I Am No Longer My Own But Thine: Wesley’s Covenant Prayer
Portrait of John Wesley by John Greenwood, after Nathaniel Hone, 1770. (Source: WikiCommons)
John Wesley is probably best known for his journal and sermons while his brother, Charles, for his hymns. But one prayer of John Wesley’s has become a well-beloved classic, particularly used around the turn of the new year: his Covenant Prayer. In contemporary American Methodist practice, this prayer is associated with a watch night service, a vigil, or some form of it. The service can be used throughout the year but is often associated with New Year’s Eve or the Sunday closest to it, a practice that can be traced to the London society itself. The prayer, found often in a Covenant Service, has also become a social media favorite.
Contemporary services for a Covenant Service can be found in the recently published My Great Redeemer’s Praise (2022), but also in the Methodist Church in Britain’s Methodist Service Book (1999) in which it is skillfully combined with a Eucharistic service, and also in the United Methodist Book of Worship (1992) among other places. I applaud all of these efforts to bring the riches of the tradition into practice, but the historian and antiquarian in me loves the original language best. No matter the words used, I still hear it in the eighteenth-century language, “I am no longer my own, but thine…”
It’s popularly thought that the watch night service and the covenant prayer are derivative of Moravian influence, but it’s more complicated than that. The covenant prayer itself is actually Puritan. Wesley owed much to the Moravians, but they often ignited in him dormant undercurrents from the English tradition itself. He was never a German divine, after all. The Moravians had a way of kindling this sort of response wherever they went, though, and that is part of their genius.
The Puritan influence on Wesley shouldn't come as a surprise, although the average person today views the Puritans through an unfortunate and dare I say puritanical lens. In reality, the Puritans of the Church of England – and they were a part of it, not separate – were Reformed Protestants who wanted to see the Church of England move further away from what they believed to be medieval Catholic practice and theology. They were opposed to bishops, the Book of Common Prayer, and high church theology with its emphasis on sacramental efficacy. Thankfully Wesley, and the Church of England itself, rejected this part of the Puritan agenda. But there was much more to Puritanism. They had a beautiful devotional tradition. And within that devotional tradition the concept of covenant is paramount.
The theme of covenant is biblical, of course. It can be seen clearly in the Old Testament such as when God makes a covenant with Abraham and ultimately with the people of Israel. In the New Testament, it is Christ who fulfills this covenant in his life, death, and resurrection, something only the God-Man can do. Subsequently, the concept of covenant runs throughout Christian tradition. We can easily think of the poetic text attributed to St. Patrick that begins “I bind unto myself today the strong name of the Trinity, by invocation of the same, the Three in One, and One in Three.” But the concept of covenant is also one of the key emphases of Reformed Christianity with its emphasis on the sovereignty of God and his covenant with the elect. That emphasis entered into the culture of Puritanism as the Puritans, or the godly as they were often called, sought to forge a Reformed future for English Christianity.
In Puritan enclaves within England, the word covenant took on its own nuances, as small groups of the godly would enter into covenant together to work for the further reformation of their own lives and that of the English church. They considered this covenant as binding as the covenant of marriage. Covenant was not only a theological theme for them but it was congruent with their practices, even explicitly. So the appearance of a covenant prayer shouldn’t surprise anyone who understands the various streams of English Christianity that influenced Wesley, even as his overarching vision was that of an eighteenth-century high churchman caught up in the sweep of the Evangelical Revival.
But let’s be careful here, I am not saying that Wesley was trying to push a Reformed agenda. He was, in fact, sharing with the Wesleyan movement something that he learned from his family. They introduced him to the work of Richard Alleine and his son Joseph, both of them great Puritan divines of the early 17th century. In fact, Wesley’s paternal grandfather knew Joseph and worked with him. John Wesley re-published some of the work of Richard Alleine – shorn of its predestinarian elements – but was inspired by the work of Alleine to craft a covenant service for the Methodist people. The covenant prayer itself is Wesley’s 1755 adaptation of Alleine’s work.
But Alleine’s influence is greater than the prayer itself. It can be seen throughout the various services that emerge. In his Instructions about Heart-Work and a Companion for Prayer he provided directions for praying – note that Puritans were not always keen on written liturgies and so he provides not a text but a pattern – that undergirds the covenant prayer and the service that we now have. Alleine wrote beautifully about prayer, reflecting on prayer as one who had been immersed in it. He said, “fear not, you shall be heard if you will hear; hear him that speaks to you from heaven, and your cry shall enter into heaven.” He also wrote, “Come to pray with an actual and great expectation of obtaining help and grace from God.” This beauty and this sort of expectancy are evident throughout the covenant service.
The idea of a watch night service, or vigil, came to Wesley’s mind in 1742 after he heard of “several persons in Kingswood [who] met together at the school and…spent the greater part of the night in prayer and praise and thanksgiving.” Inspired by this, he held a service, likely on March 12 of that year when he:
designed to watch with them [i.e., those in Kingswood] on the Friday nearest the full moon, that we might have light thither and back again. I gave public notice of this the Sunday before, and withal, that I intended to preach; desiring they and they only would meet me there who could do it without prejudice to their business or families. On Friday [an] abundance of people came. I began preaching between eight and nine; and we continued till a little beyond the noon of night, singing, praying, and praising God (Works, 9:264).
At this point, it is very unlikely that the service in question had a set liturgy as will be seen in later decades. And there is no indication that the service included elements of the covenant prayer itself, something that would develop over time. The watch night was a vigil. But use of the watch night spreads from this point on, held in the emerging centers of early Methodism: London, Bristol, and Newcastle.
The first London watch night service that Wesley mentions in his journal (Works, 19:258-59) was held just a few weeks later on April 9 that same year and already we can see that patterns for the service have emerged, including holding it nearest a full moon so that people can see their way home and also “in singing the hymn with which we commonly conclude:
Hearken to the solemn voice!
The awful, midnight cry!
Waiting souls, rejoice, rejoice,
And feel the Bridegroom nigh.”
The idea of a vigil service may be unique to modern evangelicals but it’s an historic practice within the universal Church. The Eastern Orthodox probably do it best today with their Saturday vigils that can last well into the early hours of the morning, but the Anglican and Roman Catholic practice of Eucharistic vigil over the night of Good Friday and the liturgy of Easter Vigil itself represent this historic pattern. Wesley was criticized for keeping people out into the night with his “midnight assemblies,” implying they were up to no good. His retort is classic: “Sir, did you never see the word ‘vigil’ in your Common Prayer Book? Do you know what it means?” (Works, 9:305).
But these two services, a vigil and a covenant, develop within the expanding Wesleyan movement found in the Church of England. In the later 1740s, prototypes of the covenant service began to emerge. In 1747, Wesley mentions addressing the London society where he “strongly urged the wholly giving up ourselves to God and renewing in every point our covenant that the Lord should be our God” (Works, 20:203). And with the emergence we not only see the covenant prayer, but hymns for the occasion. One of the hallmarks of early Methodism is the hymns used not simply for the liturgical seasons of the larger church but hymns for specifically Methodist practices. A hymn for the covenant service can be found in the 1780 Collection of Hymns for Use of the People Called Methodists that includes the first stanza:
Come, let us use the grace divine,
And all, with one accord,
In a perpetual covenant join
Ourselves to Christ the Lord (Works, 7:710).
It is this hymn that the Methodists sang on July 12, 1778 (Works, 23:99). Wesley records the event in his journal:
After I had several times explained the nature of it, we solemnly renewed our covenant with God. It was a time never to be forgotten; God poured down upon the assembly the Spirit of grace and supplication, especially in singing that verse of the concluding hymn:
To us the covenant-blood apply,
Which takes our sins away;
And register our names on high,
And keep us to that day.
In this passage, Wesley provides us with the answer as to why this prayer and these liturgies have become so very dear to the Wesleyan people: we too want to see God pour down his grace, to change us, to change our families, our society, our world, and to make us whole. That yearning and the expectation that God will act are hallmarks of Methodism. And over the centuries this prayer and these services have been a means of grace in which God has acted. The words are beautiful, even poetic. But ultimately it's the dynamic of grace that we yearn to see. And with that expectation and that hope, let us boldly approach the eternal throne as so many who have gone before us:
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 or laid aside 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 glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
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.
Ryan N. Danker is Director of the John Wesley Institute, Washington, DC, publisher of Good News Magazine, and assistant lead editor of Firebrand.