I have returned recently to the journals of John Wesley. I’ve been re-reading his account of his ministry, looking for wisdom and practical insights about the pastoral craft in the Wesleyan tradition.
In entries from December of 1739, he relates disputes that were going on in the early Methodist movement about the nature of faith and works. There were those who were arguing that Christians should not engage in any kind of works at all prior to coming to saving faith. They should not worship, they should not pray, they should not do good things for the bodies or souls of others. If people do such works before they have been saved, they argued, they would come to trust in those works as the source of their salvation and so never receive the salvation that comes from faith alone.
Wesley could not accept such a position, as he found it contrary to what he called “the Bible-way.” Wesley wrote on December 31, 1739, about a letter he had sent relating his thoughts, including his conviction that those who do not yet have saving faith should use all “the means of grace” because these are the ordinary ways that God conveys his grace to unbelievers.
Among these means of grace, Wesley listed specifically: going to church, taking communion, fasting, using private prayer, reading the Scripture, doing all the temporal good we can, and doing spiritual good.
Wesley here and elsewhere explicitly views communion as a means of grace for unbelievers. Our Methodist practice of open communion goes back a long way.
But he also has an interesting observation about the usefulness of those with no or little belief doing spiritual good — which for Wesley meant witnessing and teaching the faith to others.
He writes, “[T]hose who have not faith, or but in the lowest degree, may have more light from God, more wisdom for the guiding of other souls, than many that are strong in faith.”
What I take Wesley to be saying here is that he has seen in his own ministry that those who do not even believe or have only the first inklings of faith can often be the most equipped for leading others along toward faith. They often do this much better than Christians of deep and long-standing faith.
I find this observation interesting in two ways. First, it speaks to Wesley’s attentiveness to the spiritual life of his flock. He was paying enough attention and was wise enough to see how the weak in faith were often better at bringing others along than the saints of the church. The second thing I find interesting about this is how this is a model of evangelism and discipleship that is quite far from what we often practice. Sharing the faith (in this case it would not make sense to say “sharing our faith” since we are talking about people who don’t yet have faith) is one of the ways God gives us the grace we need to become faith filled.
You don’t figure everything out and then tell people about God. You tell people about God, and as you do that, you come to figure things out and discover you have been given the faith you are sharing with others.
This I find really helpful. At my church, we’ve spent close to a year now being trying to develop our evangelistic habits and ways of thought. We’ve done some new things and reached some new people. In this, I’ve encouraged people to understand and share their witness. We’ve had several members of the church get up on Sunday mornings and talk about the way Jesus changed or helped or touched them.
But this emphasis on witness and sharing faith stories is intimidating for a lot of people. It is intimidating because of the standard things that make people nervous about talking about faith in public or with others. I think it is also intimidating because a lot of people in the church would fall into those categories Wesley calls unbelievers or those of only the lowest degree of faith. If you are told to “share your faith” but your faith is weak or fragile or actually not even really there, it can be pretty intimidating.
But, if telling other people about Jesus or guiding them into a Christian life is itself a means of grace, then we should be encouraging those who do not believe or believe only a little to share the faith of the church with others, which means we need to help model that and equip them for that. We need to encourage this not because it is a church-growth strategy, but because God will use these works of mercy as a way to give people grace and strengthen their faith. Evangelism is a spiritual discipline as much as prayer and attending worship.
In Wesley’s journal this idea was just an aside in part of a larger argument. Reading that was a “wow” moment for me.
Discoveries like that are part of why I am so grateful to have been called to be a Christian called Methodist. How much more alive would our struggling denomination be if we could just recapture some of what God taught us through the ministry of John and Charles Wesley?
John Meunier 