Are United Methodists Reaping What John Wesley Sowed?
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A group in my United Methodist annual conference called me in the spring of 2019 to verify a historical claim they were making in a petition to the conference. “Are we correct in saying that John Wesley was willing to violate his Church’s rules for missional reasons?”
“Yes,” I responded. In fact, I was in the process of documenting some of John Wesley’s violations of church order. They seemed almost thrilled by this. “Hooray! We’re United Methodists! We can violate solemn promises we have made by claiming ‘missional’ reasons!” It sent me into a deep funk: Christ, have mercy on us! We’re United Methodists. We violate solemn promises we have made claiming ‘missional’ reasons.
Are United Methodists reaping what John Wesley sowed when he violated the Prayer Book, the canons (church laws), and the Articles of Religion of his church?
Laity make solemn promises when they join United Methodist congregations. United Methodist deacons and elders, when they are ordained, make two sets of solemn promises in the presence of witnesses: one set in front of the annual conference, and another set in the ordination service itself. From the ordination service, here’s one question asking for a promise:
Will you be loyal to The United Methodist Church, accepting its order, liturgy, doctrine, and discipline, defending it against all doctrines contrary to God’s Holy Word, and committing yourself to be accountable with those serving with you, and to the bishop and those who are appointed to supervise your ministry? (Services for the Ordering of Ministry in The United Methodist Church adopted by the 2004 General Conference, p. 22.)
United Methodists seem to have become equal-opportunity offenders of the Discipline and liturgies in recent decades. Liberal United Methodists may be inclined to violate that part of our church order that has to do with the ordinations and marriages of gay and lesbian people. “Traditionalist” United Methodists can make the pledge in the ordination service and on the next Sunday lead a service that for all the world looks like the Vineyard liturgy or the local Baptist liturgy and bears scant resemblance to the liturgy of The United Methodist Church they have vowed to keep and that our 22nd Article of Religion reinforces. The argument is offered, maybe on all sides, that no one really keeps the Discipline in its fullness, and that somehow justifies our deciding for ourselves which promises we prefer to keep and which promises we prefer to violate. For ‘missional’ reasons, of course. That’s a problem.
Am I being too tough on John Wesley? If you think his violations were superfluous, here are some specifics. First, what promises did he make when he was ordained as a priest at Christ Church Cathedral on September 22, 1728, by the Bishop of Oxford, John Potter? The solemn oaths required of clergy, according to the canons of the Church of England (1603-1604), specified:
an oath of allegiance to the reigning monarch as the head of the Church of England,
an oath promising to use the liturgy of the Church of England (the Book of Common Prayer), and
an oath affirming the orthodoxy of the 39 Articles of Religion (Church of England canons 36-37, in Bray, ed., The Anglican Canons 1529-1947, 318-323).
Moreover, the service for the ordination of priests in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer required candidates to respond positively to a series of questions including the following: “Will you reverently obey your Ordinary [i.e. bishop], and other chief Ministers, unto whom is committed the charge and government over you; following with a glad mind and will their godly admonitions, and submitting your selves to their godly judgments?” (Book of Common Prayer 1662, in Cummings, ed., The Book of Common Prayer, 638.)
Did John Wesley violate these promises?
He preached within the bounds of dioceses to whose bishop he was not responsible, and within parishes in which other priests had been installed as spiritual leaders and in which he had not been licensed to preach by the bishop of the diocese, violating the canons of the Church of England governing preaching within parishes (Church of England canons 46-54, in Bray, ed., The Anglican Canons 1529-1947, 334-343).
He preached in locations (and encouraged others to preach in locations) not sanctioned as Anglican churches or chapels or not sanctioned by the terms of the Act of Toleration (1689) governing Dissenting places of worship, and he presided at the Lord’s Supper in locations not sanctioned for Anglican worship and that did not meet the canonical and Prayer Book exceptions for administering the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper to the sick and dying (Church of England canon 71, in Bray, ed., The Anglican Canons 1529-1947, 362-363).
He appointed lay preachers, and he himself gave them “license” or permission to preach, violating Anglican Article of Religion 23: “It is not lawful for any man to take upon him the office of public preaching or ministering the sacraments in the congregation, before he be lawfully called, and sent to execute the same. And those we ought to judge lawfully called and sent, which be chosen and called to this work by men who have public authority given unto them in the congregation to call and send ministers into the Lord’s vineyard” (Twenty-third Article of Religion of the Church of England, in Hotchkiss and Pelikan, eds., Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, 2:534).
He ordained clergy and consecrated one clergyman as a “superintendent” with the authority to ordain other clergy, violating the Canons of the Church of England as well as the rubrics of the Prayer Book that provided that ordinations of clergy must be performed by a bishop and that consecrations of bishops must be performed by at least three other bishops (Canons 31-37, in Bray, ed., The Anglican Canons 1529-1547, 308-323; 1662 Book of Common Prayer, in Cummings, ed., The Book of Common Prayer, 623-651; Church of England canon 8, in Bray, ed., The Anglican Canons 1529-1947, 274-277).
He altered the Articles of Religion in several ways: perhaps most significant is the fact that he removed the Article on the Three Creeds and, further, removed the Nicene Creed from the service for the Lord’s Supper in The Sunday Service of the Methodists in North America, leaving Methodists following this liturgical pattern without a formal affirmation of the Nicene Creed. (See the parallel tables supplied by Nolan B. Harmon in “Articles of Religion in American Methodism”; in Encyclopedia of World Methodism, 1:146-157. On Wesley’s revision of the Prayer Book, see James F. White, ed., John Wesley’s Sunday Service of the Methodists in North America in Quarterly Review, 1984, 9-37.)
John Wesley could claim that he was not obliged to follow the Canons of the Church of England, questioning whether the canons were in fact legally established, since he maintained that the Convocation of the Church of England had never formally authorized them (Wesley, Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion, ¶ 82, in Cragg, ed., Appeals, 11:80). But Church Courts and other church authorities in Wesley’s time consistently appealed to the Canons, the equivalent of the Book of Discipline in The United Methodist Church. Can you imagine what would happen if any elder of The United Methodist Church were to undertake to ordain other clergy on their own, apart from the Disciplinary ordination process and apart from their annual conference and their bishop?
Methodists in the past have accepted at face value John Wesley’s missional justifications for his “irregular actions.” (That’s a euphemism for violations of church order.) But we have scarcely faced up to the extent of his violations, the fact that he violated promises made by these actions, and the ways in which Methodists could appeal to his actions to justify their own irregular (shall we say?) actions.
I’m not willing to lay the blame for the present crisis of The United Methodist Church entirely at John Wesley’s feet. But he left us a problematic legacy of casting aside promises he had made for what he perceived to be a greater mission. Division appears almost certain now. Is there any way the United Methodist Church’s ecclesial offspring could emerge with a stronger capacity to expect each other to keep the solemn promises we make in the presence of witnesses? Christ, have mercy on us.
Ted A. Campbell is the Albert C. Outler Professor of Wesley Studies at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University.