To Stop Africa’s Bleeding: The Pentalateral Solution for the People Called Methodists

Photo by Angela

Recently I have been involved in several conversations related to the many bleedings occurring in Africa. Rooted in questionable global diplomacies and international competitions targeting Africa's massive natural wealth, world leaders, aided by some local lackeys, have led Africa into chaotic bloodshed. The most recent cases can be found in Libya, Côte d'Ivoire, Sudan, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, to name but a few. I cannot address the absence of a politico-military involvement consistent with the mission of God in the world; my purpose is to address the dimension that recently added salt to the wounds and appeal for the importance of a distinctive Wesleyan difference in society. My submission is that Wesleyans can redirect their missional presence in Africa to avoid internally generated violence that makes possible headlines such as: “In Nigeria, fighting between Methodist groups kills three as schism turns violent.”

Christians in the Nigerian context are wrestling with deadly extremism, usually targeting Christians. While those attacks usually hail from Islamic circles, reports of inter-community physical violence erupted between November and December 2024 from within the Methodist family as a spillover of schism within global, especially American, United Methodism. As a result, members of the Nigerian Global Methodist Church accused those of the Nigerian United Methodist Church and vice versa. Those reports have been distilled to the American audience by corresponding American Methodist families, each telling of the story to support their Nigerian counterparts. While I cannot get into the details and may not name the guilty (guiltier) party, I was shocked by the very existence of such deadly violence within the Methodist family, even with the possibility of causes going beyond the presenting GMC vs. UMC schism. My treatment of the story goes beyond GMC vs. UMC and raises the issue of how easy it was for one side of Nigerian Methodists to rise against another side of Nigerian Methodists to such a violent extent. In other words, what type of Wesleyan discipleship could have helped Nigerian Methodists face the burgeoning internal crisis without involving physical violence? Raising the issue in this way can help both the GMC and the UMC expressions of African Methodism in their various discipleship endeavors. In other words, how was our discipleship that got us to this deadly violence? In this way, regardless of whether the cause is the immediate/presenting issue of human sexuality, or a long-standing intercommunity issue, the question still stands.

Physical violence of the kind that was reported from either party of the conflict results from those actions that are carefully planned and meant to hurt others. Those who carry out such actions resort to them based on perceived wrongs they suffer. While psychological and juridical explanations may single out the guilty or guiltier party, the content and practice of Wesleyan discipleship is rooted in an ethos meant to produce believers who could have deviated from methodical violence to address wrongdoing.

The first of the three rules established for would-be seekers of the power of godliness was “doing no harm,” i.e., “by avoiding evil of every kind” including, “[f]ighting, quarrelling, brawling; brother ‘going into law’ with brother; returning evil for evil, or railing for railing…” (John and Charles Wesley, The Nature, Design, and General Rules of the United Societies, 6). The Rules point to the fact that Wesley's aim to achieve this result is in those they gather with the method of subdividing them into "smaller companies, called Classes, according to their respective places of abode." This subdivision itself was part of a larger scheme of discipling the total being of a person, thus suggesting that all aspects of a human person can be positively influenced by God's grace. Michael Henderson helpfully presents five dimensions of a human person that Wesley's method could positively affect: cognition, behavior, affect, missional governance or leadership, and will power. With this telos in view, Wesleyan hope diverges from the common explicit or implicit suggestion among Christians that someone's outer life is less important than the hidden state of the soul. In my African sociolinguistic precision from the Goun people of West Africa, the human soul is a multilayered entity including the soul-sɛlindɔn (the bit of God in every human being); and the social, publicly visible soul-yɛ or sɛmɛdo (the dimension of soul that gives account of how one would have lived on earth) (Geoffrey Parrinder, West African Psychology: A Comparative Study of Psychological and Religious Thought, 53, 76). The implied eschatology suggests that both dimensions are of critical importance for one's existence on earth and hereafter. The Wesleys' discipling method addresses human beings at both levels and is more suitable for forming human beings as whole entities. Considering Henderson's insights, Wesleyan discipleship offers a pentalateral for Methodists: Societies positively affect the human mind, the class affects human behaviors, the band affects human affections/emotions, the select society affects governance or leadership vocation, and the penitent band affects people's willpower by restoring and rehabilitating it back to its God's design. Facilitating human formation at the behavioral and affective dimensions is crucial in cultivating the entirety of the human soul toward pleasing God. That way, discipleship would not merely mean saving the invisible dimension of the soul while the outward, social, or public dimension lacks congruency with the soteriological claim. 

Wesley showed the critical importance of classes and bands in attaining such results in his series of exhortations at the end of A Plain Account of Christian Perfection. In that section, he explains that the antidote to schism is to attend to the rules of the society, band, and classes, and that the last two are the "sinews" of the society. Considering the high importance of raising leaders to provide watchful care for the pentaleral system, I suggest a Convex Pentagon representation to capture the criticalness of Wesley's design as a whole and as an attempt to portray how they might relate.

Throughout Africa, the branches of Christianity showing vibrancy gather people in great numbers. Pursuit of mass Christianity without the power to live out Christianity's well-known expectations has become the currency. African Methodists, especially those seeking renewal or revival, tend to imitate this mass-based Christianity. They usually back mass evangelism with Whitefield coaching Wesley into field preaching. Sorely absent are the other layers of Wesley's Pentalateralism in discipling Methodists toward Christlikeness. In the regions where Methodism is alive and well, mass Christianity predominates more than disciplined class and band connexional discipling. Small groups have come down to long prayer meetings, bible study, or bible sharing during which each participant is allowed to share their nuggets or takeaways. Rarely do the procedures take seriously the character and competency formation as expected in Wesley's method.

Given the absence of the pentalateralism that helps cultivate sober, virtuous, and religious life, death-dealing violence can be found among Methodists, as expressed recently in Nigerian violence. While the recent Nigerian's case is comparatively very small in scale, this type of mass Christianity has yielded a larger scale physical violence in Rwanda and was the result of what Richard Benda analyzed as the sin of idolatry, the fact that "Christian churches and individual Christians chose the 'wrong option' in terms of committing their allegiance; an option for power and the powerful instead of the poor, the oppressed and God" (Richard Benda, The Test of Faith: Christians and Muslims in the Rwandan Genocide, University of Manchester, 2013, 158). Concern for the repeat of such violence has been expressed based on the current analysis of the Rwandan public. Abandoning the sinews of Methodist local churches has had the same effect on Benin Methodism, where intra-Methodist violence has reached a level still awaiting healing, reconciliation, and communal thriving (Michel Alokpo, Leadership War in the Protestant Methodist Church of Benin: How Ethical Values Have Been Compromised, 2022). The task for Methodist soul formation requires that the pentalateralism of Wesleyan communities is taken to its logical implementation so that African Methodists can responsibly contribute to stopping, rather than adding, to Africa's bleeding. They, in turn, also need to pass this method to other Christian communities, especially those whose view of revival and renewal only focuses on mass Christianity sans people's formation. 

Taking such concerns seriously would amount to including the care devoted to forming missing Methodist structures. This may require a focus on raising leaders who are truly devoted to facilitating the reign of Christ in the lives of those under their care. While Methodist accounts of church statistics will continue to focus on "church membership" and other statistics, there also needs to be a way to account for real experiences with what John Wesley defended himself to be doing in the society he was leading: to incite members "to live a sober, virtuous, and religious life". In his argumentative letter against slander and misrepresentations, Wesley defines the religion he was inculcating negatively and positively. Negatively, his religion is "…not the bare saying of so many prayers, morning and evening, in public or in private; not anything superadded now and then to a careless or worldly life." Rather, positively it is "a constant ruling habit of soul, a renewal of our mind in the image of God, a recovery of the divine likeliness, a still-increasing conformity of heart and life to the pattern of our most holy Redeemer" (John Wesley, Letter to Richard Morgan, January 15, 1734). Those living under the care of a society whose sinews are classes and bands, whose sinews are class leaders, can be provoked to live according to an ethos not given to violence against one another.

The post-Wesley drift toward a focus on training Methodist preachers as mass-communicators at the expense of class leaders, who serve as facilitators of virtuous, sober, and religious life, was already implicit in Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury's 1798 doctrinal remarks. In effect, they implied that Methodists were giving a greater consideration to "the whole body of the preachers" than "the whole body of our [class] leaders." These remarks led them to insist that class leaders were "the sinews of our society, and our revivals will ever in great measure rise or fall with them." Following John Wesley's observation that classes and bands are the sinews of Methodism, Coke and Asbury saw class leaders as the sinews of the Methodist classes, hence of Methodist revival. But this path was being abandoned in their time. The resulting overemphasis on raising pastors-as-preachers at the expense of class leaders is a shared heritage of Methodism. For this reason, present and future engagements with African Methodism can be reconsidered for a better focus on preachers and class leaders, and maybe with an emphasis upon the latter until we are caught up. Many have used class meetings or similar as a stepping-stone strategy to plant churches. Afterward, class meetings are abandoned. Methodism offers a different path, which is that classes, bands, and their leaders are "sinews" of Methodism, and to abandon them is to erect a system of nominal Christians given to questionable practices, including deadly violence against one another. Methodism can recover its distinctive role in world Christianity by repositioning itself to stop African bleeding rather than adding to it.

Sègbégnon Mathieu Gnonhossou, Ph.D., is a John Wesley Fellow, an Ordained Elder in the Free Methodist Church-USA, and a Methodist renewal facilitator in the Republic of Benin.