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WESLEY ON SPIRITUALITY: MUTUAL ACCOUNTABLILITY AND ENCOURAGEMENT

Many committed Christians concerned about the lack of vitality in United Methodism today have rediscovered mutual accountability as a promising antidote for spiritual malaise. John Wesley used the term “Christian conference” to describe this classic means of grace. The fact is that the realization of a deeper sense of community and solidarity among disciples, which accompanies this means, has always been a primary characteristic of spiritual renewal. Mutual accountability is both essential and effective in the promotion of new life because spiritual encouragement is its heart and core.

“Encourage one another,” says the writer to the Thessalonian Christians, ‘and build one another up” (1 Thess 5:11). No need could be greater in our own time, and especially in the seminary community. Each of us needs the support and care of the Christian community throughout the course of our pilgrimage with Christ. Like the early missionary Barnabas, all of us need to hear anew the call to be “sons and daughters of encouragement” (Acts 4:36). Wesley’s rediscovery of these ageless truths for his own age helped to bring new life into a church crying out for renewal. The Wesleyan model of discipleship offers sound guidance for spiritual renewal in our own troubled age as well. It is a simple model—a method of mutual encouragement for disciples of Christ.

Wesley’s approach to spiritual encouragement is based upon two basic insights. Saving faith, first of all, is the foundation of discipleship. Secondly, spiritual formation (a term much in vogue today) is the fullness of discipleship.

Saving Faith: The Foundation of Discipleship
1. Encountering Christ is the starting point of our pilgrimage of faith. The good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection is the solid foundation upon which to build an abundant life. “May we all come to experience what it is to be not almost only,” Wesley once prayed, “but altogether Christians… knowing we have peace with God through Jesus Christ, rejoicing in hope of the glory of God, and having the love of God poured into our hearts by means of the Holy Spirit, who is God’s gift to us!” Such knowledge and joy comes from meeting the Jesus of the Word—a living reality who can transform all who open their lives to him.

John’s brother, Charles, expressed the liberation of new life in Christ most graphically when he sang:

Long my imprisoned spirit lay,
 Fast bound in sin and nature’s night;
Thine eye diffused a quickening ray;
 I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;
My chains fell off, my heart was free,
 I rose, went forth, and followed thee.

Whenever we encounter Christ, the living Lord, through the proclamation of his saving love, our lives can never be the same.

2. Enjoying community is the necessary corollary to a vital companionship with Christ. There is something about our faith that leads us immediately into fellowship with other believers. This community of those united by God’s grace is the greatest source of encouragement to the disciple. “We introduce fellowship where it was utterly destroyed,” wrote Wesley in defense of his movement, “and the fruits of it have been peace, joy, love, and zeal for every good word and work.” It was the mutual accountability of the early Methodist Societies that proved to be the movement’s greatest strength. The early followers of Wesley demonstrated with their lives that there could be no such thing as “solitary Christianity.”

All UM leaders ought to remind themselves continually about Wesley’s words on this topic. “I was more convinced than ever,” he warned, “that the preaching like an apostle, without joining together those that are awakened, and training them up in the ways of God, is only begetting children for the murderer.” For the Christian, the experience of saving faith leads irresistibly to the camaraderie of a pilgrim band.

3. Emancipating (God’s) children is a third aspect of saving faith—a joyful responsibility actually—which emerges out of a vital relationship with Jesus conjoined with a dynamic community of faith. Living faith, as experienced through the proclamation of the good news and in the community of Jesus’ love, inevitably leads the Christian disciple into service for and in God’s world. The calling that engages all our powers is our service to the present age. This was the “charge to keep” of which Charles spoke so eloquently.

In our journey with Christ there is certainly a centripetal force which holds us together around the center, the hub of our faith; but there is also a centrifugal force which propels us out into the world on its behalf for the glory of God. It is always difficult to live in-but-not-of the world, but this has always been the mark of our higher calling as disciples of Christ. When we proclaim release to the captives (held in bondage to all of the evil forces of our own time) and the inbreaking of God’s reign in its many forms, we are engaged in an apostolic ministry essential to saving faith.

In summary then, this faith—the foundation of our discipleship—implies a dynamic encounter with a living Lord, a
life lived out in a community of support and care centered in Christ, and a calling to be witnesses to liberation and reconciliation in a broken world for his sake. No greater foundation for spiritual encouragement can be laid other than this.

Spiritual Formation: The Fullness of Discipleship
If saving faith is the foundation, then spiritual formation is the fullness of our discipleship in Christ. This is where we see the encouragement of mutual accountability most forcibly.

1. The elevation of the laity is an important initial step toward a fully empowered and well-formed spiritual movement. The Reformers of the sixteenth century rediscovered what they called the “priesthood of all believers,” and Wesley built the evangelical revival of the eighteenth century around an army of well-equipped lay men and women. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, many are heralding the ministry of the laity (baptized) as a sign of hope and light. “Give me one hundred preachers,” Wesley exclaimed, “who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God, and I care not a straw whether they be clergy or lay, such alone will shake the gates of hell and set up the kingdom of Heaven on earth.”

Perhaps it is among the laity—those compelled to live out their faith in the common walk of life—that the movement from saving faith to spiritual formation is most evident. Another Charles Wesley hymn describes this essential connection. Notice how the foundation of discipleship exemplified in the first verse leads to its fullness in the second:

He bids us build each other up;
 And, gathered into one,
To our high calling’s glorious hope 
 We hand in hand go on.
The gift which he on one bestows, 
 We all delight to prove,
The grace through every vessel flows
 In purest streams of love.

The sacred value of each individual before God is the secret to our formation as Christ’s disciples. Each is gifted. Each is called. Each has the potential to be filled so as to fulfill a ministry in Christ’s name. That is a legacy of empowerment and hardly the source of feelings of inferiority so often found among the laity today.

2. Just as saving faith has its communal component, so spiritual formation is enhanced by disciples who embrace their links within the community of faith. It was the small groups of early Methodism (ecclesiola, or little churches within the church) that provided a fertile environment for Christian growth. “A society,” explained Wesley, “is no other than a company of men and women having the form and seeking the power of godliness, united in order to pray together, to receive the word of exhortation, and to watch over one another in love.” Networking is the term perhaps more commonly used today. What Christians are learning now, as Wesley discovered then, is that unless we are joined together we will never ‘increase with the increase of God.”

Our discipleship cannot be experienced in the fullest sense until we fully see our need for each other, both weak and strong, both powerful and impotent. Spiritual elitism and arrogance was a problem in Wesley’s day, as it is potentially in our own, and he realized that intimacy among fellow pilgrims was a necessary guard against such self-righteous deceptions. A lesser-known Charles Wesley hymn makes the point succinctly:

Two are better far than one
  For counsel or for fight;
How can one be warm alone,
 Or serve his God aright?
Join we then our hearts and hands,
 Each to love provoke his friend,
Run the way of his commands,
 And keep it to the end.
Woe to him whose spirits droop, 
 To him who falls alone!
He has none to lift him up,
 To help his weakness on.
Happier we each other keep,
 We each other’s burdens bear;
Never need our footsteps slip,
 Upheld by mutual prayer.

3. Opening one’s self to experience God’s love continually is a final aspect of our spiritual formation in Christ. By immersing ourselves in the various means which God has given to us to continue to meet and commune with Christ, we open ourselves to the possibility of full Christian maturity or perfect love. Prayer communicates the deepest self to God, and enables God to speak to each of us. The Word, heard, read, meditated upon, is our daily staff of life. And as the Wesley’s were so eager to sing concerning the Eucharistic meal,  “But chiefly here my soul is fed/With fullness of immortal bread.” The Wesleyan revival was sacramental as well as evangelical, and Wesley’s rediscovery of these classic means of grace enabled countless followers to experience God’s love in the many sign-acts of our faith. Growth in grace was the consequence, fullness of discipleship its fruit.

Many well-meaning Christians today yearn for the fruit of faithful discipleship but shun the labor it requires. Just as now, Wesley found it necessary to caution those in his own time who seemed to be “expecting knowledge, for instance, without searching the Scripture and consulting the children of God; expecting spiritual strength without constant prayer; expecting growth in grace without steady watchfulness and deep self-examination.” The irony is that all these “tasks” are, in fact, the greatest “gifts” of God and the joy of those freed by God’s love continually renewed.

Spiritual formation, then, is rooted in our effort to value and empower the people of God, to embrace opportunities for intimate fellowship and accountable nurture, and to open our lives to the experience of God’s self-giving love through the various means of grace. These are all the concrete expressions of God’s encouragement of God’s own people.

In our pilgrimage with Christ we are encouraged because we have encountered Christ, enjoy community, and seek to emancipate all of God’s children; we elevate the laity, embrace our links, and experience God’s love anew as we seek to fulfill our various callings through God’s grace. “Let that love pant in your heart,” as Wesley would say to encourage us today, “let it sparkle in your eyes; let it shine in all your actions.”

By Paul Wesley Chilcote, former John Wesley Fellow, Visiting Associate Professor of Church History, Methodist Theological School in Ohio.