To Stir Up God's Good Trouble

I am no longer my own, but thine. Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt; put me to doing, put me to suffering; let me be employed for thee, exalted for thee or brought low for thee; let me be full, let me be empty; let me have all things, let me have nothing; I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.

And now O God ... thou art mine and I am thine. So be it. And the covenant which I have made on earth, let it be ratified in heaven. Amen.

—Prayer from John Wesley's Service for Such as Would Enter or Renew their Covenant With God

I am an adopted child of John Wesley. My upbringing was in a parsonage family of the Evangelical United Brethren Church (EUB). When we merged with the Methodists late in my high school years, I took little note—even though my Dad was busily involved in the local administrative negotiations. But in seminary a friend who was at once my mentor in Scripture and civil disobedience drove me to those roots. He said, "To know where you're going, you need to know where you're coming from." Duly prompted, I took a course on Wesley to find out and recognized with an EUB heart my spiritual kith and kin. Indeed, yet another mentor emerged with whom I pray to be in covenant.

Some things I like in John Wesley are personal, trivial, and human: his large parsonage family and special closeness with his brother Charles, the struggle with ordination, or the botched and bungled romantic affairs. Some affections stem from his down-to-earth style: the gutsy street and field preaching, his in-praxis theology written on the move (generally by horseback) and put in plain folk's language, the strident polemical leaflets and pamphlets—notoriously plagiarized, improved, and circulated hand to hand. Some things about Wesley confound and frighten me: his boundless obsessive energy (preaching, for example, 40,000 sermons in 50 years without so much as a single workshop in clergy burnout) or the near-despotic authority by which he held the Methodist movement together during his lifetime.

But most of all I love his love for and frustration over the church. I confess to sharing both. And I share also the way they were theologically grounded and expressed.

Wesley believed that there was no New Testament basis whatsoever for a national church, apprehending it a "mere political institution," and yet to his death he clung faithfully to the Church of England, in which he was a priest. From the very first conference of the Methodist movement in 1744, he enjoined his preachers to a like fidelity.

This zeal Wesley offered to a church he regarded as sluggish, apostate, and unregenerate. On certain occasions he said so plainly. As a fellow of Oxford University, he was obliged to preach there at least once every three years, and the university, in its turn, was obliged to listen. During the early days of the movement, these sermons became an opportunity for "revival manifestoes," assailing with prophetic fire the dead and decadent faith of Oxford and the wider church.

Howard Snyder, in his fine book The Radical Wesley, points out how Wesley saw the church fallen early into unfaithfulness. For him the baptism of the Roman Emperor Constantine was a watershed event. Works, the history of primitive faith that Wesley published, concludes with that so-called conversion wherein the early community "began to have a life of ease, but at the same time to lose the Christian spirit." It was the main reason why extraordinary spiritual gifts were no longer practiced. As Snyder quotes, the church had been and remained corrupted by power:

Persecution never did, never could give any lasting wound to genuine Christianity. But the greatest it ever received, the grand blow was struck at the very root of humble, gentle, patient love ... in the fourth Century by Constantine the Great, when he called himself a Christian, and poured in a flood of riches, honours, and power, upon the Christians; more especially upon the Clergy ...

Nevertheless, he loved the church, clung to it, and prayed for its renewal. The revival was precisely that prayer. According to Colin Williams in John Wesley's Theology Today, Wesley's hope was for the Methodist preachers "not to supercede, but to 'provoke to jealousy' the ordinary messengers" of Anglicanism. He set out to stir up God's good trouble.

It was never John Wesley's intention to found a denomination or organize a church. He refused separation and counseled ecclesiastical obedience. The movement, he hoped, would build a new church in the shell of the old. He was pushed to the margin and hung there, on the edge.

The revival preaching campaign, in fact, began and flourished quite literally on the geographic and economic edge of the established church. It was among the poor of Bristol, who had been abandoned by the church, where the revival first took root.

Bristol was a coal mining center, a dirty town fueling the furnaces of the industrial revolution. It was a big port city, a trade center for colonialism—including the traffic in slaves. The poor multiplied, and so did the ale houses. Unrest was afoot: The new class of urban workers who were not quite making it erupted in food riots. Repression came down; the prisons filled up.

When George Whitefield wrote John Wesley on March 23,1739, asking him to come and help preach to the colliers (miners) of Bristol, his request followed by only two months an uprising in the region that had been suppressed by soldiers and jailings of the leadership.

Wesley was afraid to go. His brother, Charles, and many of their London society tried to dissuade him. Together they exercised bibliomancy—a random consultation of Scripture for advice and discernment (a practice which I do not commend)—and turned up ominous verses warning vaguely of martyrdom. They cast lots and prayed together. Then he packed his saddlebags and went.

There may be more here than meets the eye: John Wesley preached the first sermon of Methodist revival prepared to die. Now that's the way to take to the pulpit or to the streets. And that courage (or grace) is, I contend, the very seed of the movement.

Wesley's journal reflects a recurrent, morbid fear of death that began in childhood after a narrow escape from a fire in the Epworth rectory, where he grew up, and the fearsome storms of the journey to America. His lifelong driving urge for the "assurance of faith" was fueled in part by that human terror. However else it prompted the Methodist movement, Wesley's famous heartwarming experience of assurance of forgiveness and salvation at Aldersgate the previous year granted him the freedom to die which put all his efforts at the "pleasure and disposal" of God. That, of course, is the plain meaning of justification.

Wesley was still apprehensive about this open-field preaching business. There was the rough repute of the colliers, and it simply went against his own orderly grain. In the end he took counsel in the Sermon on the Mount ("one pretty remarkable precedent of field-preaching"), climbed a little hill in Kingswood just outside of town, and preached to a gathering crowd of about 3,000. His text? "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor" (Luke 4:18). The campaign was off and running.

Field and street preaching continued to characterize the Methodists. The open-air meetings regularly suffered the accusation of illegality—being a breach of the Conventicle Act, which prohibited separatist religious gatherings. Still it was where the people were. More often than not, Wesley and his preachers were forbidden access to church pulpits.

The crowds grew. It was not uncommon for Wesley's journal to note multitudes of 20,000 or more. These, let it be said, are his own calculations, not official police estimates. Anyway, big crowds.

The preaching continued over the years by those whom Wesley tutored and sanctioned. They lived a mendicant life of empty-handed simplicity right out of Luke 9, relying for hospitality on their fellow Methodists. They certainly knew poverty and their obedience was, quite frankly, to Wesley.

Wesley was an inspired community organizer. (Indeed, the gift of administration is one charismatic gift which today in Methodism is not only revered but often made a fetish.) As quoted in John Wesley: His Life and Theology, by Robert Tuttle, Jr., Wesley was convinced that preaching without organizing was only "begetting children for the murderer":

The devil himself desires nothing more than this, that the people of any place should be half-awakened and then left to themselves to fall asleep again. Therefore I determined, by the grace of God, not to strike one stroke in any place where I cannot follow the blow.

He followed the blow everywhere by organizing base communities of prayer and nurture. These little churches on the edge of the church, these ecclesiola in ecclesia, were the strength and substance of the Methodist movement.

In his own Plain Account of the movement's history, Wesley details how the various forms of community evolved by improvisation and experimentation, by common sense and necessity. Wesley takes great delight in discovering in retrospect that they had stumbled exactly upon the forms of the early church. The societies (a term employed because already in common English religious parlance) were, for example, nothing less than the catechumens convened by the primitive Christians for instruction, exhortation, and prayer. The societies bore no doctrinal requirement for admission—the only condition for members being "a desire to flee from the wrath to come, to be saved from their sins."

As the societies grew, it became necessary to divide them into smaller groups: the classes, the bands, the select societies. These functioned variously as house churches, for the sake of pastoral care, for financial collection, for confession, and for worship.

The bands, for example, were subject to a rigorous and near frightening mutual scrutiny. They demanded a confessional honesty and intimate vulnerability unmatched this side of the Last Day—which they fully anticipated. They were communities, all in all, of eschatology and ethics.

From the beginning to his own end, Wesley required that none of these groupings, large or small, should meet at times that conflicted with the Eucharist of the established church. Such was his commitment to sacrament and unity. Still, whether for confessional prayer or preaching, they always met in a spirit of worship.

In the revival, much of that spirit was set and carried in music and hymnody. As the activists say, when it comes to change, let the powers write the laws, let the people write the songs. By 1739 a hymnbook had already been published and put in the hands of society members. The words offered a concise course in practical Methodist theology. The tunes were often familiar, as they were swiped and converted from popular ale house drinking songs. Brother Charles cranked out the verses hand over fist as a daily discipline—one with his own private prayer.

Wesley preached conversion. He spoke from his own experience. But conversion had consequences and implications which, he was convinced, could be unequivocally spelled out. He had no time for preaching that did not lead promptly from the altar to ethics and practical obedience.

Wesley's message was, in effect, that we know no discipleship without costly discipline. The "General Rules of the United Societies" defined the common discipline of their redeemed life together. It was virtually a lifestyle covenant.

The rule had three parts. The first was to give evidence of salvation by "doing no harm, by avoiding evil of every kind, especially that which is most generally practiced." I don't think it unfair or imprecise to call this nonviolence. Examples were not left to the imagination and are still listed in the Methodist Discipline, which details administrative and ecclesiastical structure. Among them: "buying or selling of spirituous liquors, or drinking them, unless in cases of extreme necessity; the buying or selling of men, women and children with an intention to enslave them; fighting, quarreling, brawling, brother going to law with brother; returning evil for evil; ... the putting on of gold or costly apparel; ... laying up treasure upon the earth."

The movement's discipline thus began by resistance and refusal, the turning from, but it moved toward the positive, the turning to: "By doing good, by being in every kind merciful after their power." The corporal works of mercy and evangelism were commended. Moreover, members were generally to take up their cross daily, expecting to be treated "as the filth and offscouring of the world ... for the Lord's sake."

Thirdly, the rule called for attendance to the ordinances of God: worship, sacraments, Scripture, prayer—the last being the source for all that goes before. All in all, the result is a life of nonviolence and simplicity, the works of mercy, and prayer. No surprise that of Wesley's 52 standard sermons, 13 expound our Lord's Sermon on the Mount.

Little wonder either that he was not well received in monied circles. He has even been thought guilty of hardening in his attitude toward the wealthy. Stanley Ayling writes in his book John Wesley that once in a miffed confrontation, Wesley told some women point blank: "I do not expect that the rich and great should want either to speak to me or hear me, for I speak plain truth—a thing you hear little of, and do not desire to hear."

As the movement grew, Wesley expressed concern for their upward mobility, feeding the ranks of a rising middle class. Albert Outler quotes him in his book John Wesley: "The Methodists grow more and more self-indulgent because they grow rich." Against that trend and in keeping with the "Rules," he preached from the early days a now much quoted and seldom read sermon on the "Uses of Money." Its three points counseled a fusion of moral industriousness, simplicity, and generosity.

Earn all you can. What is most amazing about this economic injunction is that Wesley proceeds immediately to enumerate its limits. For example, we should refuse work "dealing too much with arsenic or equally hurtful minerals, or the breathing of an air tainted with streams of melting lead." The early trade unions could have lifted the page for their organizing manuals. He also warns against employment that hurts someone else, even unseen. In a fiery attack on capitalists who profit from the suffering of others he says:

They murder his Majesty's subjects wholesale, neither do their eyes pity or spare. They drive them to hell like sheep. And what is their gain? Is it not the blood of these men? Who then would envy their large estates and sumptuous palaces? A curse is in the midst of them! The curse of God cleaves to the stones, the timber, the furniture of them ... Blood, blood is there—the foundation, the floor, the walls, the roof are stained with blood!

Not bad copy for a leaflet at the Pentagon or an arms bazaar. A fitting call to examine our labors and where they lead, our paychecks and where they originate.

Save all you can. This is not advice for a bullish lean into the money market. It exhorts us to find our barest needs—and not to let those needs inflate even as our income grows. A list of consumer vanities is laid out, a popular asceticism proclaimed. None of this, I suspect, would be easy to preach to the up-and-coming bourgeoisie. It is a hard word, but gospel. For all this gaining and saving, industriousness and frugality are not for the sake of a bank account security, but for the sake of service.

Give all you can. Everything you earn above your needs is for the household of faith and doing good to all. It's as simple as that. Wesley was a walking illustration of his sermon. The rigor of his life commended itself.

Once in a letter he demonstrated how, by wearing the plainest apparel, making his own fire, fasting, and stretching his meals, he saved almost half his annual income. Again quoting from Tuttle's book on Wesley:

... so that I have nearly twenty pounds to return to God in the poor. Now, if every Christian family, while in health, would thus far deny themselves, would twice a week dine on the cheapest food, drink in general herb-tea, faithfully calculate the money saved thereby, and give it to the poor over and above their usual donations, we should then hear no complaining in our streets but the poor would eat and be satisfied.

When not on the road, Wesley lived at the movement headquarters in a poor section of London. Wesley states in his own Works, "I myself, as well as the other preachers who are in town, diet with the poor, on the same food, at the same table. And we rejoice herein as a comfortable earnest, of our eating bread together in our father's kingdom."

The headquarters, a preaching house that accommodated 1,500 people, was called the Foundry because Wesley had refurbished an abandoned cannon factory that had been disabled by a murderous explosion. (The irony of this conversion apparently escaped him.) Activity there was phenomenal. Meetings of the classes and bands of the United Society took place there, as did the first Annual Conferences. It also housed variously a shelter for widows, a free school and medical clinic for the poor, a clothing closet, a bookroom for the sale of movement literature, and even some cottage industry (carding and spinning cotton).

There were few dull moments at the Foundry. Charles reports that once in John's absence, they were served legal papers for seditious assembly. Occasionally, especially in the beginning, they were invaded by hecklers.

The Methodists often preached in the face of opposition and even violence. Wesley's journal records firsthand his own miraculous escapes from the hands of angry mobs—often by his willingness to take the licks and keep coming gently back with the gospel.

Mobs like these were often stirred behind the scenes by local clergy who felt their parishes invaded by charismatic and uncontrolled enthusiasm. They were often left unchecked by the magistrates and even acted with their tacit civil approval. But the movement never came into direct frontal conflict with the state. It has been suggested that if they had, Wesley would have become far more radical in his political understanding of the gospel.

Here we touch on a few of Wesley's shortcomings and blind spots. John Wesley was a monarchist and a Tory. He justified it from Scripture. He even wrote and circulated a tract ridiculing democracy, which is to say, ironically, that he mistrusted the poor and the common folk as a political force.

Yet by calling and equipping the poor for leadership and organizing them into communities of personal responsibility, the movement laid the foundation for their political involvement and shaped the democratic spirit. Wesley enlivened people's sense of self and dignity and worth. His strong preaching on free will and the universal offer of salvation bore the implication of liberty and equality, a theological presage of democratic thought. But he never quite made the connection.

Wesley actively opposed the revolution being fought with civil disobedience and eventually force of arms in America. At first he had interceded on behalf of the Americans, writing to the Earl of Dartmouth, who was secretary of state for the colonies, and arguing the justice of their cause. But he was later persuaded against them on the tax question—and eventually, it appears, feared the revolution would spread to England!

It is remarkable that it never occurred to him to regard the anti-colonial American nationalists as enemies. Indeed, when the empire fell back defeated, he reached out all the more. The movement was now growing in the States and since the Anglican clergy had either fled with the war or been withdrawn, there was no one to administer sacraments. To no avail Wesley lobbied hard for the English bishops to remedy the situation. Finally in 1784, he undertook the irregular and extraordinary ordination of Thomas Coke as superintendent (in effect a bishop) to ordain pastors in America. The revolution prompted his own act of "ecclesiastical disobedience," and the Methodist movement became a church.

Was the new church faithful to the movement? This is a hard question which begs to be put. One measure which bears confession relates to slavery. Wesley was an abolitionist. Almost from the first he had written the prohibition into the "Rules." By 1774 he was circulating a passionately written pamphlet on slavery that described the suffering in detail and lifted language from the money sermon to warn the traders and owners. J.W. Bready quotes Wesley in his book Wesley and Democracy: "Thy hands, thy bed, thy furniture, thy house, thy lands are at present stained with blood. Whether you are a Christian or not, show yourself a man [sic]; be not more savage than a lion or a bear." Eventually while preaching strong abolition in Bristol, the slave-trading port, he set aside Fridays as a day of fasting and prayer that God would break the chains of slavery.

That intention made its way into the new church. The founding conference in America called for expulsion of any member engaging in slave trade. But little by little, as the bulk of the Methodist membership shifted southward, this commitment fell to the tempting compromise of mainline convenience. As noted in The Spirituals and the Blues, by James Cone, a committee on slavery gave the following report to the General Conference in 1816:

The committee to whom was referred the business of slavery beg leave to report, that they have taken the subject into serious consideration, and, after mature deliberation, they are of the opinion that under the present existing circumstances in relation to slavery, little can be done to abolish a practice so contrary to the principles of moral justice. They are sorry to say that the evil appears past remedy; and they are led to deplore the destructive consequences which have already accrued, and are likely to result therefrom.

The flame burned pretty low though not entirely out. From Methodist ranks came a few of the young abolitionist revival preachers of the 19th century. Wesley, no doubt, smiled down.

In addition to its various notorious political implications, the year 1984 marks the bicentennial of American Methodism. That commemoration should occasion for us both celebration and repentance. What if it also prompted a rediscovery of conversion preaching with the cost made clear? What if gospel communities and lifestyle disciplines caught like wildfire and spread? What if a revival of faith emerged in, through, and on the edge of the established church? These would be nothing less than answers to John Wesley's lifelong prayer.

Bill Kellermann was a Methodist pastor in Detroit, Michigan when this article appeared. He is a Sojourners contributing editor.