‘Wesley Is Fire Now’ and Evangelicals Are Being Strangely Warmed
By Clayton Sidenbender
This article (including picture) was originally published by Christianity Today on 17 September, 2024. What follows is an abridged version. For the full article, use the link below:
‘Wesley Is Fire Now’ and Evangelicals Are Being Strangely Warmed – Christianity Today
Shawn Hamilton does what a lot of college-aged guys do on Christian campuses. He goes to class. He does his homework and reads his Bible. He plays video games, hangs out with his friends, and thinks about prevenient grace.
“The Holy Spirit tries to beckon people,” the 22-year-old told CT. “It’s more than just common grace, as Calvin articulates it. It’s the reason why all people can do good things. Because we are totally depraved, but it’s the Holy Spirit continuing in every life to give a little bit of light to respond to what God is doing.”
The focus on Wesleyan theology is perhaps a bit out of the ordinary.
But Hamilton attends Asbury Seminary in Kentucky, a school deeply grounded in the Wesleyan tradition. He was a Bible and theology major at Asbury University, so he’s interested in these kinds of things, and he also had a religious experience at a worship service at Asbury University as a freshman. His heart, as Methodist movement founder John Wesley famously described the experience, was “strangely warmed.”
“I felt an immense peace that I had never felt before in my entire life,” Hamilton said. “I cried in that moment because it was so warm and experiential, and that was a moment that really left me questioning, ‘What does it mean to be a Christian and live a Christian life?’”
After that, he found that the doctrines of grace and virtue developed by Methodist movement founder John Wesley in the 1700s started to make a lot of sense to him. As he tried to explain his experience of the Holy Spirit and his sense of what God wanted, Wesleyan theology felt like it fell into place.
Hamilton may not be unique here. There appears to be a growing number of young people drawn to Wesleyanism and Wesleyan-Arminian theology. Nearly 20 years after the rise of New Calvinism—when “Young, Restless, Reformed” Christians embraced the doctrinal system taught by French theologian John Calvin—there’s a new and renewed interest in another theological tradition, which has a bit of a different flavor.
Where Calvin taught predestination, Wesley believed that, through prevenient grace, God freed the human will sufficiently to accept or reject the offer of salvation. God predestined a plan of salvation, but not individual people.
Theologians in the Wesleyan tradition, like many Christians, emphasize the centrality, inspiration, and reliability of Scripture. They also teach the importance of sacraments. And many of them—though not all—are egalitarian, affirming that women can be gifted and called to ministry.
Wesley himself said he was just a “hair’s breadth” from Calvinism, and many Wesleyans, including Hamilton, think there’s just a different emphasis, not outright antagonism between the two positions.
However one thinks of the difference, it’s Wesleyanism today that has an energy and vibrancy drawing in people like Hamilton.
“Things have shifted,” said Brian Shelton, Asbury University’s Wesley Scholar in Residence. “Wesley is fire now.”
Groups of theologians are working to articulate Wesleyan theology in a fresh way. A small Wesleyan seminary has grown 500 percent in just six years. A new Wesleyan denomination, the Global Methodist Church, is sparking revived interest in the history and theology of the tradition and increased attention to spiritual practices, including Bible reading, worship, and prayer. Last year, a revival among the students at Asbury University drew international attention to Wesleyan spirituality.
Andy Miller III, a sixth-generation Salvation Army officer who has joined the Global Methodist Church and is currently a preaching and theology professor and president of Wesley Biblical Seminary (WBS), told CT this is an “amazing moment in Methodism.”
In addition to being president of a historically Wesleyan seminary, Miller leads More to the Story Ministries, which “exists to create content with orthodox Wesleyan convictions to serve the world in the name of Jesus Christ.” His weekly podcast boasts more than 750,000 views and downloads.
There is also a small fleet of Wesleyan institutions, including Seedbed, More to the Story, the Francis Asbury Society, the John Wesley Institute, the Fundamental Wesleyan Society, Firebrand Magazine, and Holy Joys.
Johnathan Arnold, who helped start Holy Joys in 2019, recalls he was steeped in Calvinist theology in high school. He read whatever was on his dad’s bookshelf and really loved a biography of Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards and the Westminster Shorter Catechism. He also started reading contemporary Calvinist preachers and teachers, including John MacArthur, and watching videos of them on YouTube.
One day, however, he found a Q&A with a question that tripped him up on his path toward Calvinism. On the YouTube video, someone in the audience asked a Calvinist pastor how to explain to people who are not Christians that Jesus didn’t die for them.
“I thought, That’s a weird question,” Arnold told CT. “Surely he’s going to say, ‘Of course he died for the world. He’s not only a propitiation for our sins, but for the sins of the whole world’” (1 John 2:2).
Instead, the pastor said this was a complicated issue.
“That just blew me away,” Arnold, now 29, recalled.
It made him question whether Calvinism, which teaches a doctrine called “limited atonement,” was really biblical. He started looking around for other ways to systematize what Scripture said about God’s grace.
That’s when he discovered a book called Wesleyana, a collection of John Wesley’s writings. He liked what he read and found Wesleyanism to be a much more satisfying option. He started to identify as a Methodist.
Today, Arnold is senior pastor of Redeemer Wesleyan Church in Mount Pleasant Mills, Pennsylvania, and is president of Holy Joys. The organization seeks to equip local churches with Wesleyan-informed resources. It spends little time opposing Calvinism but instead tries to recover classical Methodist theology, much of it from the 19th century, developed by people such as Richard Watson, William Burt Pope, and Thomas Ralston.
“Of course, the name Holy Joys comes from John Wesley,” Arnold said. “In that little book, Wesleyana, that I read, one of the very first chapters is on true religion and in that chapter, Wesley says, ‘Christianity is holiness and happiness.’”
The Holy Joys Podcast has more than 25,000 downloads. A lot of listeners seem interested in questions about church structure, discipleship, and building a strong church community.
“Ecclesiology has really become the driving doctrine,” said Holy Joys board member David Fry, who is also senior pastor of Frankfort Bible Holiness Church in Frankfort, Indiana. “We want to write theology for the church and developing healthier churches.”
Chris Lohrstorfer, associate professor of Wesleyan theology at WBS, said Wesleyan ecclesiology offers a vision of the church as a community. Many people, in recent years, have craved a community-oriented Christian life, he said, and that has only increased in response to what some experts have called an “epidemic of loneliness.”
“The Wesleyan understanding of church and Christianity is … what our society is looking for,” Lohrstorfer said.
