A Compelling Story of American Methodism
A review of Doctrine, Spirit, and Discipline: A History of the Wesleyan Tradition in the United States by Kevin Watson
Doctrine, Spirit & Discipline: A History of the Wesleyan Tradition in the United States by Kevin Watson
As an adolescent, one of my favorite movies was the dystopian thriller set in London called V for Vendetta. In one of the better scenes of the movie, V (undercover as someone else), tells a detective that he has all the facts and figures of a conspiracy, but “What you want, what you really need—is a story.”
I’ve always like that scene because in my mind this is what every good historian does. They collect and verify vast amounts of original and secondary sources, and from that work discover a narrative, a story, that somehow makes sense of it all.
In the rather small world of American Methodism, the facts and figures are more or less agreed upon, but I have been looking personally for a story to help me make sense of it. What, really, does it mean to be Methodist, to be a practicing Christian in the wake of the Wesleyan evangelical revival? What are the boundaries of this tradition, what are its essentials, who best exemplified being a Wesleyan in our past, and who today is best living into whatever that means?
Kevin Watson’s new book, Doctrine, Spirit, & Discipline: A History of the Wesleyan Tradition in the United States, in my opinion does a fine job of putting forward some answers to these questions. The book’s thesis is that
“the doctrine, spirit, and discipline of early Wesleyan Methodism is fundamental to Methodist identity and spiritual vitality. This reading of the history of the Wesleyan tradition in the United States demonstrates that when Wesleyans have been faithful to our core identity, God seems to have prospered the people called Methodists. Conversely, when Wesleyans in the United States have not been faithful to the doctrine, spirit, and discipline with which they first set out, their faith communities have tended to see spiritual and numerical decline” (27).
The way Dr. Watson persuades you of his thesis is by telling a story—a story of a people in America who attempted, by the grace of God, to lead holy lives, to go onwards toward perfection, and to band together with one another to spread scriptural holiness across the lands. And through many divisions, conflicts, revivals, and decline, Watson weaves a thread throughout: a commitment to holiness (doctrine), a commitment to a shared life (discipline), and a yielding to the Holy Spirit (Spirit).
Watson provides a good summary of Methodism’s beginning in England with John Wesley and its basic beliefs, especially for readers who are not familiar with that history. But I more enjoyed the details of early American methodism I had not encountered:
Such as the scene when Barbara Heck, called by some the mother of American Methodism, “seized the pack of cards” from a group of other Methodists, “and threw them into the fire,” telling one of the Methodist preachers there, ‘You must preach to us, or we shall all go to hell together, and God will require blood at your hands!’” (57). The response to Heck led to what is believed to be the first Methodist sermon ever preached in America.
Or the statement from the Methodist conference in the North in 1780, which stated that slavery was “contrary to the laws of God, man, and nature, and hurtful to society…”, a conference that also required traveling preachers to free their slaves or be removed from Methodism (if only the early Methodists could have held fast to this radical position rooted in holiness!).
Or the time John Wesley got mad at Francis Asbury for taking on the title of bishop, writing to him: “How can you, how dare you suffer yourself to be called Bishop? I shudder, I start at the very thought! Men may call me a knave or a fool, a rascal, a scoundrel, and I am content; by they shall never by my consent call me a Bishop!”
Details like these make what could be a rather dry book of history come alive.
But for myself, where the book really shined was in the way it expanded the Wesleyan story to include the German Wesleyan traditions (the Evangelical Association and United Brethren), the Salvation Army, the historically black Wesleyan denominations (the African Methodist Episcopal and AME-Zion), the various branches of the holiness movement (including the Church of the Nazarene, the Free Methodists, the Wesleyan Church), as well as the various ways that Pentecostalism itself is an offspring of the Wesleyan evangelical revival. Though at times the book could get a bit bogged down in some of the various details of those movements, for people like me who are most familiar with the origin story of what we might call mainline Methodism, I appreciated the attention given to these other Wesleyan movements.
In the final part of the book, Watson tells the story of the United Methodist Church’s foundation and it’s current division, and in my view helpfully frames that as a part of Methodism’s ongoing tension between holiness and unity. For Methodists, the struggle has been to figure out what exactly it means for a renewal movement to become a church. In Watson’s assessment, when Methodism has been able to unapologetically preach our doctrine about holiness, commit to our shared covenantal life through our discipline, and yield to the leadership of the Holy Spirit, God has blessed the movement. But time and time again, we folded to the forces of culture and compromise; and those who did not want to fold to that pressure were often pushed out and forced to start anew. In one prophetic passage, Watson writes:
“Throughout the UMC’s half-century existence, one could predict the majority opinion on almost any controversial social issue within the UMC in a particular geographic area by first determining the majority opinion of the geographic area itself. United Methodists in the most socially liberal parts of the United States are the most socially liberal United Methodists in the United States. Conversely, United Methodists in the most socially conservative parts of the United States are the most socially conservative in the United States…A crisis of identity leads to a crisis of unity. What work, for example, is United Methodism doing in a person’s life who lives in Seattle, Washington, or in Atlanta, Georgia, if their beliefs about human flourishing are determined by where they live more than on their Christian identity?” (479-80)
I found this to be a haunting statement, for what has happened before can certainly happen again. Though Watson is invested in the formation of the Global Methodist Church, the tone of the book seemed to be one of thoughtful reflection upon how the Methodist and Wesleyan family could avoid some of the ways that we have failed in our history, and what God might be calling all of us to do in this particular cultural moment. For me, it highlights the great hopes I have for the Wesleyan movement more broadly and the Global Methodist Church more specifically—but the book also shows how repeatedly, when we have become culturally significant and materially wealthy, we have tended to sacrifice our first calling, the calling to lead holy lives.
I highly recommend this book, and I pray with Dr. Watson that all of us “who redig the ancient wells of the Wesleyan tradition as the most faithful way to follow Jesus Christ in this life will find living water and experience renewal, and, Lord willing, even revival. May it be so!” (481)
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