The following is an excerpt from Wesleyan Vile-tality by Ashley Boggan. It’s a featured Speakeasy selection, and there are still limited review copies available for qualified reviewers.
Within the Christian tradition, being Wesleyan and/or Methodist calls us to actively stand as a beacon of justice in this world. You cannot identify as Wesleyan or Methodist without constantly seeking to ensure that all people, no matter who they are, how they identify, or where they come from, feel worthy of God’s love, have their basic physical and bodily needs met, and have the ability to seek happiness and perfection in Jesus Christ. If we are actually living into this call of our faith, this book will argue that we will be known as a people who bend the rules and push the boundaries of society to ensure God’s love is continuously felt.
This is the core aspect of our identity, one that we’ve lost, and one that we need to claim. It can be summed up in the ideology of Wesleyan vile-tality—a willingness to look beyond today’s acceptable practices, standards, and norms and bend the rules in order to ensure that more and more persons can be included within the Kin-dom of God. And also that all persons, no matter who they are, how they identify, whom they love, or how they live can know and experience the love of God, can know their own self-worth, and can grow to love themselves and so that they can love others….
Typically, when Methodist scholars speak of Methodist history, we begin with the “three rises” of Methodism. This was, after all, how John Wesley himself described the beginnings of the movement. But, if you ask me, Methodism doesn’t start with Oxford, Georgia, or London—yes, it has crucial components that were formed in those spaces, and John’s faith and mission were shaped by the particularities of certain experiences in these three rises, but John Wesley didn’t really figure out what his true calling was, what he was doing (or how or why), until Bristol….
On March 31, 1739, the day of his arrival [to Bristol], John saw Whitefield preach for the first time, but he was not preaching inside a church (as John had expected him to be). He was preaching in the fields of Bristol, specifically to coal miners gathered there. John writes in his journal, “I scarcely could reconcile myself at first to this strange way of preaching in the fields.” Now, at least for me, when I think of early Methodism, I tend to go directly to preaching in the fields—to camp meetings, to revivals, to John’s preaching atop his father’s grave. But those are all moments that happen after Bristol. Up until this point, John had followed the preaching standards of his day: “I had been all my life (till very lately) so tenacious of every point relating to decency and order that I should have thought the saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been done in a church.”
On April 2, 1739, only two days after his arrival, he does something he never thought he would: “At four in the afternoon, I submitted to be more vile and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation, speaking from a little eminence in a ground adjoining to the city, to about three thousand people.”…
Within three days of being in Bristol, John Wesley’s entire framework of how to preach, where to preach, and what is proper versus what is missionally prophetic was wholly overthrown. This experience shook his foundational understanding of normativity, of acceptability and replaced it with a desire to follow the spirit of God and meet the people wherever they were—even if that be on the dirtiest fields of all of England. And it’s at this point in the story that I’m taken back to that day sitting in the New Room, listening to David Worthington brilliantly sum up John’s action on April 2, 1739: “While John Wesley’s heart may have been strangely warmed in London, it was set afire in Bristol.”
… So much happened in Bristol for John . . . and honestly for me as well. As for John, he dared to go beyond his own comfort zone and follow the Spirit of God wherever it called him; he figured out the basis of any community is a small group of people that can be vulnerable with one another; he built a versatile and adaptable community-centric space where the people dictated how it functioned and for what purpose. His message was received both poorly and well. And through all of this, he just kept going. He ignored praise and criticism and relied instead upon the Spirit of God working through him and the reactions of the people around him. He saw need and acted. He saw despair and loved. He saw people withdrawn and brought purpose and worth. This is what it means to be Methodist. This is the birthplace of Methodism. This is where John Wesley finally figured out what it meant to be a “brand plucked from the burning,” as his mother referred to him when he was saved at the last minute from a burning parsonage. He wasn’t meant to be a pulpit preacher, to conform to the standards of the Church of England. He was meant to stir up trouble, push boundaries, and love people not because they brought him money or fame in return but simply because they were also created by God and therefore worthy of love. I hope the lesson we can take from this today is clear.
We need love in this world. We need hope. But we also need a radical love that is willing to proclaim into all spaces, no matter the consequences, that God loves all and all are worthy of this love. We need radical hope to know that we can do this work because God is with us. We need the example of John getting into trouble, his reputation tainted, his official preaching authority threatened in order to truly embody the call of being Wesleyan. This identity must be reclaimed in order to move us forward as Wesleyans and as Methodists…
This book will delve into the of foundational stories of our Wesleyan/Methodist history and connect them to our current moment within The United Methodist Church (UMC). John Wesley set out to revive the Church of England toward a renewed sense of mission and faith acted out as love. How can we, as United Methodists, seek to reform ourselves to, once again, be a beacon of embodied loving justice in a world that is increasingly polarized. Together, we will journey through the life of John Wesley and those early Methodists, discovering their unwavering commitment to spreading the gospel to the marginalized and their relentless pursuit of social justice. We will also see the contexts for and the consequences of becoming an institutionalized church that lost some of that rule-bending Spirit. The main question this book will leave you with is, “What is our identity moving forward?”
This book is an analysis of our identities as Methodists throughout history. It will delve into our past, but I promise it’ll be an approachable, fun trip backwards that propels us forward with stories of resurrection and of rebirth of a church identity. As you read, I invite you to open your mind to the radicalness of John Wesley and those early Methodists. As we examine how their identities formed, how their faith shaped a movement, and how that movement became an institution, I invite you to think of your faith journey. Why are you Wesleyan, Methodist, and/or United Methodist? What DNA from those early folks still lingers inside of us? What pieces might we need to leave behind? What pieces might need to be reclaimed?
About the Author
Ashley Boggan is a scholar, laywoman, and currently the General Secretary of the General Commission on Archives and History. In this role, she ensures that The United Methodist Church understands its past in order to envision a more equitable future for all. She is the author of Nevertheless: American Methodists and Women’s Rights and Entangled: A History of American Methodism, Politics, and Sexuality and contributed toAmerican Methodism: Revised and Updated .
Wesleyan Vile-Tality on Bookshop
The Wesleyan Vile-Tality essay that started it all
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