Holiness in a World of Fractures: Wesleyan Sanctification, Agrarian Imagination, and Communal Discernment
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The church’s crisis of formation is not simply a crisis of discipleship programs. It is a crisis of imagination—a failure to see holiness as the Spirit‑empowered way of being human in the world God loves. Wesleyan theology has always insisted that sanctification is not an escape from creation but the healing of creaturely life. Yet in our age of mobility, abstraction, and fragmentation, that vision has thinned. We have inherited a holiness too often reduced to moral restraint or private piety.
To recover a robust Wesleyan vision of sanctification, we need two unlikely conversation partners: Wendell Berry, whose agrarian imagination reclaims the goodness and limits of creaturely life, and the practice of communal discernment, which restores the church as the Spirit‑formed community of holy love.
Together, they help us see holiness not as withdrawal but as membership, not as moralism but as creational fidelity, not as individual striving but as shared discernment in the Spirit. We must learn or relearn how to share discernment of God’s Spirit with and among each other. There is a rhythm to life with God in the world, as God’s Image-bearers, that can only be fully experienced and taught as a communal practice. This is one place (of many) where the Western church can learn from their global sisters and brothers.
We must learn the humility to listen and to change. Change is always held in tension with the historic continuity of God’s self-giving revelation. As the church, the body of Christ at work in the world, we must learn to live in the tension between continuity and change. We can do this in community when we learn epistemic humility and generative practice. Once we know what we don’t know, we are more likely to be the people God has called us to be.
This is Wesleyan holiness for a fractured church.
Holiness as the Healing of Creaturely Life
Wesley’s theology of holiness is often misunderstood as moral rigor or spiritual intensity. But at its core, Wesleyan sanctification is the restoration of the imago Dei—the healing of human life so that we can love God and neighbor with our whole selves. Holiness is not a ladder out of the world; it is the Spirit’s work of making us fully human within it.
Three Wesleyan convictions matter here:
Holiness is relational: love of God and neighbor is the form of sanctified life.
Holiness is communal: Christians grow in grace through shared practices, not solitary striving.
Holiness is creational: grace does not bypass creation; it heals it.
Wesley’s vision is profoundly embodied. It assumes that the Spirit forms us through practices, relationships, and places. But modern Christianity has often severed holiness from the world in which it is meant to be lived. This is where Berry’s agrarian imagination becomes a theological corrective.
Agrarian Imagination: Recovering the Conditions of Holiness
Berry’s work is not a holiness treatise, yet it exposes the cultural conditions that make holiness difficult. His agrarian imagination reveals how modern life deforms us: placelessness, speed, disembodiment, and the illusion of autonomy. These are not merely cultural problems; they are spiritual ones.
Berry helps Wesleyans remember what sanctification requires:
Place: Holiness grows in fidelity to actual places, not generic spaces.
Limits: Creaturely boundaries are gifts, not obstacles.
Membership: We belong to communities, land, and histories.
Work: Formation happens through embodied practices, not disembodied spirituality.
Attention: Holiness requires the slow, patient noticing of the world God made.
Berry does not replace Wesley; he grounds Wesley. He gives sanctification a location. He reminds us that holiness is not an abstraction but a way of inhabiting creation with love, humility, and fidelity.
Holiness is not merely what God does in us; it is what God does with us in the places we actually live.
Communal Discernment: The Church as a Community of Holy Love
If Berry gives holiness a place, communal discernment gives holiness a people.
Wesley knew that Christians cannot grow in grace alone. Class meetings, bands, and societies were not optional; they were the ecclesial ecology of sanctification. Holiness is always communal, because the Spirit forms us through shared practices of listening, confession, encouragement, and accountability.
Communal discernment is the Wesleyan practice that restores this ecology.
It teaches the church to:
Listen together for the Spirit’s leading
Name truthfully the fractures in our lives and communities
Discern faithfully how to respond
Act courageously in obedience
Bear witness to God’s healing work
In communal discernment, holiness becomes visible. It becomes shared. It becomes embodied in the life of a community learning to love God and neighbor together.
This is not group therapy. It is not strategic planning. It is the Spirit forming a people whose life anticipates the Kingdom.
A Wesleyan Synthesis for a Fragmented Church
When Wesleyan holiness, agrarian imagination, and communal discernment are brought together, a compelling vision emerges—one capable of confronting the fractures of our age.
1. Holiness as Membership
Wesley teaches us that holiness is love. Berry teaches us that love requires belonging.
Together, they reveal sanctification as faithful membership in the places and communities God has given us.
2. Holiness as Creaturely Fidelity
Wesley affirms the goodness of creation. Berry insists we must live within its limits.
Holiness becomes creaturely fidelity—the Spirit’s healing of our relationship to land, labor, and life.
3. Holiness as Shared Discernment
Wesley forms Christians through communal practices. Communal discernment restores those practices for today.
Holiness becomes shared listening, shared obedience, and shared witness.
4. Holiness as Hopeful Embodiment
Wesley’s sanctification is eschatological. Berry’s imagination is earthy.
Together, they yield a holiness that is hopeful without triumphalism, embodied without idolatry, and local without parochialism.
This is holiness that can heal a fragmented church.
The Way Forward
If the church is to recover spiritual formation in our time, it must reclaim holiness as the Spirit’s work of restoring us to creational membership, communal discernment, and Kingdom hope. Wesleyan theology gives us the grammar; Berry gives us the imagination; communal discernment gives us the practice.
Holiness is not escape. Holiness is not abstraction. Holiness is not individual achievement.
Holiness is the Spirit teaching us how to be human again—together, in place, for the sake of God’s new creation.
Kelli Summers Sorg is a PhD candidate in Intercultural Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary, where her research explores Image-Bearing, communal discernment, and the theology of place in spiritual formation. She serves as Spiritual Director in Residence at Asbury and writes on ecclesial renewal, agrarian imagination, and the recovery of embodied Christian practices.