Resurrecting Wesleyan Evangelism: The Necessity of Field Preaching Today
Statistics and anecdotal evidence suggest we are moving into a post-Christian era in North America. If this is the case, it is imperative that the church recapture a sense of missionary calling and method. There is no magic bullet to re-evangelize America, but we must get serious about approaches that do not assume people will wander into our church buildings.
Shaped by the church growth movement, American church culture in recent decades has been dominated by attractional evangelism methods that make weekend worship the center of outreach efforts. Whether stated overtly or not, many of our churches send the message to existing church members that the only version of evangelism we expect from them is, “Invite your friends to Christmas Eve or Easter services and we will tell them about Jesus when they show up.” Inviting people to church is not bad (although even a minority of churchgoers do that), but it’s not enough. For large swaths of our current population, the thought of attending a church service holds no value, which means we keep marketing a product for which no one is shopping. For too long the majority of our time has been spent trying to concoct the right formula that will attract more people “out there” to come “in here.” Bluntly, it is not working.
If we want to recapture the evangelistic heart of Christianity in our current culture, we need to look no further than our own Methodist roots. Early Methodism was a movement fueled by robust evangelism that went far beyond simply inviting people to church. In fact, it’s my conviction that one of the most neglected aspects of early Methodism by contemporary audiences is the central role of field preaching. There has been a rediscovery and renewed energy around Wesleyan class and band meetings in recent years. I am profoundly grateful for that, but field preaching gets little discussion today among Wesley’s spiritual descendants. Field preaching was crucial to the Wesleyan revival of the 1700s, and it is essential that we recover the principles that drove this method.
The History of Field Preaching
The practice of preaching to crowds outside of a church building predates John Wesley. In 18th century England, Wesley was influenced by his famous contemporary, George Whitefield, who followed the model of Howell Harris and others.
Wesley began his own attempts at field preaching with great hesitation. The practice, while not illegal in England, was certainly scorned by many religious leaders at the time. Even with his reluctance, Wesley sensed God’s hand at work and quickly acquiesced to this method. After witnessing Whitefield preach from a little mount on Rose Green in Bristol to an estimated 30,000 people, the following day Wesley wrote these famous few lines in his journal: “At four in the afternoon, I submitted to be more vile and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation, speaking from a little eminence in a ground adjoining to the city, to about three thousand people.”
It did not take long for field preaching to become central to Wesley’s ministry. From his journal, he records that the attendance of his first month of field preaching at Bristol totalled 47,500, with an average of 3,000 per event. The following month brought even more. Almost exactly one year after his famed Aldersgate experience, he preached to 10,000 at Rose Green. By the following month he took the practice back to London where he was preaching to even larger gatherings, sometimes over 15,000.
After his first open-air sermon, Wesley preached for the next fifty-one years and six months until he offered his last message out of doors at the age of eighty-seven. Throughout his life, Wesley had a general practice of open-air preaching, to a variety of audiences and whoever would listen, at least twice each day.
None of this meant that the practice ever came naturally to him. In 1772 he was still referring to field preaching as a cross that he must bear. Yet in field preaching Wesley discovered a method where the gospel could be delivered to people who otherwise would not hear the good news. The reason he continued to persist in something he did not enjoy was his evangelistic passion to reach the lost. This comes through in his work A Farther Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion, originally published in 1745:
And one plain reason why, notwithstanding all these churches, they are no nearer being reclaimed, is this—they never come into a church, perhaps not once in a twelve-month, perhaps not for many years together. Will you say (as I have known some tender-hearted Christians), ‘Then it is their fault; let them die, and be damned’? I grant it is their own fault; and so it was my fault and yours when we went astray like sheep that were lost. Yet the Shepherd of souls sought after us, and went after us in the wilderness. And oughtest not thou to have compassion on thy fellow-servants, as he had pity on thee? Ought we not also ‘to seek,’ as far as in us lies, and to save that which is lost?
As Methodism began to spread in America, preaching outdoors was a near necessity if the church were to reach people in the expanding frontier. In 1746 Wesley first organized the idea of circuits in Britain. To coordinate the widespread field preaching, he organized seven circuits based on geography. Groups of two or three preachers were assigned to a circuit for one month at a time and then moved to a different circuit the following month. American Methodism adapted this concept of circuits and the practice of circuit riders became the norm. Mark Teasdale writes, “On these circuits the preachers rode from one preaching site to the next to encourage faithfulness of those already organized into Methodist societies, and to evangelize non-Methodists in the hopes either of drawing them into existing societies or of organizing them into new societies.” Teasdale suggests,
This organizational structure uniquely suited evangelism in several ways. First, it all but guaranteed that the circuit riders understood their primary job to be evangelistic. The denomination deployed them to proclaim the gospel and draw people into both the Christian faith and the Methodist Episcopal Church… The Methodist preacher was an evangelist and a missionary precisely because he was a Methodist preacher (“Evangelism and Identity in Early American Methodism,” Wesleyan Theological Journal 47, no. 2 [Fall 2012]).
Methodism reinforced this sort of evangelism by empowering the laity. Wesley’s system of discipleship automatically led to the multiplication of evangelists. “Converts were trained to become soul-winners themselves. Many enlisted as lay preachers—some itinerant and others local. Many more were appointed as leaders in their own society, and, in addition to watching over the flock, engaged in evangelistic activity in the neighbourhood” (A. Skevington Wood, The Burning Heart: John Wesley, Evangelist, 1967, 225). In particular in the United States, lay people were required to get involved because of the relative infrequency of circuit-riding preachers.
Much has been written about the rapid growth of Methodism both in the United States and in England. In most of that analysis it is hard to pinpoint any single cause for the movement’s meteoric rise and subsequent decline, but it seems as though the use of field preaching is at least partially related. When Methodism was growing, field preaching was normative. During Methodism’s decline, field preaching was largely absent.
With his own convictions about the need for field preaching, Wesley was concerned to find places where it had stopped. Toward the end of his ministry he noted,
In the evening I preached at Stroud; where to my surprise, I found the morning preaching was given up, as also in the neighbouring places. If this be the case while I am alive, what must it be when I am gone? Give up this, and Methodism too will degenerate into a mere sect, only distinguished by some opinions and modes of worship (Journal, March 15, 1784).
In a letter to James Rea in 1766 Wesley shared a similar sentiment. “It is the cooping yourselves up in rooms that has damped the work of God, which was and never will be carried out to any purpose without going into the highways and hedges and compelling poor sinners to come in.”
In America the rapid growth of Methodism led to a place of privileged status, which led to a priority of respectability, which is directly at odds with “undignified” field preaching. After growing to claim over a third of the adult church-going population by 1750, Methodists abandoned the centrality of evangelism that led to such growth and sealed their inevitable decline.
Recovering Field Preaching Principles for Today
The sort of Gospel boldness required for such a practice is not easy. And yet we follow the One who went to any length to find us when we were lost. We must recapture a similar sense of evangelistic passion in contemporary Methodism. Drawing on the motivation and practice of early field preaching, I will offer five principles that should impact our practices of evangelism in Methodism today.
First, evangelism must include the opportunity for people to hear the gospel without coming to a typical religious setting. Part of Wesley’s insistence was that people who would not enter a church heard his sermons in the open air.
Second, the burden to cross cultural barriers or bear discomfort in delivering the message is upon the preacher or Christian, not the hearer. Wesley and others took the burden of criticism, both from the world and the church. They even faced the threat of physical harm. Their evangelistic fervor trumped their need to stay comfortable and safe inside a church building. If we want to follow in this same model, we must be willing to accept that burden as well. In many cases evangelism necessitates choosing to become undignified by societal standards.
Third, evangelism following the principles of field preaching will not rely on attractional gimmicks or always give people what they want. These early Methodists evangelists dealt in the reality of sin while offering the hope of salvation. They did not assume their message would make church more attractive to people. They called people to costly discipleship, even in the fields.
Fourth, field preaching was not a substitute for full involvement in the life of the church. Wesley did not leave people in the fields. He met them there with the Gospel, most often had Methodists invite them into a class meeting, and then expected full participation in the sacramental life of the church. Any modern method that claims field preaching as a historic imperative but fails to move people into deeper discipleship and the full sacramental life of the church is missing the point. Field preaching was an evangelism tool of the church, not a replacement for the church.
Fifth, field preaching was profoundly focused on the preaching of the Word. Any activity that does not include an opportunity for people to hear the message of salvation, no matter how noble it may be, is not a fair comparison to this practice.
Here’s the bottom line: we are no less called to evangelism than were Methodists in the 1700s. The Gospel has not changed. The desperate need to reach the lost who are not wandering into our churches has not changed. Given the differences of the twenty-first century in typical work environments, communication mediums, and cultural norms, I am not suggesting Christians literally stand in fields and preach. Rather, I suggest that the same principles that underscored the Wesleyan commitment to the field preaching ought to underscore our evangelism today. Scott Kisker writes, “In our generation, we must find the equivalent of the Market Cross if we are to regain our evangelistic vitality. Where and how do we submit ourselves to be more vile to reach those who will not cross the thresholds of our churches?” (Mainline or Methodist? Rediscovering Our Evangelistic Mission, 2008, 78).
Part of why I am so passionate about field preaching is that, in my work with Spirit & Truth, I have seen the fruit of the application of these principles. Church leaders are too quick to undersell what ordinary Christians in our churches can accomplish. We provide basic training in evangelism and then send people out in groups to offer to pray for others in the community and start spiritual conversations. I have done this with hundreds of people all over the country, and the testimonies are amazing. Everyday church folks, many of whom have never shared their faith, find that the Holy Spirit can and does empower them to talk with complete strangers about Jesus. We are all capable of a version of field preaching in our everyday lives… and it still works. It is time for the descendants of Wesley to learn again how to become more vile.
Matt Reynolds is the founder and president of Spirit & Truth, a church equipping, resourcing, and missions ministry based out of Dayton, Ohio. Firebrand is a ministry of Spirit & Truth.