Wesleyan Vile-tality

This is the final week of our Wesleyan Vile-tality series. Across the series we’ve looked at what changes when we stop managing how our faith looks to other people, the same freedom John Wesley found when he left the pulpit to preach in open fields among the people the respectable church had ignored. This week explores the challenges of a focus on appearance, and what might be possible when we let that focus go. Scripture: 2 Samuel 6:12-23; Matthew 10:40-42…

We continue our “Wesleyan Vile-tality” series, and have followed the history of the people called Methodist. As the movement they built grew into an institution, more than once, the people lost their nerve. This week we turn to the ones who worked prophetically from within, refusing to leave and refusing to behave. They formed communities of accountability and care, and kept asking one plain and profound question: How is it with your soul? Scripture: Jeremiah 20:7-13 (NRSVue), Matthew 10:24-39 (CEB)

Our Wesleyan Vile-tality series has traced the people called Methodist from their polished, respectable later years back toward the bold, boundary-crossing faith of their beginnings. This week we read from the ancient prophets who challenged the people who loved their worship more than action. When our singing and our justice drift apart, how does God respond? What does God call us to do? This week we consider what happens when churches prize reputation over neighbors, and what it takes for…

This week our Wesleyan Vile-tality series follows the early Methodist movement out of the church and into the open, where Wesley and the first Methodists went to the imprisoned, the laborers, and the outcasts. We see the same pattern in two scriptural examples: Abram, told to leave his country and his father’s house for a land God will show him only as he goes, and Matthew, called up from his tax booth to follow and to make room at his…

As we continue “Wesleyan Vile-tality,” we go back to the years before Bristol, when John Wesley and a small group of Oxford students spent their time among prisoners the rest of the city preferred to forget. This week explores what it means to show up for someone the world has written off, why trust between unequal people requires more than credentials, and how the very word “Methodist” was born from solidarity with the forgotten. Luke 4 and Hebrews 13 frame…

This week launches a new six-week series inspired by Dr. Ashley Boggan’s book “Wesleyan Vile-tality.” In 1739, John Wesley decided to “submit to be more vile” and preach in Bristol’s open fields to people the established church had ignored. We begin this series on Pentecost with two passages about the Holy Spirit showing up among people no one authorized and in places no one expected. What happens when God’s Spirit refuses to stay where we put it? Scripture: Acts 2:1-21…