How to be a Christian: Wesley's General Rules

John Wesley, several decades after first
writing the General Rules

How does someone become a Christian? Is it only a matter of saying a creed, thereby meeting the minimum requirements of Romans 10:9?:

If you openly declare that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. (NLT)

Well, even that seemingly simple formula requires the interaction of heart and mind -- that is, the seats of both emotion and reason. John Wesley's concern for the group of people called Methodists was that they would let God purify their hearts and minds, which would lead to increasingly Godly actions in their daily lives. As more men and women responded to the spiritual awakening that was being unleashed in England and elsewhere in the middle of the 18th century, they wanted to know how to be true Christians. Was it enough to be baptized into the Church of England? Was their salvation contingent on regular attendance at worship services in the local parish each week?

As these early Methodists began to ask John and his brother Charles how to grow in their commitment to Christ, the Wesleys responded by organizing them into groups, also known as Societies. These Societies grew into different forms as the movement spread into different areas: there were classes of initial followers (or what we might call seekers today), bands for the more serious, and even select societies for the leaders of the classes and bands. The point was that these early Methodists should be connected to each other -- Christian discipleship is not intended to be a solo journey. The connection between these groups was a bedrock of the growing movement, and the classes and bands in the same geographical region would even meet together as United Societies for fellowship and worship.

In order to keep that connection unified, the Wesleys established three sets of guidelines, known as the General Rules, that kept everyone moving toward the same goals. Here is how John Wesley described the three rules as a fundamental way to understand the expectations of a faithful Christian life:

There is only one condition previously required of those who desire admission into these societies: "a desire to flee from the wrath to come, and to be saved from their sins." But wherever this is really fixed in the soul it will be shown by its fruits.

It is therefore expected of all who continue therein that they should continue to evidence their desire of salvation,

First: By doing no harm, by avoiding evil of every kind...

Secondly: By doing good; by being in every kind merciful after their power; as they have opportunity, doing good of every possible sort, and, as far as possible, to all men...

Thirdly: By attending upon all the ordinances of God 

Check out the link above to read all the details of each of the three rules. Wesley didn't just say "do no harm" -- he specified that Christians should not fight, gamble, or own slaves. Likewise, "doing good" was spelled out as feeding the hungry, visiting those in prison, and helping others. The third rule declared that Methodists should attend worship services (especially Communion), read the scriptures, and pray.

The Wesleys' system of organization into small groups, guided by simple and powerful spiritual guidelines, helped provide a foundation for spiritual growth that combined the emotions of the era's spiritual revivals with the strong doctrine of the Church of England. It's no wonder that the United Societies became so effective that their members started to see them as a form of church itself rather than just a supplement to their own local parish services. Wesley never meant for the Methodists to strike out on their own and separate from the Church of England, but the forces of history in the colonies set the Methodists, and later The Methodist Episcopal Church, on its own path. Today's United Methodists still hold to the General Rules. Anyone seeking to live faithfully in service to Christ would do well to start with these three simple rules.

Radical or Ordinary?

In October 2014 Christianity Today reviewed a book called Ordinary by Reformed theologian Michael Horton, whom I first encountered through the weekly White Horse Inn radio program. I initially liked listening to Horton and his friends because their panel discussion format stood out from a lot of interview-based shows, but eventually I had to stop because the lively group discussions too often took an angry tone that tended to move toward ranting. Horton and his co-hosts were determined to identify and counter non-Reformed versions of Christianity, and it was just too much for this Wesleyan-Arminian United Methodist to take.

So when Horton decided to take on David Platt's best-selling book Radical, I didn't rush out to buy a copy. Not that I am a huge fan of Platt's book. In fact, I saw in Radical way too much earnestness about changing the world. That desire of "I must do something" can be an untamed beast that rages in the soul of do-gooders, ready to be unleashed on anyone identified as a target -- usually someone considered poor, lost, or different. This is something I saw first-hand in certain missionary colleagues who made their ministry more about what they were doing (or giving up) than about following Jesus. Also, Radical is really not that radical; it is not actually calling Christians to re-evaluate the consumerism that pollutes most versions of Christianity in the United States. Take the subtitle: Taking Back Your Faith From the American Dream. This doesn't call into question the assumption that my faith is "mine" to spend as I like. Platt's not challenging the underlying consumerist, individualistic perspective of evangelical Christianity; he just wants you (singular pronoun, not plural) to "spend" your faith doing things that will change the world. As much as Horton's tone makes me cringe, I recognize that Ordinary offers a needed corrective, warning the church against a consumerist version of works righteousness on steroids.

This is an old debate, one that also tore at the fabric of early Methodism as it was getting started in the middle of the 18th century. John Wesley, not unlike Platt, wanted to urge the people called Methodists to do all the good they could, and he formalized the importance of service and acts of mercy in the second of his Three Rules, which the United Methodist Church still subscribes to. This was a clear call against the tendencies of some European pietists like Philip Henry Molther, who said that people should not do anything to grow closer to God. This emphasis on "quietism" taught that one could only wait for God to show up and be revealed -- there was nothing you could do in your own power to experience God in a deeper way. Wesley was concerned that this waiting around would encourage antinomianism  and that people wouldn't be concerned about what they did in this life. Wesley was so worried that quietism might lead to spiritual lethargy (or outright sinfulness) that he harshly denounced it in his Rules:

...trampling under foot that enthusiastic doctrine that "we are not to do good unless our hearts be free to it."

Wesley said we couldn't simply wait around for God. He believed that God is always present and that there are "means of grace" available to help us experience God more deeply. Those means are listed in his third rule and they include things we would expect any spiritual leader to endorse: prayer, reading scripture, public worship, and the sacraments of baptism and Communion. Those from the Reformed camp accused Wesley of work righteousness because he urged the Methodists that they had to do something to grow in faith. I wouldn't be surprised if Horton would make the same argument against Wesley today. But Wesley never wavered from teaching that faith is a gift received from God; his theology centers around the belief that our worship and our works are a response to God's gift of grace. This response is by definition a free offering of love -- it is not a currency to spend.

The debate about how much work one has to do to find faith in God goes to the heart of what it means to live a Christian life. It's why Martin Luther wrestled to understand the epistle of James. Trying to find that balance between waiting for God and doing good things is part of the daily pilgrimage of discipleship. These two books come from two different perspectives, staking out extreme claims on either side. You could read both of them and then try to find a middle ground that works for you. Or you could just start with Wesley and his Three Rules. He already wrestled with the relationship between faith and works, and his balanced perspective can help the rest of us who come after him.

The Bugbear of Sustainability

In my years as a mission administrator I never quite came to terms with the language of sustainability. From the 1990s onward there has been a suspicion of development projects that are started by foreigners and run by outside money. Most experts in the field will grant you that good initiatives have to start that way, but the conventional wisdom nowadays demands that the running and funding of projects has to come from the inside -- that is, from stakeholders in the community (or communities) being served.

That's all well and good. Except that some excellent things will never be sustainable. Take, for instance, Bible translation. The book publishing industry in rich economies is in trouble, and that's with a scale of potential readers that numbers into the millions. Imagine producing a book hundreds of pages long for no more than 10,000 people -- and that's if everyone in the language group buys a copy. Publishing Bibles for minority language communities will never be financially sustainable. You can't sell enough books to even pay for the paper, much less cover the other costs of publication and distribution.  Hence my discomfort with development models that push for sustainability.

In a book review in the Sep/Oct 2015 edition of Books and Culture, Naomi Haynes has named some of the problems that underlie these assumptions about sustainable development projects. Her review of the book Having People, Having Heart by China Scherz largely blames the modern Western concept of autonomous personhood. The book contrasts two different charity organizations in Uganda -- a struggling local NGO which is arguably sustainable, and an effective-yet-unsustainable Franciscan house for the poor. Scherz argues that the individualistic, time-centered ("your funding runs out in X months") post-enlightenment model undermines traditional patron-client relationships, through which many of the world's peoples define and understand their sense of self. In other words, dependence is built in to the structure of many societies. Charities that work within those structures sometimes do more good than ones which set arbitrary timelines for local leaders to take over projects on their own and find their own funding.

The language surrounding sustainable development often seeks to right the wrongs of colonialist attitudes in which the rich world's leaders dictated their own goals to the less powerful. However, the insistence on local stakeholder ownership that severs ties between the donor and client may be just as colonialist as the previous models, in a 21st-century way.