Early next year we will be having a Conference wide celebration on the Joy of Wesleyan Believing. Our Lay Ministry Team will be asking every church and pastor to join in a study of United Methodist Beliefs. The text for the study will be a little book that I recently published, United Methodist Beliefs (John Knox Westminster Press, 2007). In the next few weeks, I’ll be using some excerpts from that book as a way of initiating our study of United Methodist Believing:

The Christian Faith

The Christian faith is always in danger of becoming a set of beliefs, a philosophy of life, a helpful technique for getting what you want. But isn’t this faith a set of beliefs? Isn’t that what this book is about, United Methodist beliefs?

Christianity is first of all about God, about God who has come to us as a living, dynamic, complex personality who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If we could adequately get this God fixed, defined, and stabilized into a set of beliefs, then the God we were believing in wouldn’t be the God of the Bible, wouldn’t be the living Lord. Therefore, United Methodists tend to stress faith in God as a relationship with a living, moving, demanding Lord rather than as a set of static ideas.

One of the main differences between a living God and a dead God is that a living God can still surprise you. In Trinitarian faith, it’s not only that God once appeared, that God has spoken; it is also that God continues to reveal and to disclose, to appear and to show up when least expected or even wanted. God speaks. God continues to create something out of nothing, as in Genesis 1. And sometimes the something created out of nothing is a new you! If you can find a God who can be easily defined with a definition, pinned down with a creed, fixed by a set of absolute propositions, reduced to six fundamentals, go worship that. It will be easier than serving a God as loquacious, invasive, and demanding as the Trinity. But it won’t be as much fun. It also won’t be as true. In talking about God in this fashion I am talking like an heir of John Wesley. In 1735, as Samuel Wesley lay dying, he called his son John to his bedside and urged him to seek a personal relationship with the living God through the Holy Spirit. Wesley said later that he had the form of faith without the personal experience of faith. Shortly thereafter, on his rough voyage to be a missionary in Georgia, John Wesley was deeply impressed by the Moravians on board whose firm faith challenged his own uncertainty. Back in England, Wesley met frequently with Peter B ¶hler who stressed the pietistic religion of the heart. Then, three days after his brother Charles had experienced a dramatic, heart-felt conversion, on Sunday, May 24, John Wesley’s soul was engulfed by the living God: 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.[1]

“Aldersgate” is a short hand way of explaining why Methodism has always stressed the personal, relational, experiential reality of the triune God rather than some static, abstract divine set of attributes. It is of the nature of the Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – to be in relationship, indeed to be relational in the deepest, most dynamic sense. To know, truly know this God is to be in relationship with God, to have one’s life engaged, engulfed, enflamed in a most assuredly personal way.

William H. Willimon

[1] Quoted in Albert Outler, ed., John Wesley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 66. Note Wesley’s italics, denoting that Wesley hereby moved from an idea of salvation to the personal assurance of salvation.