillan, reprinted by Herald Press,1985), the diagram is found on p. 31.
Albert Outler, editorial preface to John Wesley’s sermon “Of the Church” The Works of John Wesley, Vol. III, Sermons, 46.
Michael G. Cartwright, “The American Methodist Experience of Chruch Discipline,” 19.
John Wesley, “Advice to the People Called Methodists” in The Methodist Societies: History, Nature and Design, The Works of John Wesley, Vol. IX, p.125.