Evangelism Resources

BY: DR. BRYAN STONE

The genius of the Wesleyan movement has always been located in structures such as the connection, circuit, conference, class meeting, society, and itinerancy – but not in the congregation. In fact, it would not be too difficult to argue that Wesleyans lack a well developed theology of the congregation. This omission in Wesley is not difficult to explain. From the beginning, the Wesleyan movement worked alongside and outside of traditional congregational and parish structures and did not immediately take a congregational form. The Wesleyan “connexion,” moreover, was originally a community of preachers, not a communion of congregations or parish churches. In fact, a review of Wesleyan scholarship on the nature and mission of the church reveals that ecclesiology has largely been carried out in terms of the conference and connection, or the society and class meeting. There has been little or no reference to that pervasive mediating institution, the congregation – and this despite the centrality and importance today of the congregation in the actual practice of Methodists and Wesleyans. But simply to announce that we are “not congregationalists” is inadequate. Surely something more robust may be said by Wesleyans about the congregation without acquiescing to a widely popular congregationalism or abandoning the virtues of connectionalism.

There are a number of ways to approach this subject. David Carter, in his fine study of the Church from a British Methodist perspective entitled Love Bade Me Welcome, highlights three main characteristics of Wesley’s ecclesiology: primitivism, non-exclusivism, and connexionalism. I will take up just one of these – what would it mean to speak of Wesleyan congregations and their evangelistic practice as primitivist?

To be primitivist is, as Wesley says, to seek “the old religion, the religion of the Bible, the religion of the primitive Church,” as Wesley described Methodism in his 1777 Sermon “On Laying the Foundation of the New Chapel.” This “old religion,” says Wesley, is “no other than love: the love of God and of all mankind; the loving God with all our heart, and soul, and strength, as having first loved us, as the fountain of all the good we have received, and of all we ever hope to enjoy; and the loving every soul which God hath made, every [person] on earth, as our own soul.”

Wesley’s primitivism evolved over time, as he learned to adapt what was at first a rather rigid and static adoption of ancient liturgies and ecclesiastical practices of the sort the Holy Club experimented with at Oxford. But while Wesley’s primitivism would increasingly focus less on ancient ecclesiastical practices better suited to the cultural context of early Christianity and more on the kind of ‘primitive’ love mentioned in the 1777 sermon, he did not abandon his advocacy of ‘primitivist’ practices such as economic sharing in the form of a community of goods that gave visible and concrete expression to that love. Nor did he neglect other practices such as prayer, fasting, and frequent attendance at the Lord’s Supper.

For Wesley, being a primitivist church also meant being a missionary church that refused to observe parish boundaries and that relativized ecclesiastical order in relation to what would contribute to or detract from the missionary task of the church. It is in this context that practices such as lay preaching, field preaching, itinerancy, class meetings, bands, watchnight and love feast services, the founding of schools and facilitating a heightened role for women in ministry should be viewed. Indeed, these are enactments of a ‘primitivist’ social imagination.

This poses an important question for us in our era. Is it possible for 21^st century congregations to enact this kind of primitivism? Some of the most interesting recent congregational experiments around the world are attempts to do just this – to shed worn-out ways of being the church in order to retrieve what is most ‘essential’ and ‘primitive’ about the church in its service to God’s mission. Wesley, of course, did not think that the church could naively skip backwards in time to a pristine church, and he was troubled by what he took to be the self-righteous and separatist attitudes of other primitivist movements in his time. He did, however, believe that God was doing something new and providential in the world through the Methodists that was, at the same time, something old and primitive. Sometimes you have to go backward before you can go forward.

While on the one hand, congregational primitivism is a critique of all institutional form, it is, on the other hand, an emphasis on a distinctive, even counter-cultural, form of life. But instituting this wedding of spirit and form takes great creativity, discipline, and courage in our time. Wesleyan congregations are always tempted to look over their shoulders at more ‘successful’ congregations that justify their public witness in terms of consumer satisfaction and usefulness in a market of competing goods rather than the exemplification of social holiness. Perhaps congregations attempting to recover a bit of Wesley’s ‘primitivism’ will discover that the first and primary task of Christian evangelism is not the translation of the gospel into ‘useful’ programs designed to reach and attract the masses, but rather a public exemplification of the gospel that is ‘strange’ in our world and not at all the same as meeting the ‘felt needs’ of consumers in the context of a comfortable, safe, and friendly atmosphere. But then this means that the most appealing congregational exemplars for Wesleyans will not necessarily be suburban mega-churches who really know how to “pack ‘em in” but something more like first-century house churches that were essentially ‘schools’ for acquiring the habits, virtues, rhythms, and relationships that sustain practices of radical simplicity, outrageous hospitality, and extravagant modes of economic sharing that could rightly be called ‘primitivist’.

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Dr. Bryan Stone is an E. Stanley Jones Professor of Evangelism, James and Eunice Mathews Chair at Boston University School of Theology, Boston, MA.