A Wesleyan Theology of Worship

Wesleyan liturgical theology is deeply concerned to define worship as more than public acts. Worship has to do with all of life, with relationships, and with vocations. In deed and thought believers continually act out their relationship to Christ.

Christianity, as John Wesley describes it, is the method of worshiping God which has been revealed to us by Jesus Christ. Christ makes known the profusion of God’s love for us, and faith (“the eyes of the newborn soul”) apprehends this love. Faith involves us in a life of worship as we are drawn to adore and to imitate the God who has loved us. Thus “worship,” in the Wesleyan tradition, encompasses not only public rituals and private devotions but the Christian life in all its fullness.

Worship is much more than the simple awareness of God. In its most general sense, worship is adoration, the loving contemplation of God’s holiness. Worship, says Wesley, brings us into the presence of God. Through it, we “find such a near approach [to God] as cannot be expressed. [We] see him, as it were, face to face … ” (The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, vol. 1 [Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1979] 514. Subsequent references will be to Works.) In the presence of this God we learn “to love him, to delight in him, to desire him, with all our heart and mind and soul and strength; to imitate him we love by purifying ourselves, … and to obey him whom we love … both in thought, and word, and work.” (Works, vol. 1, 544).

This sense of adoration and devotion before the presence of God found expression in the singing that characterized Methodist worship from its earliest days. Charles Wesley devoted his theological energies to setting Methodist doctrine to poetry and melody.

Worship invokes in the worshiper the whole drama of redemption including the call to repentance, the joy of knowing God as forgiving God, and the challenge of imitating Christ through holy living.

As a priest in the Church of England, Wesley was familiar with and generally at home in highly ritualized forms of worship. As a young missionary to the English settlement at Savannah, Georgia, he pored over new translations of Eastern Orthodox liturgical texts and revised the Anglican prayer book based on his research. In the heyday of the Methodist revival, he advised his followers to attend Communion as often as possible, preferably daily (he personally received Communion 5 days a week on average). He recommended the Anglican prayer book for personal devotions and provided a revised edition of it for American Methodists—i.e., the Sunday Service.

Wesley distinguishes between the outward form of worship and its inward power, neither of which can be neglected. He criticizes nominal Christians for observing the forms of worship while neglecting the power of God’s grace at work in them. To these, he says “true religion is so far from consisting in forms of worship.” (Works, vol. 1, 219).

At the same time, he criticizes believers who insist that “spiritual worship” makes the form of worship a matter of indifference and who ask “will it not suffice to worship God, who is a Spirit with the spirit of our minds?” (Works, vol. 1, 532). To these Wesley insists that worship must engage our whole person and therefore, must include a disciplined use of the “means of grace,” including public and private prayer, the Lord’s Supper, Scripture reading, fasting, and small group nurture. Although forms and rituals can be abused, “let the abuse be taken way and the use remain. Now use all outward things, but use them with a constant eye to the renewal of your soul in righteousness and true holiness.” (Works, vol. 1, 545).

This unity of inward power and outward form enables Wesley to maintain a theology of worship that straddles the divide between a liturgical formality and formless subjectivism. Worship centers on the objective realities of God’s presence and at the same time, it draws the heart of the believer into a transforming relationship.

Wesley’s discussion of the specific elements of worship indicates a thorough and consistent re-interpretation of liturgical forms in keeping with his theological commitment of visible holiness in believers.

Baptism represents the ordinary means by which we are initiated into the life of Christ. In speaking of infant baptism Wesley teaches a mild form of baptismal regeneration: “By baptism, we are admitted into the Church, and consequently made members of Christ, its Head … By water then, as a means, the water of baptism, we are regenerated or born again.” (Works, “A Treatise On Baptism,” in vol. 10, 190–2).

Yet Wesley adapts this Anglican view to his evangelical commitments. He concludes, for instance, that although baptism is the ordinary means of initiation into the life of Christ, it is not necessary to salvation: “If it were, every Quaker must be damned which I can in no wise believe.” (Works, vol. 26, ed. Frank Baker [Oxford: Clarendon Press, c. 1975], 36). In preaching to nominal Christians Wesley seems to dispense with baptismal objectivity altogether, chastening his listeners for assuming that baptism assures their salvation: “Lean no more on the staff of that broken reed, that ye were born again in baptism. Who denies that you were then made children of God … But notwithstanding this ye are now children of the devil.” (Works, vol. 1, 430). Wesley calls those who have lived away from their baptismal identity to rebirth in the Spirit.

Wesley’s teaching on the Eucharist begins with a strong emphasis on the real presence of Christ. “He will meet me there because he has promised so to do? I do expect that he will fulfill His word, that he will meet and bless me in this way.” (Poetical Works, III, 203–4). We can come to the Lord’s Table in the confidence that Christ will meet us there.

So confident was Wesley in Christ’s presence that he speaks of the converting power of the Eucharist. “Ye are the witnesses. For many present know, the very beginning of your conversion to God (perhaps, in some, the first deep conviction) was wrought at the Lord’s Supper.” (Journal, vol. 2, ed., Nehemiah Curnock [London: Charles H. Kelly, n.d.], 360–61). Those who seek God may find him revealed to them here. The Lord’s Supper stands as the chief means by which believers receive the grace of Christ and remained, for Wesley, an indispensable element in Christian living.

Wesley’s one real innovation in worship was his Covenant Service which became an annual practice in the Methodist Societies after 1755. Wesley based his liturgy on a seventeenth-century Puritan service. The Covenant Service’s prayers, responses, and solemn vows emphasized his vigorous program of moral and spiritual discipline.

For most of the eighteenth century, the Methodist Societies remained within the Anglican church. Therefore, in practice, Methodist worship rarely included sacramental elements. Methodists were instructed to receive the sacraments at their parish churches, whereas the Methodist chapels were reserved for singing and preaching. As the Societies gained independence from the Church of England, and finally broke with it altogether (1795), these limitations came to shape Methodist worship, especially in England. The tensions in Wesley’s sacramental-evangelicalism generally relaxed in favor of more informal worship styles. These tendencies were only heightened by the independent culture of the North American frontier. In this century the influences of the student movement and liturgical renewal movement have led to a resurgence of liturgical formality and sacramental practice in Methodism.