John Wesley: Inspiration
John Wesley: Inspiration Bruce Kent The invitation to write this short essay came as something of a surprise. I have preached in a few Methodist churches, and as a university chaplain and parish priest I have been on good terms with many a Methodist counterpart. Lord Soper has always been a Christian witness much admired and Dr Kenneth Greet a friend in whom administrative ability and prophetic vision can and do go happily hand in hand. Since I met the Methodists I have liked and admired them. There is of course a lot of significance in that 'since'. If there was a word said about Methodists in six long seminary years I do not remember it, and in the late 1950s and early 1960s we were told to keep to our clerical selves when suggestions about joint Christian initiatives were proposed.
Ecumenism as an industry had not yet been invented. It was not until the late 1960s as a university chaplain that I learned a little more about Methodism and its class groups system, which I found most impressive. As Wesley envisaged it, every Methodist would be part of a small support group. My young Catholics were full of interest and life, but for most of them the idea of a holy evening of any sort in addition to Sunday Mass would have been taking loyalty into the realm of fanaticism. Since university days I have come to admire even more the commitment of many a Methodist congregation and have most especially been impressed by the sense of shared responsibility. No Methodist church is a one-man band.
So this invitation to write about John Wesley was not only an honour — it was also an eye-opener. Of course one does not become an expert on anyone by reading a few books in as many months.
Those like me who are not experts but are trying to be Christians
John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives in a confusing world have much to learn from the life of this astonishing man. By any standards he was exceptional. His energy would make most people tired just to read about it. Books, pamphlets, letters, diaries, journals, were all grist to his productive mill. All this written work was undertaken in a life of endless travel in most difficult circumstances. The physical effort involved simply amazed me. Twenty miles a day on good roads would be quite enough for most reasonably athletic people today. In Wesley's Journal for 18 March 1747 a snow storm is described which filled up the roads making the way to Grantham, his next stop, almost impassable. 'At least we can walk twenty miles a day with our horses in our hands,' wrote Wesley, and so, despite such daunting conditions, the group reached Grantham.
Wesley's various interests were almost Churchillian in range.
He had opinions on everything from tea to landscape gardening, from electricity to sanitation. This was a lively, energetic human being who despite a rigid religious discipline — or because of it — did not find anything human outside his sphere of interest. It was indeed a rigid discipline. It was entirely normal in his eyes to rise at 4 a.m. for fifty years, turn to prayer for nearly an hour and then preach a first outdoor sermon at 5 a.m. If Wesley felt himself
'strangely warmed' in 1738, two hundred years and more have not ended his power to communicate that warmth. The man lived as he did because he actually believed, not in some notional way but fully, demandingly and inspiringly. What an obvious thing it is, after all, if you have some news to impart, not just to provide a building and expect the public to come to you to hear it but to go out to them. Open-air preaching is something most of us would now find rather bizarre: embarrassing in fact. It was, too, for Wesley when he first started on it, but it became his bread and butter — an essential way of taking the Gospel to the people. It took considerable courage on his part and some loss of what was thought to be dignity to get started on that apostolate, but a very important one it was.
In short, to write about John Wesley is not just to produce a bit of history. It is to be challenged all the time with the reflection: what about me? How we compare to this quite extraordinary person and what meaning his life has now are questions that do not go away. Methodists today must have just the same problems as those affecting dozens of religious orders and communities. An
John Wesley: Inspiration
inspiring figure arrives and blazes across his or her age and the rest of us are left to try to make the machinery work after he or she is gone. Perhaps the Wesley blueprint no longer fits exactly into the world of Concorde, television and computer. But some things, I think, remain constant. His was a reaction against a Christianity of the head but not of the heart, of form without personal conversion, of getting by rather than the struggle for perfection.
Things haven't changed too much. The house churches and basic communities of today sound remarkably like a considerably less organized and rather less demanding class structure. The official churches still find enthusiasm rather embarrassing and the vexed question of religion and politics remains unresolved.
Our worlds are, of course, in many personal ways very different.
I shuddered when I learned how Susanna Wesley thought it right to bring up her children. She told John in 1732 that 'when turned a year old (and some before) they were taught to fear the rod and to cry softly .
. that most odious noise of the crying of children was rarely heard in the house... .' That régime cannot have done much for John Wesley's understanding of women, which was the one disaster area of his life. But then someone who travelled on foot, horse and boat some five thousand miles a year, with every detail of an ever-growing Methodist community under his eye, was not an ideal marriage partner. The laconic entry in his Journal for 12 October 1781: 'I came to London and was informed that my wife had died on Monday. This evening she was buried though I was not informed of :t till a day or two after .
. .. leaves something to be desired when it comes to the most human of human relationships.
Nevertheless, this is not the place to go into a lengthy discussion of eighteenth-century attitudes to the upbringing of children and the disciplines that ought to be involved or the emotional consequences. Most ages look rather odd to those which follow.
One day someone will wonder how it was that we in our time have come to accept a culture of personal and national violence as if a dozen TV murders a night and a booming national arms industry was a normal world for a Christian to live in, while divorce has become almost a regular end to marriages.
From his parents Wesley certainly learned about prayer, but it would be a mistake to discuss his spiritual life as if that could be separated from his ordinary existence. Those very early Oxford
John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives dons and undergraduates who earned for themselves the sarcastic
'Holy Club' description did not make such a division. Concern for the poor, the uneducated, the orphan, the prisoner, flowed from their response to the Gospel. Quite right too. St Matthew's Gospel
Chapter 25 is still the only yardstick which we were given for selfmeasurement. But all this came from a spiritual search. 'I began to aim atand pray for inward holiness', he says in his Journal atan early stage. 'My one aim in life is to secure personal holmess for without being holy myself I cannot promote real holiness in others.' He was a reformer, not a revolutionary, when it came to the Church. The purpose was not to found a new church, though history managed that for him. It was to inspire fellow Christians 'to have the mind that was in Christ and walk as he walked.'
It is only honest to admit that the endless soul-searching that went on amongst Wesley and his companions is not a process with which most of us can empathize. It all gets a bit tedious. Perhaps this might be because we do not take the presence of God as seriously as he did. Certainly few monksin monasteries could claim to lead today the single-minded, regulated life of prayer, scriptural reading and reflection that was meat and drink to John Wesley throughout his active life. Perhaps we ought to become a little more disciplined. Perhaps aspot of communal examination of conscience on a regular basis would be no bad thing. Perhaps an active daily awareness of the existence of God in our lives as the sustainer of all creation would help us on the road to real religion. Certainly such belief changed the lives of tens of thousands of ordinary working people in the eighteenth century and gave Britain a new force for social change whose effects have lasted until this day. Lord Soper comes from a long and convincing tradition.
The encouraging feature of Wesley's religion was the conviction that sanctity, holiness, perfection and with it joy, were not objectives for the religious specialist alone. This was and is the result of God's grace. A positive awareness of both the call to holiness and the possibility of achieving it was open to all. Indeed, no Methodist could join one of the Bands, or spiritual sub-circles, unless such an awareness was there and tested. Wesley's A Plain
Account of Christian Perfection is a very encouraging booklet. It challenges mediocrity and pessimism. It does not suggest that falling by the wayside is impossible. Freedom and even the freedom to fall is there. But so is the possibility of holiness for everybody.
John Wesley: Inspiration
This message is a challenge of a very positive sort to those of us brought up in an 'officers and other ranks' understanding of religion. We Catholics somehow came to accept that the counsels of perfection, as they were called, were for the chosen few. For the rest, half standards were more or less accepted. The concentration was on avoiding sin: mortal catastrophic, venial undesirable but open to correction. Holiness — usually expressed as poverty, chastity and obedience — was for those with a real vocation.
Wesley's genius was to offer such a real vocation to everyone. All become spiritual A-level candidates.
'Be ye perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect' is an instruction to everyone, which takes us back to the days of the Acts of the Apostles and to the generations of Christians trying to renew themselves in the spirit of the Gospel. It presents radical challenges to all Christians, not only in relation to prayer but especially in relation to money, power and service.
Oddly enough, or so it seems to me, as a consequence Wesley became much more radical about church structures than he did about state structures. His commitment to the poor is beyond question. He took the Gospel to places where more established churchmen would not go. That the world was his parish was his answer to those who told him that he had no licence to preach. He had far-reaching things to say about taxation and pensions, poverty and prison. But it all falls short in a strange way of a head-on collision with Caesar. On the contrary. He certainly opposed war and wrote an essay (Works, Vol. XII) about it which sounds like Erasmus: 'How shocking, how inconceivable.
. utter _ degeneracy of all nations from the plainest principles of reason and virtue. .. ." Nevertheless, when it came to the threat of a possible invasion in 1756 he was quick to offer the Government a twohundred-strong volunteer force to be self-funding and entirely at the disposal of His Majesty. His support for the Monarchy when
Bonnie Prince Charlie was moving south was almost servile.
Despite an initial sympathy for the American Revolutionaries, he came quickly to explain that their activities were wholly unreasonable. Universal suffrage was not at all his political aim.
In his 1772 Thoughts upon Liberty he described Britain as a society in terms which only the middle and upper classes could have recognized. That there might even be a need for Catholic emancipation as evidence of all this British liberty which he
John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives championed so loudly does not occur at all. Wesley's political spirit was very much that of Romans 13. Authority came from God and not from the people. Early radicals like John Wilkes got no sympathy at all.
This is not to deny the enormous worth and Christian logic of his many social concerns. These followed naturally from belief in the one Father to whose family all belong. Christ suffers in the poor and the prisoner, the widow and the orphan. So Wesley went out to find him there. The marvel is not that he did these things, but that so many Christians, then as now, can still see
'good works' as an optional extra rather than the main course of Christian living. Nevertheless we look in vain for a radical reappraisal of the norms of society itself. I'm not sure that Wesley would have understood the sentence in the 1971 Rome
Synod on Justice which said that the Gospel is not just good news to set us free from sin 'but from what sin has done to our society'.
Wesley was not out of the Leveller stable. Indeed, I wonder what he would have said of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, very much his children, if they could have asked him not about the right to a decent wage, but about the right to withdraw labour in an organized way as a means of putting pressure on landowners and farmers.
He was at his most radical when it came to his judgment on the slave trade. This was very much part of the national economic system, and his base in Bristol made him very much aware of it. He hated it and condemned it in appeal after appeal.
His own experiences in America must have made it impossible for him to think of Africans as sub-human creatures, not even fit for baptism, as some churchmen of his day maintained. He was outraged by the institution and by its dreadful attendant cruelties. Of all his many letters and instructions (how on earth did he find the time?) that last letter to William Wilberforce, written the day after his last sermon and a week before he died, is a blast of encouragement for anyone struggling for social change. He had heard that Wilberforce was becoming despondent. 'But if God be for you who can be against you .
. go on in the name of God and in the power of his might till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it.' So cheer up nuclear disarmers, Amnesty workers, Oxfamites and all that breed. Wesley has a message for you, too!
John Wesley: Inspiration
I suppose that he might well have denied that he was in our terms radical when it came to the Church. Perhaps he intended not to be so. All his life he saw himselfas a communicating priest of the Church of England. Though church doors were often closed to him and his Methodist chapels were seen as a threat not an inspiration, it was never his intention to found a different church.
But he did. It is almost impossible for a Roman Catholic to understand the free-wheeling priesthood which Wesley claimed for himself. He certainly did not see himself as being responsible to any bishop. As time went on he began to see priesthood and episcopacy as two sides of the same coin and not very different at that.
His American ordinations were, he judged, entirely orthodox.
Like many contemporary charismatics, in any event, he thought the Spirit for more important than the structures. Yet he survived. No excommunication, no defrocking and no feeling on his part that loyalties had been stretched so far that he ought to resign. His ecumenism, of course, advanced with the years. In 1747 he patronizingly wrote of the Trappists that God makes allowances 'for invincible ignorance', but nevertheless he acknowledged in them 'deep experience of the inward work of God'. He could recognize holiness when he saw it. By 1773 he had become more generous. On a trip through 'dreary' Galway, he noted twenty thousand Papists and five hundred Protestants. 'But which of them are Christians, have the mind that was in Christ and walk as he walked? And without this how little does it avail whether they are called Protestants or Papists?' Just seven years before the Gordon Riots that was generous indeed. If Wesley managed to avoid an irrevocable rupture with the authorities of his own English Church, he certainly managed, towards the end, an ecumenism before its time.