Dr. Will Willimon is one of the best known voices of the United Methodist Church today. Recently, Dr. Willimon spent some time with Larry Jent, editor of the Advocate, sharing his perspective on the legacy of John Wesley in the 21st century. Below are excerpts of that interview.

I think we should care because Wesley was a gift. You have hit on a growing theme of mine. There is a growing American tendency to crank everything down and make it all the same, kind of blah, vanilla — I think we United Methodists have got a very particular word on the faith to offer that has been handed to us.

A student came out of Duke Chapel a number of years ago and said to me, "Well that’s another typical Methodist sermon." I asked, "Why was it Methodist?" He said, "Oh, it’s Methodist alright! You just grab people and try to change them." I said, "You’re right: I’m a Methodist. I really do think you need to be born again." I think that we are due for a rediscovery of our distinctiveness. Fortunately, Wesley is rich enough — and the Wesleyan experience is rich enough — that there are lots of memories to draw upon. There are plenty of critical resources to help us in that task.

A lot of evangelicals have professed Christianity as this instantaneous thing that gets you zapped and, there! You are fixed and you move on to glory! Or else developmentalists have stressed the nice orderly way of becoming better and better every day and in every way. That denies the need of this radical thing we call born again conversion. Well, Methodism at its best has held those two together. I am impressed with how we hold that new birth together with growth, holiness. I think that’s a twofold message that the world is literally dying to hear. I work on a college campus and I have found this is a message that is needed and well-received. The students with whom I work are delighted to get born again. They are out looking for something to grab hold of their lives and make them different. They have had dramatic religious experiences.

  The problem is that too often church is anything but dramatic and life-changing. In fact, it seems to be organized as a sort of defense against this surprising God.

On the other hand, many modern, 21st century Americans sense that their lives are in chaos, that they need some better structure and form. Wesley’s movement speaks to that need as well. We were called "Methodists" for a reason. John Wesley thought that some things were too important to be left until you felt like doing them. That is why he gave people disciplines. Our Book of Discipline was originally a way to order our lives together. Spiritual rebirth and spiritual discipline: I think the world needs to hear both. What needs doing among us is so deep and radical and transformative and beyond us that it is more than being nice boys and girls and doing nice things. On the other hand, the work that God wants to do in us is so deep and so radical that it cannot be just a one-time thing. As I say, we Wesleyans believe that you have got to be born again… and again… and again and again. You never get too adept at this faith to not need to be changed. We believe that change is God’s continuing work in us.

I think we lack the cutting edge that we should have. In the context of the Wesley birthday celebration that is particularly sad because Wesley led a huge church reform movement in 18th century England and the cutting edge of that movement was reaching out in the name of Christ to the unreached.

It seems to me that the Disciple Bible Study is one of the most Wesleyan things that has happened in a long time. It has certainly been successful with millions of people. I believe Wesley would smile at that. He had this strange notion that you could take a group of utterly ordinary people and make them into saints. You could teach them good habits. He devised all sorts of creative strategies for that. So I think of Disciple as a wonderful Wesleyan innovation and I think we ought to be on the lookout for more.

Yes, Wesley was truly grabbed by a sense of a God who was moving and lively and demanding and aggressive and imperialistic. That God seemed to be against John Wesley’s basic nature in so many ways. Papa John was very conservative, very happy with the Church of England and all of its doctrines and worship — but he got mixed up with a God who would not let him be. I love the entry in his diary where he says, "And today I submitted to be even more vile: I descended to the level of field preaching." You can just imagine this proper little pastor’s son, this Oxford graduate out there in the field — screaming at people! Here is a man who got grasped by a God who just wouldn’t be contained in the contemporary structures of the Church of England. It seems that too many of us are strangers to that God who is too determined not to let us be. I was in a church in Florida — a declining inner-city Methodist church — they had had problems with break-ins in their church. They had a lot of homeless people in that part of the city. They bought new locks and a new security system and people had just gone right through them. So they had gotten bids on a new security system. This old lady on the administrative board said, "You know, this church has been begging for members for the last 20 years and here we have people trying to get in here. It’s just sad to lock the doors. If they are that determined to get in I think we ought to let them in." So that night they just unlocked the doors and about 20 homeless men showed up. And the pastor said, "We have got to get organized!" The stuff that had to be done to welcome those people adequately in their building — and still keep a building — she said, "That made us a church." John Wesley would smile at that. He would have loved that kind of chutzbah!

No! Not because he thought the culture was positive and down-deep good, but because he felt Jesus is Lord! He had a totalistic view of the work of Christ. I think at our best, Methodists have been concerned with that. Take education for example. We sometimes forget what an amazing thing it was that this fledgling, struggling church in America founded something like 250 colleges within our first 75 years. There are a lot of churches that are frightened with that kind of thinking and exploration, but Methodism has never been afflicted with that.

The buzzword today is "holistic" salvation, but Wesley really may have invented the concept.

Yes, I think of that as a kind of outgrowth of his deep concern about the poor and the disenfranchised. He was very concerned about alcohol abuse because of what he saw it doing to the poor and the way it kept people enslaved. It was his horror at people not having life’s necessities.

I think he is a gift to us. I can remember reading in Wesley’s diary that he was shocked when he figured up how much money it cost for him to get his hair cut. He had resolved on the altar of God never again to pay a barber. And I thought, "Whoa! This is either a sadly hung-up, compulsive little man, or this guy is a revolutionary and he means to have everything under God’s control!" I mean, the man was unbalanced, but geniuses tend to be that way. It wasn’t just his heart that was strangely warmed but his whole life caught fire.

Well, I think we do have implanted deep in our Methodist bones these stories, these memories of Aldersgate, of this little man out in the fields preaching, or in the marketplace with stones flying, the ministry at Oxford, the going to Georgia, the failing in Georgia, leaving Georgia… I think those memories can become wonderfully subversive of a fixed present. I’ve been privileged to travel and speak on almost every continent with heirs of Wesley and I marvel at the adaptability of this movement and the vitality of this vision. He was a radical innovator in many ways.

That memory is badly needed. We need to rejuvenate that.

  I hope we can catch some of that spirit and make this more than a trip down memory lane — that we can make it a way of igniting through memory, what a revolutionary people we were meant to be.

Reprinted from the May 2003 Virginia United Methodist Advocate newsmagazine, 
editor Larry Jent (used with permission).