Posts from May 2026

Introduction As we continue our Wesleyan Vile-tality series, we go back to the years before Bristol, when Wesley and a small group of Oxford students spent most of their time in the prisons of Oxford, among people the rest of the city preferred to forget. They called themselves the Holy Club. Others called them Bible Moths, Sacramentarians, and eventually, Methodists. This last word first appeared in print because of the stir they caused. In our text this week, Luke frames Jesus’ mission…

Introduction This Sunday is Pentecost, and it’s also the beginning of a new six-week series: Wesleyan Vile-tality. The series takes its name from Dr. Ashley Boggan’s book, which asks what it would look like for The United Methodist Church to reclaim its original identity as a movement of people willing to go where they weren’t supposed to go and say what they weren’t supposed to say. The title comes from John Wesley’s journal entry of April 2, 1739, when he “submitted…

Introduction This is the final week of our post-Easter series Reckless Love. Over the past five weeks, we have explored what it means to begin with love, expand the circle, love lavishly and openheartedly, and value the vulnerable. Along the way, our understanding of what love requires has widened. This week, we consider these core questions that undergird the entire series: whose examples are we following, and what does it look like to follow them with our whole lives? In John…

Introduction As we near the end of our post-Easter series Reckless Love, we arrive at a question that has been building for weeks: what do we do with the people we’d rather avoid? We’ve explored what it means to begin with love, expand the circle, give lavishly, and love openheartedly. This week, we are called to go further, toward the people our communities have written off. In Mark 5, Jesus crosses into Gentile territory and encounters a man living among the…