An Essential Office for Wesleyan Revival: The Class Leader (Part 2)
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Bringing back Wesleyan discipleship structures to our local congregations is not controversial, but how to do it and do it well is another matter. Class meetings do not provide an 18th-century curriculum for Bible study, but instead work to build an intentional community focused on holiness. Similarly, the class leader is not just a warm body, but someone with gifts for leadership and a commitment to their own sanctification and the sanctification of others.
At the same time, some of the historical practices might not be prudent for our day. For example, John Wesley made class meetings a requirement for all Methodists, and at one point did not allow individuals to participate in a society gathering if they did not have proof of their class meeting attendance. I am not sure turning people away from Sunday morning worship is sensible. I also would not recommend the dismissal of Christian education in Sunday School and other catechism structures. I believe clergy have a central role to play in the development of their local members. How we retrieve parts of our heritage matters, and the class leader requires some focused contextualization.
For the past ten years of ministry, I have been involved in class meetings and have helped to start them within local congregations. I have seen groups sprout with life and then wither in the busyness of worldly influences. I have seen meetings become evangelistic hubs to multiply groups like a church planting network. Groups have formed in a nursing home with people from all different types of faith backgrounds, and with teachers at a middle school who met before the school bell rang. Quickly, though, I realized much of the success of these classes depended on the leader. If the leader was committed to their own pursuit of holiness, desired to serve others in this pursuit, was committed to prayer, held a consistent presence in the life of individuals, and began to learn the skills of a class leader, then almost always these classes thrived and grew spiritually and numerically. Here I will make the case for modern expectations and training of a class leader.
Leading Classes in Today’s Church
The first part of this essay demonstrated that the historical class leaders had a high responsibility to officiate a means of grace for 10-12 individuals in their care. This responsibility contained three aspects that I believe are important: an adequate Wesleyan theology, spiritual care in the meeting, and leadership skills.
A class leader for today’s church must have a working Wesleyan theology of salvation. What made the historical class meeting successful—even with explosive growth—was how closely Wesleyan soteriology was tied to ecclesiology and mission. Undergirding every discipleship structure and practice of the early movement were Wesley’s convictions concerning grace and salvation.
God’s free gift of salvation through faith in justification is the launching point into a new life in Christ. Sanctification is the doctrine focusing on this work of God’s love to bring about holiness in the life of the justified believer. This part of the journey is about the believer appropriating the work of grace throughout their life through repentance, faith, and responsibility. Christian perfection further presses this truth to its logical conclusion by boldly claiming that sin need not be a reality in the life of a mature believer. The class meeting takes shape from Wesley’s conviction that God’s love is not done saving persons in justification and his belief that persons have a role to play.
We cannot afford to be vague anymore about discipleship. It is imperative that we are raising up leaders in our church with a working understanding of the Wesleyan faith. Our leaders should have received at minimum a confirmation-type catechism, or what we reproduce will only be littered with a mixed bag of practices and beliefs. Class leaders must have a knowledge of this theology but also must be experiencing it in their own lives.
Secondly, the class leader will need to provide a specific kind of spiritual care in the meeting. This person will need to model dependence on the Spirit and awareness that God is at work in the life of every person, both within the meeting itself and beyond. The leader also must be able to articulate what people are experiencing. This is no small task. The meeting is based around a simple question, “How is it with your soul?” or “How is your life in God?” Each individual has the opportunity to testify to how their life is enfolded into God this week. You can imagine with 12 responses they will range from shallow to deep, from vague to poignant, from deeply faithful to slightly heretical, and the leader will need to interact with all responses. Joseph Nightingale from Portraiture of Methodism provides a helpful summation of testifying and helping others to do the same:
These meetings are generally holden at private houses, and commence at eight in the evening. The leader having opened the service by singing and prayer, all the members sit down, and he then relates to them his own experience during the preceding week. His joys, and his sorrows; his hopes and his fears; his conflicts with the world, the flesh, and the devil; his fightings without and his fears within; his dread of hell, or his hope of heaven; his pious longing and secret prayers for the prosperity of the church at large, and for those his brothers and sisters in class particular. This experience is generally concluded with some such language as the following: --“After all, my dear brethren, I still find a determination in my own soul to press forward for the mark of the prize of my high calling of God in Christ Jesus.
After some such harangue as this, the leader proceeds to inquire into the state of every soul present; saying, “Well sister, or well brother, how do you find the state of your soul this evening?” The member then proceeds, without rising, to unbosom his or her mind to the leader; not, as has often been said, by particular confession, but by a general recapitulation of what has passed in the mind during the week. Such advice, correction, reproof, and consolation, is then given, as the state of the case may require; so the leader passes on to the next, and the next, until everyone has received a portion of meat in due season.
A leader for today will need to teach the group how to listen to one another and to listen for God’s guidance. We are not formed for this. We are conditioned to give advice and sympathize instead—comparing one person’s loss of a loved one to our experience of a similar loss, for example. Instead, a leader will do well to help a group learn to ask God-guided questions of one who shares so that the sharer will be invited deeper into consideration of how God is working in his or her life. The class leader will need to effectively describe what people may be experiencing or help them reflect more deeply, like spiritual sherpas guiding the journey. If this is done well, the group will soon share this role.
Finally, the class leader needs to be a leader. I know this is gimmicky, but unfortunately it must be said. We have struggled to identify leaders and put them in the right places. Leadership today is often seen as serving on the Board of Trustees or Finance Committee rather than making disciples. Furthermore, we often lower the bar so we might find a leader, and then we are disappointed when we get mixed results. If discipleship is the most important thing, then let’s put our best leaders in these positions.
In today’s culture, Christian accountability is not welcomed and we struggle to extend it in compelling ways. A focus on holiness in a transformational group flies in the face of expressive individualism and our self-therapeutic infatuations. Proper leadership will reintroduce us to the plague of sin both individually and corporately. Considering all this will require a leader who inspires this journey in others. The leader must learn accountability practices that are persuasive and effective. Humility is of deep importance while also leading with moral maturity and intentionality. When it comes to leading people towards holiness and holding them accountable to this pursuit, we must stop sacrificing integrity for charisma.
I have used a model of servant leadership to identify potential leaders and to train them. Servant leadership is defined as “a multidimensional leadership theory that starts with a desire to serve, followed by an intent to lead and develop others, to ultimately achieve a higher purpose objective to the benefit of individuals, organizations, and societies” (Coetzer, Bussin, Geldenhuys, The Functions of a Servant Leader, 2017). Larry C. Spears has identified the following characteristics for servant leadership (Practicing Servant-Leadership, 2004):
Listening
Empathy
Healing
Awareness
Persuasion
Conceptualization
Foresight
Stewardship
Commitment to growth of people
Building community
These characteristics can help to identify potential leaders, and also teaching leaders about these characteristics can assist in exploring skills that leaders already possess, helping them to lead from their gifts. Putting these layers together to train class leaders ensures a foundation for transformational communities in our churches.
Training Class Leaders
The best training for class leaders in the Wesleyan movement was the class meeting. Leaders were trained and identified while being discipled within the class-meeting structure. Today, however, we are starting from scratch in our churches and need to find a way to train these leaders as we go. I propose training with three layers to accomplish what is needed in a class leader: a class meeting of potential leaders, theological catechism, and training in servant leadership. I will address these briefly here.
The first move is to gather potential leaders and invite them to participate in a ten-week experience of the class meeting. Kevin Watson’s The Class Meeting is the perfect guide for this journey. As you go through this book, model for them the qualities of a class leader. Pray for them regularly, check in outside of regular group meetings, invest in their spiritual growth, and lead the weekly meeting by example. Show them what it looks like to ask pointed questions, to pray for someone in crisis, and to testify to what God is doing in their life. These are your twelve disciples preparing to be commissioned into the same work.
Theological catechism occurs organically throughout the whole experience, but I recommend an explicit exploration of Wesleyan theology. During these 10 weeks, pause from the book for theological training. These leaders need an adequate working theology of Wesleyan soteriology, but you do not need to take them to seminary. I suggest a catechism like The Absolute Basics of the Wesleyan Way by Phil Tallon and Justus Hunter. Our disciple-making leaders need to be convinced of the reality of sin and a conviction that sin is not all-powerful in our life. This would be beneficial for all in our churches, but starting with the leaders is imperative.
Finally, spend at least one gathering during the ten weeks discussing servant leadership. Describe the characteristics of a servant leader, and then invite group members to consider which characteristics they possess. This provides the opportunity for you and the whole class to affirm the qualities of leadership they see in one another. It is during this segment that I had participants discern that they actually had a long way to go to develop their leadership skills; yet some were surprised that many others already see them as leaders.
During the ten-week journey continually ask the participants to pray about one of three opportunities:
Leading a class meeting
Helping a leader start a new class meeting
Finding ways to lead in other capacities in the church (Sunday school, mission, etc.)
This work requires patience and focused commitment over time. Resist the urge to launch 100 groups (or 3 groups) with untrained leaders, lest this be a short-lived fad. With each season of this type of training, I saw at least one new class meeting develop, but maybe the widest impact was the commissioning of leaders throughout the church to disciple differently in their spheres of influence.
Much uncertainty exists regarding what the next Methodism will look like, and many are speculating that our heritage will speak volumes if we are to experience revival again. I believe our future depends on many things like doctrinal commitment, institutional integrity, sacramental theology, mission and evangelism, and dependence on the Holy Spirit. Wrapped up in all of this is how we equip the saints for the ministry. Our Wesleyan story would not exist without the men and women who led classes of people toward holiness. The class meeting, specifically the leader, held together the connecting pieces of theology, mission, and evangelism. If the class meeting is a means of grace worth retrieving, then we must start with the officiant of this means of grace, the class leader.
John Wayne McMann is an Elder in the Texas Annual Conference and a church planter in Willis, Texas.