Welcome all bloggers and readers to this, the new Free Methodist Soul Blog, sponsored by the Free Methodist Historical Society. Our purpose is to interactively engage Free Methodists in thinking about how our history has shaped and continues to shape us and how this history can inform and guide our future. Gerry Coates and I (Jeremy Thomas) will be moderating, but we are hoping for a fairly free flowing environment stimulated by your contributions and responses.
To get the conversation going, I want to begin by reflecting once again on the perennial question of where did the Free Methodist soul go? It seems like it's been missing for quite a while, and after our trilogy of recent search expeditions, we still haven't found it. Therefore, I want to suggest a different search tactic.
My hypothesis is actually quite simple: when we find the Free Methodist method, therein, we will find the Free Methodist soul.
The irony, though, is that this seems like the last place on earth that most of us would ever look. Indeed, as our recent General Conferences have enacted and as our local congregations are evidence of, the once rich set of methodological particularities that Free Methodism embraced and identified around have now been replaced by layers of spiritual abstraction and laissez-faire practice. Somehow we became convinced that adherence to specifics of lifestyle and worship is our Achilles heel--which might not have been an all bad conclusions--but then we made the astounding decision to eliminate this vulnerability by removing it from the body! Moreover, in typical American spirit, this radical and debilitating procedure has been justified under the guise of freedom. After all, it's argued, we're free: free from sin, free for the Spirit, free from secret societies, free for the poor...free from the bonds of methodology, generally speaking...and above all free from the pernicious evil of particularities!
Ahh...but if it were only that easy! Unfortunately, cutting out our Achilles heel, has not made it easier for us to walk. Instead, we will shortly arrive at the 150th anniversary of the Free Methodist Church to discover that we are only an anemic and crippled version of our old self. So, what happened? Where did we go wrong?
Well, I suggest to you that our thinking was not all wrong. Methodology and its derivative forms of legalism had indeed become a problem. It was true that our particular methods were no longer serving freedom, but freedom was serving our particular methods. We had made the mistake of letting a particular version of our methodology become sacrosanct and static, instead of continuing to invigorate it as dynamic and instrumental. Hence, it became crystallized around specific cultural and historical forms, and as that culture and history changed, our methodology became less and less effective, until we came to the unfortunate conclusion that methodology itself was the problem.
I propose to you, then, that the solution to our denominational malaise is to recapture a sense of dynamic specificity. As human beings, we need methods, and as the community, we need particular methods that will form us and shape us and allow us to become the people that our theology believes is possible. Certainly this was both Wesley and Robert's experience, and yet for some unfathomable reason, we have abandoned our historic wisdom to travel down paths of contemporary delight. Is it any wonder, then, that entire sanctification and general holiness have become but skeletons in our corporate closet that we drag out for the occasional required performance, but whose lifeblood was long ago thoroughly ensanginuated? I urge us, therefore, to put flesh back on our bones. Let's reinvigorate our Wesleyan theology with a Weslyean methodology. I, for one, know that I make a lousy Christian by myself. I need the community. I need the structure. I need an introspective methodology that holds me accountable and pushes me on. Hence my simple hypothesis: find our method, and we will rediscover our soul.
Okay, I've given it a stab. Let's have some dialogue, now. What do you all think?
Jeremy Thomas
