by Steve | May 1, 2025 | March/April 2025
Why We Do What We Do —
By Tammie Grimm (March/April 2025) —
I require students in my Christian formation classes to read John Wesley’s Character of a Methodist as their first assignment. I want them to hear from Mr. Wesley himself that though early Methodists of the 18th century were considered particular and peculiar people, they were no more particular or peculiar than the earliest Christian disciples. Being a Methodist, as Wesley contends, is in fact to be Christian and to live out the Great Commandment — to love God with all their heart, mind, soul, and strength and love their neighbors as themselves. But most of all, I want students to wrestle with the fact that the Christian life is first and foremost about being like Jesus — to grow in Christlike character and not merely do the things that Jesus did.
It is the way of the world to describe our life by what we do. Wesley confronted that reality in writing his tract. Yet, our identity as Christians doesn’t stem from the things we do. Rather, our Christian identity is grounded in a loving relationship with God made possible through the grace of Jesus Christ as we live in the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. We can’t work to earn our place in God’s kingdom. It is God’s love and grace that accepts us and makes us his children. It is out of his love that we respond. For those claiming a Wesleyan-Methodist heritage, we believe it is the presence of God’s grace in our lives that initiates our faithful response to help us demonstrate love for God and neighbor by appropriate word, deed, and action in the world. Our ability to do Christian things flows out of our being Christ followers.
Certainly, there are particular activities Christians do. Whether we consider ourselves Methodists, Wesleyans, Nazarenes, Pentecostals, or Calvinists (gasp!), Christians are called to demonstrate our love for God and neighbor. And, some of the activities Christians do are peculiar by the world’s standards. Wesley and his people were called Methodists because others found them to be peculiar in the regular method by which they disciplined their lives. Not only did they regularly gather together to pray, worship, and study scripture, they sought to relieve the sick and impoverished as well as visit those in prison. Just as early Methodists sought to discipline their lives after Christ’s example, we in the contemporary church, embrace those practices of faith that are consistent and coherent with Christian witness throughout the ages.
It is not uncommon for Christians to engage in classic spiritual disciplines because we are taught it’s necessary to do so. We believe these disciplines are good things to do! But, those reasons are not motivation enough keep us going for the long haul.
True inspiration to engage in the spiritual disciplines can only ever be out of loving obedience to God’s grace present in our life. No matter how earnest we are about practicing our faith or how well we perform the disciplines, there is simply nothing inherent in the performance of these disciples themselves that fosters spiritual transformation into Christlikeness. Any growth and maturity in Christ we experience is not and will never be a result of our doing Christian things. God is the one who does the transformative work in us, through the means he chooses.
Thankfully, God is not capricious. He does not dispense grace on a whim. It is the witness of the Christian faith that God uses spiritual disciplines to demonstrate his grace and goodness. The spiritual disciplines we regularly practice out of loving obedience become the means of grace that God uses to mature us further in grace and Christlike character. God’s grace does more than inspire us to Christian action: as grace matures in us, it fuels and sustains our continual engagement in the disciplines. We not only act out of Christlike character, the actions become imbued with Christlike character and are a means by with the fruits of the Spirit are known.
Wesley had several purposes for writing Character of A Methodist, just as I have reasons for assigning it. Yet for the thrill that it might be to see students of Methodist history catch Wesley sparring with his detractors in his writing, I’m far more grateful when my students recognize Wesley’s formational content that speaks across the ages. Christians aren’t only to be known for what we do, but how we embody the disciplines as a means to demonstrate God’s love and grace.
Tammie Grimm is Associate Professor at Wesley Seminary in Marion, Indiana. This article appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Good News.
by Steve | May 1, 2025 | Home Page Hero Slider, In the News, March/April 2025
Body Language —
By Jessica LaGrone (March/April 2025) —
The first paying job I ever held was as a Health Aide in a doctor’s office that primarily treated patients and families who were unable to pay for medical care. I wasn’t qualified to do much in the way of real medicine, so one of my main jobs was to call patients in from the waiting room, to take their height and weight and blood pressure, and then to ask them a set of questions to obtain a medical history known as the anamnesis.
Most of us have been through this process so many times that we might be able to reconstruct the questions off the top of our heads:
• What brings you in today?
• How are you feeling?
• Where does it hurt?
• How long have you felt this way?
An anamnesis includes not only our immediate symptoms, but also our family medical history, allergies, questions about alcohol and drug usage and risk-associated behaviors. The result, recorded in a medical chart, sounds a little like a story, a little like a puzzle, a little like a problem to be solved.
But it’s also vitally important to remember that behind each anamnesis is a person, that the symptoms described are not disembodied, but belong to a living soul whose experience of that story feels very, very personal. Can you imagine anything more intimate than the things you experience happening within your own body?
Anamnesis is a Greek word that means “a calling to mind,” or “a remembrance.”
It’s a calling to remember — here specifically a remembrance or a recalling of the experience of one body. But it’s also the medical history going even farther back than that person’s own medical memory.
When I had the job of collecting an anamnesis from each patient I was not yet “in ministry,” but let me tell you that hearing the story of the body feels like holy work. It feels a little like being a priest: hearing confession and helping someone enter into healing.
Years later I found myself on one of those God-prescribed U-turns and began to realize that my calling was not medicine but ministry. One day I was sitting in a seminary class learning about the sacraments of baptism and Holy Communion when the professor began recounting the historic names of the different parts of the eucharistic liturgy: Confession, Absolution, Sursum Corda, Sanctus, Anamnesis, Mysterion, Epiclesis.
I loved learning all of the mysterious-sounding words, but one of them in particular stood out to me. Anamnesis: The remembrance, reenactment, and participation in the history of the Body.
The very same word used by medical professionals to recount the medical history of our bodies was the word used at the Communion Table to recount the holy history of Christ, his ministry, death, and resurrection, which includes his actions and words of institution at the table in the Upper Room: “Take and eat, this is my body, which is given for you.”
I felt like pausing for a moment to send a quick message to my dad, who once told me I was throwing away an undergraduate degree in premedical biology to go into ministry. I thought about telling him: It turns out, they’re basically the same thing! (Aside from the earning potential, anyway.)
Just like an anamnesis in a medical chart follows the journey of a body, an anamnesis at the Table describes the journey of Christ’s body. A holy history of how Christ came to live and die and rise again for us. An anamnesis of love.
In a passage from the first letter to the Corinthians, Paul makes a shocking claim: “Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it” (I Corinthians 12:27).
I can’t imagine a way of addressing someone in any more intimate way than referring to them as one’s own body. Can you?
Nothing is more intimate for us than the experience of our bodies. Our bodies are responsible for all of our input and output to the world around us. They move at our slightest impulse. They provide contact with the world through our senses. Our bodies are both the way we receive input from the world around us, and the way we move outwardly to impact the world around us.
Here Christ is saying: That’s how closely I relate to you, those who believe in me, who follow me. You are my body. You are the way I long to physically and outwardly express my thoughts, my will, my impulses. When I long to touch the world, I touch it through you. When I pour out resources, I do it through you. When I want to share my joy and celebration at the good world I have made, I want to experience and express that through you, my body.
Back in the doctor’s office where I worked, our storeroom held shelves and shelves of medical charts containing the stories of each patient’s symptoms, subsequent diagnoses, and treatments. Some patients had charts so thick that we filled them and had to open up a second chart, and a third, and more, just to hold their story.
Imagine how thick a medical chart would be for a 100-year-old patient. What if a patient could be more than a millennium old? Two millennia old? How long would their story stretch?
Imagine, if you will, that patient’s anamnesis:
The patient is a 2000-year-old who presents with both acute pain and rampant disease, but also a remarkable capacity for healing and resilience. She has been through a multitude of cancers, amputations, and treatments, but also astonishing recoveries.
Her greatest scars include the Crusades, her silence during the Holocaust, her complicities to slavery and injustice and abuse. Some of these diseases are so disfiguring those closest to her would say she doesn’t even look like herself.
She has been through many treatments, recoveries, and regenerations, often stirring from the point of near death. Sometimes it seems that she is in a coma, or on life support, but that’s usually when she is revived somewhere it is least expected.
Without her, our laws would have no foundation, our societies would lack moral guidance, purpose, and hope. Without her we would miss the depths of compassion brought through her works in hospitals and schools and missions. Through her diseases have been cured, orphans taken in and raised. Countless lonely people in her have found family and purpose and strength.
Because this body is always shifting and growing, it’s difficult to find ways to describe her physical anatomy. What exactly is her height, weight, mass? Is her temperature hot or cold or lukewarm? Is her heartbeat racing or slowed to a flat line?
It’s hard to say what should go in her chart under physical characteristics. Is she a tiny country church up on a hill or a mega-church auditorium? Is she shouting or meditating, dancing or repeating liturgy? Is she gathered under trees, in tents, in cathedrals or auditoriums, at schools or in homes? Is she in schism or in unity? Marching in protest or in bowing in deep contemplative silence?
When we try to picture her some of our feelings are warm and nostalgic, others are pockmarked with trauma or pain. “Church hurt” is a diagnosis repeated all too often these days.
Being part of a body can be both painful and healing. When a physical body has encountered an illness or pathogen, it develops antibodies that are specifically targeted, specifically shaped, to take down those challenges the next time it faces them. It’s the reason I won’t have chicken pox again — my body still carries the antibodies it made when I was nine.
One of the miraculous things about being a member of a body that has existed over 2000 years is that there is very little we can experience today that it hasn’t gone through in some way before. If we are paying attention to the incredible connectivity to the history of this body, we may find many of our diagnoses are not new at all. If we search our chart we may also find treatments there that help.
Scripture can inoculate us against individualism. The Psalms can give us a booster of lament and praise and anger and repentance and joy. Liturgy and history swirl within us, bringing nourishment and reminders that this is not the first time the church has faced challenges.
Church history carries in its bloodstream stories like Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s, who knew the Church during some of her darkest days of sickness. Surrounded by evidence of disease, he still worked to build a new kind of Church that stood on conviction, even when it meant losing his own life to save hers.
Perhaps when we encounter the dizzying effects of nationalism, or the painful symptoms of tyrants and conflicts and wars, pieces of the past will rush at us like white blood cells ready to fight again the very things that threatened before and threaten again.
In the last few years it seems like story after story has broken with news of leaders of the church inflicting harm on the body through misconduct and abuse.
Recently when one of these horrifying scandals broke, a preacher close to the events used his platform to offer those at the center of pain the metaphor from scripture of Lot’s wife, telling those facing a church torn apart by abuse not to turn back, not to dwell on the past, but to continue moving forward in faith.
Whatever his intentions, many heard it as a call not to reveal or process the wounds laid bare by the scandal that had broken only days before. Unfortunately, his message brought more pain to those already hurting. It was heard as a call to silence the heartbroken rather than facing an honest and open counting of the cost, lest the Church be hurt by the stories that might be told.
If I learned anything in the patient intake room long ago, it’s that the telling of the story of pain is part of the healing. Until the body bears witness, tells its whole story of hurt and grief, there is no chance for true healing. That’s what an anamnesis is — to tell the story of the body so that help and healing and intervention can rush in to the areas that need it the most.
To tell the truth is the beginning of getting the help we need. But to hide a wound means risking that it will fester to the point of infection, dismemberment and ultimately loss. If we want to heal, we will tell the stories of the body, even those that make us flinch.
I sometimes talk to young people who have experienced so much pain as they’ve witnessed the flaws of the Church that it makes them want to withdraw into a little corner of the faith. They haven’t given up on Jesus, just the people with the keys to his house.
Sometimes they wonder if they could leave all the trappings behind and start over. As one of them told me recently: “I don’t know if I can bear the Church, but I think I could do just Jesus and me and a few friends.”
“Well,” I said, “then you’ve just started the Church all over again!”
For those who want to authentically follow Jesus, amputation is not an option. We can’t do it alone. Christians need Christians. Churches need churches. Our medical history would urge us not to let the moments of struggle drive us away from the place that healing can happen. Amputation has never gone well for the limb.
There are no single-celled Christians. No healthy single-celled churches. Bodies need connective tissue to survive.
In Communion, the anamnesis, finds its climax in these words: “On the night he was betrayed and gave himself up for us, Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it and said: ‘This is my body, given for you.’”
The same night of deep pain and betrayal was the night when the blessing of the body was offered. This same story of crucifixion is followed by triumph of resurrection. Jesus knows how to sit with a body in pain and suffering. It’s his body after all — both suffering and mended, broken and blessed, all at one table
When my son and my daughter were small, they often had skinned knees and elbows, bruised foreheads and shins. Each night in the bathtub was an anamnesis in and of itself — recounting that day’s bumps and bruises, the most recent wounds of normal childhood play.
Sometimes there was some wound, scabbed over, that would change from night to night, almost as if by magic. “Look mommy,” they sometimes said: “Look! My skinned knee isn’t so bad, my bruise is going away. Why? What happened?”
Who tells a three-year-old about platelets and macrophages and hemoglobin? Who would explain to a preschooler the veritable processional of internal saints streaming to the site of their hurt to bring healing? I would. Because of my dual obsession with medicine and ministry, I did.
And each time we talked about their bodies’ remarkable ability to heal I would also tell them: “God made your body this way! Isn’t that cool? God made your body so that it knows how to heal itself from the inside out.” And sometimes I would even get choked up thinking about these precious bodies, and all the wounds to come, and how God would be there with them for every single one.
After a while, perhaps because I had explained it so often, they just stopped asking. They did what children do: instead of asking the questions, they began to narrate the answers themselves. They would point to a knee or elbow or scab, still hurting but better today than the day before and declare:
“Look mommy! God is healing me!”
May it be true of you and me. May it be true of the body itself. Amen.
Jessica LaGrone is the Dean of the Chapel at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. This article appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Good News.
by Steve | May 1, 2025 | Features, Home Page Hero Slider, In the News, March/April 2025
Scriptural Holiness: A set apart people —
David F. Watson (March/April 2025) —
At its 2024 Convening General Conference, the Global Methodist Church adopted the following mission statement: “The Global Methodist Church exists to make disciples of Jesus Christ and spread scriptural holiness across the globe.” As one of the people who helped craft this mission statement, I was elated at the overwhelming majority that voted in favor of its adoption. Naming scriptural holiness as the center of our mission was an important step in claiming an authentically Wesleyan voice and vocation. After all, it was none other than John Wesley who told us that God’s design in raising up Methodist preachers was to “reform the nation and, in particular, the church; to spread scriptural holiness over the land.”
Since that time, however, a number of people have asked me to explain the term “scriptural holiness.” I get it.
Many Methodists haven’t talked about scriptural holiness for generations. While a brief definition is difficult, the following description might get us started: Scriptural holiness is the work of God we receive through faith to make us a new creation, freeing us from the power of sin to live as a set-apart people. In what follows I’ll unpack this a bit.
Holiness as Separation
At root, holiness is about separation. The Hebrew word we translate as “holiness” is qodesh. It refers to things that are set apart, separate from the ordinary world. It is first and foremost an attribute of the transcendent and perfect God. Consider Isaiah’s vision of God in Isaiah 6:
“In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.’ The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke” (vv. 1-4).
Of all the things these angels could say about God, they proclaim his holiness. God is separate from us. The eternal God who created all things is perfectly righteous and loving, all-powerful and all-knowing. We are not.
Isaiah perceives the contrast between the holiness of God and his own profane nature. He thus cries out in fear. “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”
A Set-Apart People
The good news, though, is that God wants to share his life with us. For this reason, he created a set-apart people to represent him among all the other peoples of the earth. As he says to Israel in Leviticus 20:26, “You shall be holy to me; for I the Lord am holy, and I have separated you from the other peoples to be mine.” Israel is to receive something of the character of God. Just as God is set apart from this world, so Israel will be set apart from other nations. This separation from other peoples involves covenant fidelity between God and Israel. As God says in Exodus 19:5-6, “Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.” The people of Israel are to worship and live differently than the other nations. They are to be holy.
Israel and Judah went through periods of faithfulness and periods of rebellion against God. At times God would send prophets among them to warn them that they had departed from the covenant they had made with him. Sometimes the people listened. Often they did not. The kings rarely did. Following Jeroboam, all the kings of Israel were wicked, as were many of the kings of Judah. Yet the calling of Israel as a holy nation was only a part of God’s plan of salvation. It was never the entirety. When we reach the last verse of the last book of the Old Testament, the story continues.
Jesus Sets Us Free
In the fullness of time, God became incarnate as one of these Israelite people whom he had set apart. “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Jesus, both divine and human, has made the holiness of God available to us in a new way. He not only calls us to holiness, but empowers us to live as holy people. On the cross, he took our sin upon himself, broke its stranglehold over our lives, and set us free for joyful obedience. As Paul explains this to the church in Rome, “But thanks be to God that you, having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness” (Romans 6:17-18). We were once slaves to sin, but now we have been set free to love and serve God.
Wesley knew we could never do this on our own. In our own strength, we can never truly live the way God wants us to live. Sin is too powerful. It warps our minds. It makes us believe that good is evil and evil is good. Apart from the grace of God, we cannot perceive our own sinfulness. In his sermon, “On Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, Discourse the Tenth,” Wesley writes,
“Know thyself. See and feel thyself a sinner. Feel that thy inward parts are very wickedness, that thou are altogether corrupt and abominable…. Know and feel that thou are a poor, vile, guilty worm, quivering over the great gulf! What art thou? A sinner born to die; a leaf driven before the wind; a vapour ready to vanish away, just appearing and then scattered into the air, to be no more seen!”
If this sounds harsh to our ears today, we should understand that Wesley was trying to get across the extent to which sin has warped our hearts and minds. Everyone has sinned — everyone — and even when we know what is right, we often end up doing wrong (Romans 7:14-24). Until we diagnose the problem, we cannot find the cure. The problem, as Wesley understood from the teaching of Scripture, is the pervasive and coercive power of sin. The cure is the healing power of the Holy Spirit.
Continuing his argument in Romans 6, Paul contrasts an old life of sin with new life in Christ. He reminds the Christians of Rome that they used to be enslaved to sin. “But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life” (6:22). This word we translate as “sanctification” is hagiasmos, and it means, “being made holy” or “being set apart.” Now that you’ve been freed from sin, the advantage you get is that you’ve been set apart. You’re empowered to think, speak, and act differently than you did before. You’re called to and empowered for a different kind of life. Those who don’t know Christ will not understand why you live in this strange new way, but you can invite them to be part of this set-apart people as well.
A New Creation
Once we receive Christ, we are not simply the Revised Standard Version of our old selves.
The change God works in us is truly radical. The word “radical” comes from the Latin radix, which means “root.” Our transformation by the power of the Holy Spirit is not superficial. It is fundamental. It occurs at the very root of our being. We call this the New Birth — a crucial element of the Wesleyan understanding of salvation. As Jesus said to Nicodemus in John 3:3, “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” We are made new. In Christ we are a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). This happens because we become “participants of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). Put more simply, God shares himself with us, and in so doing makes us into the people we were always meant to be.
Faith and the Means of Grace
Holiness is an aspect of the nature of God, and it is something he shares with us. What part, then, do we play in becoming holy people? Do we simply sit back and watch TV while God does all the work? Wesley would bristle at the idea. We are saved by grace through faith — by putting our whole trust in Jesus Christ for our salvation. That faith will result in certain behaviors that will make us increasingly open to the work of God. We call these “means of grace.” Wesley identified particular means of grace as the “ordinances of God,” which he listed in the General Rules:
• The public worship of God.
• The ministry of the Word, either read or expounded.
• The Supper of the Lord.
• Family and private prayer.
• Searching the Scriptures.
• Fasting or abstinence.
None of these practices saves us. None makes us holy. None changes our hearts. Only God can do these things. Rather, these practices are responses of faith to the work of God. They are ways in which we beckon the work of the Holy Spirit. When we sin, we quench the work of the Spirit in our hearts, but when we partake of these means of grace in faith, we invite the Holy Spirit to change us. When we read Scripture, worship God, pray, receive the Lord’s Supper, or fast, we engage in practices commended or commanded in Scripture that serve as conduits of the Holy Spirit. As the Spirit works in our hearts, we are made new.
Scriptural holiness is the work of God we receive through faith to make us a new creation, freeing us from the power of sin to live as a set-apart people. When God makes us new, we will think, speak, and act differently from the world around us in important ways. We will live as set-apart people. Many will think us strange. They may even regard us with animosity. Yet it has been this way since the church’s earliest days. Our calling is not to seek the favor of an unbelieving world, but to love and serve God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — who shares his nature with us and sets us apart to bear witness to his love.
David F. Watson serves as Academic Dean and Professor of New Testament at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. He holds a PhD from Southern Methodist University and is an ordained elder in the Global Methodist Church.
By David F. Watson
At its 2024 Convening General Conference, the Global Methodist Church adopted the following mission statement: “The Global Methodist Church exists to make disciples of Jesus Christ and spread scriptural holiness across the globe.” As one of the people who helped craft this mission statement, I was elated at the overwhelming majority that voted in favor of its adoption. Naming scriptural holiness as the center of our mission was an important step in claiming an authentically Wesleyan voice and vocation. After all, it was none other than John Wesley who told us that God’s design in raising up Methodist preachers was to “reform the nation and, in particular, the church; to spread scriptural holiness over the land.”
Since that time, however, a number of people have asked me to explain the term “scriptural holiness.” I get it. Many Methodists haven’t talked about scriptural holiness for generations. While a brief definition is difficult, the following description might get us started: Scriptural holiness is the work of God we receive through faith to make us a new creation, freeing us from the power of sin to live as a set-apart people. In what follows I’ll unpack this a bit.
Holiness as Separation
At root, holiness is about separation. The Hebrew word we translate as “holiness” is qodesh. It refers to things that are set apart, separate from the ordinary world. It is first and foremost an attribute of the transcendent and perfect God. Consider Isaiah’s vision of God in Isaiah 6:
“In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.’ The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke” (vv. 1-4).
Of all the things these angels could say about God, they proclaim his holiness. God is separate from us. The eternal God who created all things is perfectly righteous and loving, all-powerful and all-knowing. We are not.
Isaiah perceives the contrast between the holiness of God and his own profane nature. He thus cries out in fear. “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”
A Set-Apart People
The good news, though, is that God wants to share his life with us. For this reason, he created a set-apart people to represent him among all the other peoples of the earth. As he says to Israel in Leviticus 20:26, “You shall be holy to me; for I the Lord am holy, and I have separated you from the other peoples to be mine.” Israel is to receive something of the character of God. Just as God is set apart from this world, so Israel will be set apart from other nations. This separation from other peoples involves covenant fidelity between God and Israel. As God says in Exodus 19:5-6, “Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.” The people of Israel are to worship and live differently than the other nations. They are to be holy.
Israel and Judah went through periods of faithfulness and periods of rebellion against God. At times God would send prophets among them to warn them that they had departed from the covenant they had made with him. Sometimes the people listened. Often they did not. The kings rarely did. Following Jeroboam, all the kings of Israel were wicked, as were many of the kings of Judah. Yet the calling of Israel as a holy nation was only a part of God’s plan of salvation. It was never the entirety. When we reach the last verse of the last book of the Old Testament, the story continues.
Jesus Sets Us Free
In the fullness of time, God became incarnate as one of these Israelite people whom he had set apart. “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Jesus, both divine and human, has made the holiness of God available to us in a new way. He not only calls us to holiness, but empowers us to live as holy people. On the cross, he took our sin upon himself, broke its stranglehold over our lives, and set us free for joyful obedience. As Paul explains this to the church in Rome, “But thanks be to God that you, having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness” (Romans 6:17-18). We were once slaves to sin, but now we have been set free to love and serve God.
Wesley knew we could never do this on our own. In our own strength, we can never truly live the way God wants us to live. Sin is too powerful. It warps our minds. It makes us believe that good is evil and evil is good. Apart from the grace of God, we cannot perceive our own sinfulness. In his sermon, “On Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, Discourse the Tenth,” Wesley writes,
“Know thyself. See and feel thyself a sinner. Feel that thy inward parts are very wickedness, that thou are altogether corrupt and abominable…. Know and feel that thou are a poor, vile, guilty worm, quivering over the great gulf! What art thou? A sinner born to die; a leaf driven before the wind; a vapour ready to vanish away, just appearing and then scattered into the air, to be no more seen!”
If this sounds harsh to our ears today, we should understand that Wesley was trying to get across the extent to which sin has warped our hearts and minds. Everyone has sinned — everyone, and even when we know what is right, we often end up doing wrong (Romans 7:14-24). Until we diagnose the problem, we cannot find the cure. The problem, as Wesley understood from the teaching of Scripture, is the pervasive and coercive power of sin. The cure is the healing power of the Holy Spirit.
Continuing his argument in Romans 6, Paul contrasts an old life of sin with new life in Christ. He reminds the Christians of Rome that they used to be enslaved to sin. “But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life” (6:22). This word we translate as “sanctification” is hagiasmos, and it means, “being made holy” or “being set apart.” Now that you’ve been freed from sin, the advantage you get is that you’ve been set apart. You’re empowered to think, speak, and act differently than you did before. You’re called to and empowered for a different kind of life. Those who don’t know Christ will not understand why you live in this strange new way, but you can invite them to be part of this set-apart people as well.
A New Creation
Once we receive Christ, we are not simply the Revised Standard Version of our old selves.
The change God works in us is truly radical. The word “radical” comes from the Latin radix, which means “root.” Our transformation by the power of the Holy Spirit is not superficial. It is fundamental. It occurs at the very root of our being. We call this the New Birth — a crucial element of the Wesleyan understanding of salvation. As Jesus said to Nicodemus in John 3:3, “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” We are made new. In Christ we are a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). This happens because we become “participants of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). Put more simply, God shares himself with us, and in so doing makes us into the people we were always meant to be.
Faith and the Means of Grace
Holiness is an aspect of the nature of God, and it is something he shares with us. What part, then, do we play in becoming holy people? Do we simply sit back and watch TV while God does all the work? Wesley would bristle at the idea. We are saved by grace through faith — by putting our whole trust in Jesus Christ for our salvation. That faith will result in certain behaviors that will make us increasingly open to the work of God. We call these “means of grace.” Wesley identified particular means of grace as the “ordinances of God,” which he listed in the General Rules:
• The public worship of God.
• The ministry of the Word, either read or expounded.
• The Supper of the Lord.
• Family and private prayer.
• Searching the Scriptures.
• Fasting or abstinence.
None of these practices saves us. None makes us holy. None changes our hearts. Only God can do these things. Rather, these practices are responses of faith to the work of God. They are ways in which we beckon the work of the Holy Spirit. When we sin, we quench the work of the Spirit in our hearts, but when we partake of these means of grace in faith, we invite the Holy Spirit to change us. When we read Scripture, worship God, pray, receive the Lord’s Supper, or fast, we engage in practices commended or commanded in Scripture that serve as conduits of the Holy Spirit. As the Spirit works in our hearts, we are made new.
Scriptural holiness is the work of God we receive through faith to make us a new creation, freeing us from the power of sin to live as a set-apart people. When God makes us new, we will think, speak, and act differently from the world around us in important ways. We will live as set-apart people. Many will think us strange. They may even regard us with animosity. Yet it has been this way since the church’s earliest days. Our calling is not to seek the favor of an unbelieving world, but to love and serve God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—who shares his nature with us and sets us apart to bear witness to his love.
David F. Watson is the president of Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kenucky. He holds a PhD from Southern Methodist University and is an ordained elder in the Global Methodist Church. This article appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Good News.
by Steve | Dec 17, 2024 | Home Page Hero Slider, In the News
Good News Legacy Continues
As Good News wraps up 58 years of ministry seeking to advocate for scriptural Christianity and lead Methodists to a faithful future, our legacy continues. It continues in the lives of men, women, and children who were inspired and brought closer to Jesus through Good News convocations and the consistently high quality articles featured in Good Newsmagazine. It continues in the closer connections and networks created among U.S. evangelicals and with brothers and sisters in Europe, Africa, and Asia. It continues in the recovery of Methodist essential doctrines and practices that had been forgotten or deemphasized in what Billy Abraham called “doctrinal amnesia.” It continues in the formation, growth, and deepening of the Global Methodist Church as the newest expression of historic Methodism.
The board of Good News has also taken two key actions that will ensure tangible ways that the Good News legacy will continue into the future.
Good News Magazine Goes On.
Many have expressed the desire that Good News magazine continue in some form. We are pleased to announce that the magazine has found a new home!
The John Wesley Institute (JWI), a program of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, is assuming control of the magazine and website of Good News. Editor Steve Beard will continue to guide its publication as a broad-based advocate for Methodism in theology and practice. Pivoting away from denominational battles, Good News magazine will focus more on what it means to be Methodist. What do Methodists believe? How do we practice our faith? How is God working through various streams of Methodism to bring people to salvation by faith in Jesus Christ and discipling them in the faith?
You will soon hear more from the JWI about the opportunity to continue receiving the magazine and supporting its publication. They will also maintain the Good News website as an archive of what God has accomplished through Good News over the years, as well as a repository for future articles and inspiration. We look forward to the continuation of this valuable resource for global Methodism.
Scholarship Legacy for Pastors in Training
For over 55 years, Good News used the generous gifts of our donors to work tirelessly toward ensuring that the historic Christian faith was handed down through the generations. In the last decade, that work has culminated in the creation of the Wesleyan Covenant Association to expand our reach and ultimately the start of the Global Methodist Church. In a real way, Good News kept orthodox Methodism alive through challenging years and ultimately helped shape a denomination that will keep it alive for generations to come.
Having accomplished our primary mission, the Board began to consider how we might best use the remaining funds of Good News to leave a lasting legacy. That included helping to fund the Global Methodist Church Convening General Conference. And now we are humbled to share that we have established three student seminary scholarships. These three endowed scholarships will continue the work of Good News until Christ comes again by offering the opportunity for new generations of seminary students to embrace our historic Methodist tradition and transmit it faithfully in GMC churches for years to come.
Our three scholarships have been placed at three seminaries, each in honor of a Good News President.
- Wesley Biblical Seminary in Ridgeland, Mississippi, will offer the Charles W. Keysor Good News Scholarship in honor of our first president.
- Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, will offer the James V. Heidinger II Good News Scholarship in honor of our second president.
- The Wesley House of Studies at Truett Seminary (Baylor University) in Waco, Texas, will offer the Rob Renfroe & Tom Lambrecht Good News Scholarship. For our third presidential scholarship, we chose to honor both our current President Rob Renfroe and his long-time Vice President and collaborator in ministry, Tom Lambrecht. These two men partnered together to help complete the purposes for which Good News was founded, and we are grateful to be able to honor them both in this way.
If you would like to add a donation to the endowment of any of these three scholarship funds, you may do so to honor the presidents’ work through the years. Information on how to do that is found below.
We hope it brings you joy to know that until Christ comes again, pastors will be trained through the support of Good News donors like you, and they will carry our hope of renewal and revival in Methodism forward into the future!
The Board of Good News is excited and honored to provide for the continuation of Good News’ legacy through the continuation of the magazine and the training of faithful pastors to serve the church of the future. May the work that started in 1967 continue to bring glory and praise to our heavenly Father, our Lord Jesus Christ, and our empowering Holy Spirit.
Information on donations to the scholarships:
Gifts to Wesley Biblical Seminary in honor of Charles W. Keysor should be sent to:
1880 E. County Line Rd.
Ridgeland, MS 39157
On the memo line of the check, please write “The Charles W. Keysor Good News Scholarship.”
Gifts to Asbury Theological Seminary in honor of James V. Heidinger II should be sent to:
Asbury Seminary
ATTN: Advancement Dept.
204 N. Lexington Ave.
Wilmore, KY 40390
Gifts may also be made online at https://asburyseminary.edu/donate/.
On the memo line of the check or in the comment box of the online giving form, please write “The James Heidinger Good News Endowed Scholarship.”
Gifts to Truett Seminary in honor of Rob Renfroe and Tom Lambrecht should be sent to:
Baylor University Advancement
ATTN: Jon Sisk
One Bear Place #97050
Waco, TX 76798-7050
On the memo line of the check, please write “Renfroe Lambrecht Good News Scholarship
by Steve | Nov 20, 2024 | Front Page News, Nov-Dec 2024
Coming out of Exile –
By Riley B. Case –
The 1960s were not a good time for evangelicals. For one thing, the Methodist liberal establishment did not even want to admit evangelicals were evangelicals. When I went to the head of the chapel committee at my Methodist seminary and asked if we might be able to include some evangelicals among the chapel speakers, he informed me everyone at the seminary was evangelical, and just who did I have in mind. When I explained he replied, “I believe you are talking about fundamentalists and we’re not going to share our pulpit with any of them.”
When Billy Graham came to Chicago and some of us wanted to ask Graham to visit our campus, the president of the school said, “No, because we do not wish to be identified with that kind of Christianity.”
The prevailing seminary and liberal institutional view was that “fundamentalism” was an approach to Christianity of a former day and was not appropriate for Methodists, neither in the present day nor for the future. Methodism was set in its direction. In a survey of seminaries conducted in 1926, every single Methodist seminary had declared its orientation as “modernist.” As early as June 1926, the Christian Century had declared that the modernist-fundamentalist war was over and fundamentalism had lost. It announced its obituary in these words: “It is henceforth to be a disappearing quantity in American religious life, while our churches go on to larger issues.”
Other larger issues in the 1960s included war, race, COCU, economic disparity, Death of God, the Secular City, liberation theology, rising feminism, process theology, and existentialism.
Institutional liberalism was out of touch – and I was frequently bemused in those seminary days by how out of touch it was. When someone mentioned revivals in seminary, the professor indicated that revivals were a thing of the past and he had not heard of a Methodist church that had held a revival for years.
It so happened that a friend of mine from Taylor University days, Jay Kesler, was at that very moment holding a revival and would preach at 152 revivals during his years at college, most of them in Methodist churches. Youth for Christ was on the scene, as was Campus Crusade and Billy Graham’s ministry. Evangelical schools were flourishing.
That was the situation when Chuck Keysor, a pastor from Elgin, Illinois, wrote an article for the July 19, 1966 issue of the denomination-wide Christian Advocate entitled, “Methodism’s Silent Minority.”
“Within the Methodist church in the United States is a silent minority group,” Keysor wrote. “It is not represented in the higher councils of the church. Its members seem to have little influence in Nashville, Evanston, or on Riverside Drive. Its concepts are often abhorrent to Methodist officialdom at annual conference and national levels.
“I speak of those Methodists who are variously called ‘evangelicals’ or ‘conservatives’ or ‘fundamentalists.’ A more accurate description is ‘orthodox,’ for these brethren hold a traditional understanding of Christian faith.”
Keysor explained in the article that this minority was often accused of being narrow-minded, naïve, contentious, and potentially schismatic. This was unfortunate because these people loved the church and had been faithful Methodists all their lives.
In making his case Keysor mentioned that there were many more of them than official Methodism was counting. At least 10,000 churches, for example, were using Bible-based Sunday school material instead of the official Methodist material. The 10,000 figures brought strong reaction and led to charges of irresponsibility and plain out lying. But Keysor knew whereof he spoke.
Trained as a journalist he had served as managing editor of Together magazine, Methodism’s popular family magazine. He had then been converted in a Billy Graham crusade and spent some years as an editor at David C. Cook, an evangelical publisher. The 10,000 churches figure had come from his years at Cook. He knew more about what churches were not using Methodist materials than did the Nashville editors at the time. At Cook, he also became aware of the evangelical world.
Keysor’s article drew more responses than any other article Christian Advocate had ever published. The responses followed a common theme: “You have spoken our mind. We didn’t know there were others who believed like we did. What can we do?” Keysor called together some of the most enthusiastic responders. Hardly any of those early responders would be recognized today. Nor were they recognized then. They, after all, were the “silent minority.” They were the little people, the populists — rural church pastors, long-suffering lay persons, conference evangelists.
The obvious step forward for Keysor, a trained journalist, was for a magazine. A notable voice of encouragment was from Spurgeon Dunnam of Texas Methodist (eventually becoming The United Methodist Reporter). In the September 6, 1968, issue Dunnam editorialized that the church needed a conservative voice. The liberal voice was presented by the official Methodist press with Christian Advocate and Concern (Dunnam was one who believed that an official “press” was too often public relations-oriented and thus reflected the views of the leadership) but there was no conservative voice and Good News could fill the void.
“The Texas Methodist is pleased to make known to its readers that within the past year a responsible ‘conservative’ journal of opinion has been born within the United Methodist Church. It is called simply Good News, and we think it is just that.”
Coming out of exile. Would it be possible for evangelicals to get together? On August 26, 1970, the first national convocation was held. Sixteen hundred registered and crowds on some evenings swelled to over 3,000. The speakers included luminaries such as evangelist Tom Skinner, Bishop Gerald Kennedy, Harold Ball of Campus Crusade, and E. Stanley Jones. Dr. K. Morgan Edwards of Claremont School of Theology gave the keynote address. People who came to the convocation prayed and hugged and worshipped and wept and said “Amen” and “Hallelujah” without fear of disapproving stares around them. Twenty percent of the attendees were between 20 and 35 years old. Keysor wrote of the event, “We are coming out of exile.”
The critics cried, “divisive.” Again Spurgeon Dunnam responded. In an editorial titled “Constructive Divisiveness” Dunnam commented:
“The question which remains is: are the evangelicals a divisive force within the church? Yes, they are divisive. Divisive in the same way Jesus was in first century Judaism. Divisive in the same way Martin Luther was to sixteenth century Catholicism. Divisive in the same way that John Wesley was to eighteen century Anglicanism. And, strangely enough, divisive in the same way that many liberal ‘church renewalists’ are to Methodism in our own day.
“A survey of Methodism in America today reveals these basic thrusts. One is devoted primarily to the status quo. To these, the institution called Methodism is given first priority. It must be protected at all costs from any threat of major change in direction….
“The other two forces do question the theological soundness of institutional loyalty for its own sake. The progressive, renewalist force has properly prodded the Church to take seriously the social implications of the Christian gospel…. The more conservative, evangelical force is prodding the church to take with renewed seriousness its commitment to the basic tenets of our faith…”
When Dunnam was writing those words, the Reporter was reaching a million persons per week and was the largest-circulation religious paper in the world. Under Dunnam’s leadership, it investigated both liberal and conservative activities. Even when Dunnam disagreed with Good News, he always treated us with integrity.
In the midst of all this activity, Good News was not on solid ground financially and staff-wise. Then a providential person and offer came on the scene. Dr. Dennis Kinlaw, president of Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky, was cheering Good News on from the sidelines, but he came up with an idea to help Good News as well as Asbury College. He offered Keysor a job of teaching journalism part-time at Asbury with the understanding that the rest of his time could be used to edit the magazine. For the fledgling Good News board it was an answer to prayer. The move was made in the summer of 1972.
At the time Good News was not even recognized as an advocacy group in the church. Engage magazine listed the special interest groups at the 1972 General Conference: Black Methodists for Church Renewal, the Women’s Caucus, the Young Adult Caucus, the Youth Caucus, the Gay Caucus. There was no evangelical caucus. By 1976 things had changed. Good News was able to generate 11,000 petitions, most having to do with maintaining the Discipline’s stand on marriage and sexuality in response to an aggressive progressive agenda.
Keysor knew that these controversial cultural and theological issues would divide the church. The institutionalists responded with the kind of language that would be used frequently of evangelicals of the Good News-type in the years to come: “reactionary,” “out-of-step,” “fundamentalist,” “highly subsidized,” “hateful,” “seeking to undermine the church’s social witness,” “not serving the interests of the church.”
One critic, Marcuis E. Taber, summed up the accusations in an article that appeared in the Christian Advocate (May 13, 1971) entitled, “An Ex-Fundamentalist Looks at the Silent Minority.” According to Tabor, Good News was an “ultrafundamentalist” movement with an emphasis on literalism and minute rules which was opposed to the spirit of Jesus. It had no future in a thinking world.
The Christian Advocate gave Keysor a chance to respond and so he did in the fall of 1971. The response, classic Keysor, was perceptive, straightforward and prophetic. It said basically that Tabor and others were reading the church situation wrongly. Storms were battering the UM Church and soon it will be forced to jettison more of its proud “liberal” superstructure. Meanwhile evangelical renewal was taking place: the charismatic movement, the Jesus People, Campus Crusade, stirrings in the church overseas. If there was a right side of history, it was with evangelical renewal. This is what it meant to be “a new church for a new world.”
Was Keysor right? Looking back on our history, this is worth a discussion.
Riley B. Case is the author of Evangelical & Methodist: A Popular History (Abingdon). He is a retired United Methodist clergy person from the Indiana Annual Conference and a lifetime member of the Good News Board of Directors. This article first appeared in the January/February 2017 issue of Good News.
