Strangely Warmed

Pentecost and the Future of the Methodist Movement

Acts 2:1-21

flame
Photo credit by Scharx on Deviant Art: http://scharx.deviantart.com/art/Flame-on-Fire-280535683

There are weeks in the life of a preacher where a lot of things come together at once that seem like an intentional convergence that requires some comment. This was one of those weeks. Yesterday, for example, we had the convergence of three holidays—two that you may be familiar with and one that you may not. It was the Sunday before Memorial Day, of course, when we remember those who have fallen in service to our country, but on the church calendar it was also the Sunday of Pentecost, the festival in which we remember the day the Holy Spirit came upon the early church in Acts 2—an event that many consider to be the “birthday” of the church.

But May 24 is also a Methodist holiday specifically. We call it Aldersgate Day, the anniversary of John Wesley’s conversion from a troubled Anglican priest to the founder of the Methodist movement, one of the greatest movements in Christian history. It was on May 24, 1738, that Wesley went to a meeting on Aldersgate Street in London; this after returning from a failed missionary venture in the colony of Georgia that ended with Wesley feeling like a spiritual and clerical failure. Wesley wrote in his journal that day:

John Wesley
John Wesley

“In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.” It was the day that sparked the movement that led us to be sitting in a Methodist church in Monument, CO, a town which, at the time, was not even a possibility.

But I was also reminded again this week that the Methodist movement, at least the United Methodist part of it, is largely on life support, especially here in the West. I received a call from someone in our annual conference who was polling large church pastors on a report to consolidate the Rocky Mountain and Yellowstone Annual Conferences because of declining membership. We actually now have a  person on the conference staff whose job it is to facilitate the closure of churches. An economist told officials from the UMC this week that the denomination will not recover if it does not reverse the trend by 2030. My Twitter feed and inbox are full of invectives from various sides of the church pointing out the decline, but no one seems to offer a solution. Of course, we’re not alone. I saw another article this week that suggested, again, that Christianity is dying in the Western world, and there are dire predictions for what that means for churches and denominations in the next couple of decades. There is much hand-wringing and wailing and gnashing of teeth about this, coupled with the endless debates we have that mirror the division of the culture.

Wesley warned the early Methodists that this could happen. As he wrote near the end of his life in the pamphlet Thoughts Upon Methodism: I am not afraid that the people called Methodists should ever cease to exist either in Europe or America. But I am afraid lest they should only exist as a dead sect, having the form of religion without the power. And this undoubtedly will be the case unless they hold fast both the doctrine, spirit, and discipline with which they first set out.

In other words, unless the Methodist movement held to its doctrine, spirit, and discipline, it would only one day exist as a memory worthy of its own memorial day.

For Wesley, the Methodist movement was always about getting back to basics, getting back to being a “strangely warmed” people who have both the form and the power of a vital movement. As with most things, however, Wesley took his cue from Scripture and from the early “primitive” church as he called it. For Wesley, as for Christians over the centuries, the story we read in Acts 2 is not just a memorial for the way the church once was, it’s a template for vital Christian movements that can change the world.

christendomSee, I believe that the current decline of institutional Christianity is actually a good thing. We’ve had a good run of close to 1700 years ever since the emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire. It was the period historians call “Christendom” in the West, where Christianity dominated thought and life. Some of us still remember the tail end of Christendom—those days when nothing was open on Sunday, when most everyone in town went to church, and when the church was the center of community life. It doesn’t take much to see that’s not the way it is anymore and for a lot of reasons and cultural shifts that I don’t have time to elaborate on today (but will in a future series). The bottom line is, those days are gone and are not coming back.

But the good news in that is that Christianity actually grew the fastest and had the most impact in the world when it was not an established institution but rather an underground, grass roots movement. Those disciples gathered in the house on the day of Pentecost had no institutional power, no status, no wealth, no influence in the culture, but it was through them that God chose to radically alter the world for his kingdom. John Wesley was a common Anglican priest from a poor family with no influence or status when he started the Wesleyan movement among the poor in England. It’s been proven time and again—God tends to work through people on the fringes of power and virtually never with those at the center.

My study this week took me back to a book I read a while ago by Steve Addison titled Movements That Change the World: Five Keys to Spreading the Gospel. In that book, Addison explores several movements that have occurred in Christian history and he came up with five characteristics of movements that make them more effective and impactful than institutions. When you overlay these characteristics with the birth of the early church and the birth of the Methodist movement, you begin to see that God usually does a new thing through people who are willing to change everything about themselves except their core beliefs in God and God’s purposes.

1. A WHITE-HOT FAITH

The first characteristic of a world-changing movement is a white-hot faith. Effective movements begin with people whose lives have been unraveled and redirected by God’s intervention. The disciples’ world was unraveled by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead and the realization that God had come in person to redeem the world from slavery to sin and death. They reoriented their lives around this reality, so much so that when Jesus told them in Acts 1 to go back to Jerusalem and wait for the Holy Spirit to come upon them they went, even though there were people there who wanted to kill them. They had no resources of their own, no formal learning, just the example of Jesus that was so compelling to them that they could not help but give their lives over to his mission.

Wesley’s “strangely warmed” heart was the result of such an unraveling. Indeed, Wesley was reported to have once been asked why so many people came to hear him preach. His reported answer (which he probably never said, but I like it anyway)? “I light myself on fire and people come to watch me burn.” The question for us today is whether or not we have been completely unraveled by the truth the gospel, the reality of the resurrection, and the transforming power of grace in our own lives. Movements begin when men and women encounter the living God and surrender themselves to him in loving obedience to his call.

Jesus told the church in Laodicea that you can’t be lukewarm and be useful to him. There’s a reason, after all, that the Spirit came upon the disciples as tongues of fire and not as a comfy sweater. Does your faith in Christ make you burn with passion? Does your heart beat faster when you hear the good news? Do you see the people around you as people in need of the kind of faith you have? That’s the catalyst for a movement.

How do you cultivate that kind of white-hot faith? Jesus told his disciples to wait for the Spirit by being together and being in prayer for it. Notice that when the day of Pentecost came “they were all together in one place.” One of the disturbing trends even among those who still go to church is that whereas once people considered themselves to be “regular attenders” if they attended worship 2 or 3 out of every four weeks, now people in the church think attendance once every 4 to 6 weeks is enough. That’s not a white-hot faith, folks, it’s a casual one that places little priority on being part of the community of faith. No, church attendance isn’t the way of salvation, but it is a regular opportunity to wait upon the Lord, to spur one another one, to stoke the faith within the Body of Christ. If we want to be a white-hot church, the fire needs to be fueled and we do that best when we gather together in the presence of the Spirit. Movements are never started by people who invest in them part time. TLUMC is bucking the trend of most churches but we still have a lot of heating up to do! I want to encourage you to make being in a worship a priority, even and especially this summer. Don’t let it just be hot outside, come inside and get your faith stoked as well!

2. COMMITMENT TO A CAUSE

But it goes beyond merely gathering together. The second characteristic of a world-changing movement is that those within it have a commitment to a cause. Nothing was more important to the disciples of Jesus than the mission he had given them. Nothing was more important to John Wesley than the mission of “spreading Scriptural holiness across the land.” World-changing movements happen when people expect a high degree of commitment from themselves and from one another. It happens when people align the rest of their lives around that belief while, on the other hand, the movement ceases to exist when people stop caring and are out of alignment.

When we become members of the church, we make a commitment to aligning our prayers, presence, gifts, service, and witness with the mission of Christ. That affects everything from our daily rhythm to our calendars to our pocketbooks. In fact, “membership” is actually a bad word to use in connection with the church. World-changing movements don’t have members, but they do have participants. Indeed, a church with fewer members and more participants will always be more vital than one that has a lot of members but only a few who are fully invested. 

How committed are you to the cause of Christ? How does the way you live your life align with that commitment? The more aligned we become, the more impact we make for God’s kingdom.

3. CONTAGIOUS RELATIONSHIPS

The third characteristic of a world-changing movement is contagious relationships. When Peter preached on Pentecost, Luke tells us that 3,000 people were added to the number of the church. That’s a good preaching day. But look at verses 42-47 – they devoted themselves to the apostles teaching, to the breaking of bread, and the prayers. They held things in common, and the Lord added daily to their number those who were being saved. I would argue that the spread of Christianity wasn’t primarily due to preaching by apostles and paid clergy, but due to the contagious relationships of ordinary people who had encountered Christ.

See, when you have a white-hot faith and are committed to a cause, you tend to want to share with someone else. We’ve so often thought of evangelism as a technique when, in fact, it grows out of relationships with others in our circle of influence and proximity—our friends, our neighbors, our coworkers. The early Methodist movement was based on class meetings of 15-20 persons and more people came to Christ there than ever did because of Wesley’s evangelical preaching. Most of us come to know Christ not because we’ve been convinced into it but because we’ve been loved by someone who loves him.

Eighty percent of the people in our area have no religious affiliation and are not connected to Christ. No church program, no evangelism committee, no preacher will ever be as effective as you can be with the people you know and love. Your neighborhood is the most wide open mission field you will ever visit. With whom will you have a conversation this week that will be an opportunity to share what Christ has done for you? Ask the Spirit to show you, to give you the boldness to share and the words to speak. You can be the catalyst for changing a life! The more we do that individually and together, the more the movement can grow.

4. RAPID MOBILIZATION

Which leads to the fourth characteristic of a world-changing movement and that is rapid mobilization. Notice what happens in the Pentecost story, the first people to hear the message are people who have the capacity to tell it someone else in a faraway land—those native speakers in Jerusalem for the festival suddenly become missionaries. They are not professionals, they have no seminary training, they just go and share what they have heard. The most effective movements in Christian history have been lay movements and church bodies that understand this tend to have more impact than those who rely on the clergy for everything.

An early Methodist Circuit Rider
An early Methodist Circuit Rider

The early Methodist preachers were all lay people, including both men and women. The stuffy Anglican priests mocked them because they didn’t have formal training and credentialing, but they did have the fire and the ability to spread their faith through contagious relationships. I’m convinced that the future of the Methodist church is going to be found not in recruiting more clergy but in equipping more laity to do the work of ministry.

That’s the idea behind the huddle groups and missional communities we’ve been developing at Tri-Lakes UMC. Only disciples of Jesus can make other disciples of Jesus. We are all part of the priesthood of all believers—everyone can do the work of ministry. We want to train as many of people as possible to be lay pastors, evangelists, prophets, teachers, and leaders so that the full Body of Christ may be mobilized and impact the majority of our community who do not know him. I have reordered my priorities as a pastor to make that my number one job. Don’t sit back and wait to be asked. God has gifted you and it’s the church’s job to hone and deploy that giftedness! Friends, this kind of mobilization is going to be the key to this church’s future and the key to it’s impact on the community.

5. ADAPTIVE METHODS

And lastly, effective movements that change the world use adaptive methods. On the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit gave the disciples the ability to communicate with people in their own language, adapting the message of the gospel in a new form that could reach more people. John Wesley adapted from preaching in churches to preaching in the fields and open marketplaces of 18th century England. Both adaptations were considered to be weird at the time—some in the crowd thought the disciples were drunk and some thought of preaching outside the church as “vile” in Wesley’s day. But the Spirit tends to work best on the margins and outside the established forms, taking the gospel to people where they are and using methods that reach particular generations.

cell phoneWe now live in a world where the main language is technology. I was struck while visiting Israel this time that nearly everyone had a cell phone, from the orthodox Jews to the religious Muslims. Social media is the new lingua franca in our culture, and while some in the church have mocked the “impersonal” use of technology as a fad, the truth is that this is how people communicate, connect, learn, and share. I’m convinced that the new Wesleyan movement will need to embrace technology. For us, that means looking at the creation of a more interactive internet campus that can reach new people and generate content that can be shared across your social networks. It means speaking in the social media language of emerging generations and inviting people into different kinds of relationships in groups both in person and online. It means not telling people to turn off their phones when they come to worship, but to use them to interact with what God is saying to us and share it with others. This is field preaching for the 21st century and it’s something we need to explore and exploit. The Spirit can move as easily across the spark of wires as it can in tongues of fire!

In short, kindling the flame of a movement requires us to surrender to the Spirit’s leading, and the Spirit will usually lead us in directions we didn’t anticipate.

There’s a lot of pessimism out there about the church and about our denomination. Me? I think God is primed to do a very new thing among those who have a white-hot faith, who are committed to the cause; those who cultivate contagious relationships, those who are willing to be mobilized and use adaptive methods. The Spirit has done it many times in Christian history, and the Spirit can do it again. Why not through us?

It simply takes a people who are willing to be strangely warmed.

Scroll to Top