A Shared Heritage: Rediscovering Methodist-Baptist Connections

A St. Gaudens statue The Puritan from Wikimedia

In the 21st century, the Puritans are all but extinct. Yet they live on only through their famous works, such as Pilgrim's Progress and Precious Remedies Against Satan's Devices. In the 17th and 18th centuries, they constituted a movement within the Church of England that came into being as a reaction against spiritual stagnation. Because they wanted to remove all barriers to encountering Jesus, they sought to purify the church of all its pomp and circumstance. To varying levels of success, they created a church environment that was bare and simplistic. While experts debate the effectiveness of their methods, their desire was pure. They believed all that was required to encounter the living God was the Bible presented to the congregants. Nevertheless, while they took Scripture and its reception seriously, they did not use it as an excuse to avoid other kinds of education. Puritan societies became some of the most literate populations in history.

While there are some similarities, we Methodists are not Puritans. The Puritans were Calvinists; we are not. The Puritans worshiped without instruments, while we embrace instruments. The Puritans advocated a congregationalist form of polity. We have always had connectional polity. Finally, Puritans are extinct. Puritans were aggressive in their approach during a time of social and political upheaval that saw them persecuted into extinction. The last generation of Puritans saw the tide changing and fell in line with what the Church of England dictated.

One of those last Puritans was a man by the name of Samuel Wesley, who would as an adult leave the movement. His wife, Susanna, was the daughter of a prominent Puritan minister, Samuel Annesley, though she aligned with the Church of England at the age of nineteen. While both parents were committed to the Church of England, Puritanism left its mark upon them, particularly upon Susanna. As their son John matured and began his ministry, he reacted like the Puritans did to the spiritual stagnation he saw around him. Then, like the Puritans, he sought not to leave the Church of England but to begin a renewal movement inside the Church of England. As the theology of the early Methodists began to be marked by Christian Perfection, the connection to the Puritans began to reveal itself.

More common than systematic theologies among Puritans were prayer books, devotionals, and hymnals. That does not mean they were any less theological. One of the popular Puritan devotionals, written by Thomas Watson, was called The Godly Man's Picture. Watson and many of his Puritan contemporaries were concerned with the doctrine of the mortification of sin, according to which Christians must put to death (mortify) any lingering internal sinful desire that might lead one into sin. It was a call to a pure life and a godly life. Watson declared of a godly person that “heaven is in him before he is in heaven!” He would argue that “he sanctifies his will, biasing it to good, so that now it shall be as delightful to serve God as before it was to sin against him.” It cannot be overstated how central the mortification of sin was to Puritan theology. Their desire to purify the Church of England was punctuated by mortifying the sins of the Church of England in a consistent and often aggressive manner. 

While the mortification of sin operates within a Calvinistic framework, it contributed to Wesley's emphasis upon Christian perfection. Wesley spent decades preaching the gospel, and a central concern of his preaching was Christian perfection. He was convicted that following Jesus meant loving God and loving neighbor perfectly. Wesley described a perfected person as someone who “all the commandments of God he accordingly keeps, and that with all his might. For his obedience is in proportion to His love, the source from whence it flows” (A Plain Account of Christian Perfection). As a Christian embodies this kind of love, it purifies the sin in the person's heart. That sounds suspiciously like Watson's “heaven is in him before he is in heaven.” It is also reminiscent of Jesus commanding, “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48). Neither Watson, Wesley, nor Scripture would ever suggest we can come to a place where we never sin. Yet all three argue that in surrendering ourselves to the Lord every day, we are being formed more and more into the image of Christ. That image is the perfect love of God and the perfect love of neighbor. For more on Christian perfection, see John Wesley's A Plain Account of Christian Perfection.

But where is the connection point? How does that help the lead pastor relate to his or her congregation and community? How does that help give a youth pastor like me a framework for partnering with other youth pastors? Can such an approach advance work across denominational lines? In the past the standards for ecumenical relationships among mainline Protestants have been quite low. No real doctrinal commitments were necessary. Ecumenism of the lowest common denominator, however, is in part responsible for the Methodist malaise today. We need something more robust because Methodists are not the only ones to descend from the Puritans. We share this heritage with Baptists, among other traditions.

Most historians agree that the earliest Baptists originated in the Church of England as contemporaries to the Puritans. However, unlike the Puritans and Methodists, some Baptists eagerly split with the Church of England. A group of “General Baptists” (in distinction from “Particular Baptists”) went to Germany and Holland for a time before settling back in England and planting the first Baptist church in the early 1610s. Like the early Methodists, the Baptists emphasized the doctrine of mortification of sin as a framework to discuss sanctification. Many Baptists, however, maintained a commitment to Calvinism that did not ultimately take root in Methodism. 

Let us fast forward to today. We exist in a world where Methodists and Baptists are most often divided by baptismal practices, soteriology, and polity, to name a few of the differences. In many communities in the United States, both traditions have a significant presence. The two will often compete for the attention of the community. While we try to be ecumenical, our differences often complicate our attempts. But what if we realized we shared a heritage through our Puritan ancestors? We are called to spread the perfecting and mortifying love of Jesus to all four corners of the earth. Perhaps John Wesley's vision in his sermon “The General Spread of The Gospel” of a thoroughly discipled world could become a greater reality if Methodists and Baptists could understand their shared heritage and, therefore, their connection. 

Bradley Edwards is the Youth Pastor at Christ Church Birmingham and an ordained Elder in the North Alabama Conference of the Global Methodist Church.