What Methodists believe, and how they worship
Methodism began as a renewal movement inside the Church of England under John and Charles Wesley in the 1730s, and grew into the largest Protestant body in nineteenth-century Canada. Most Canadian Methodists entered the United Church in 1925; the congregations still called Methodist today are chiefly those that did not.
1 Methodist church in Owen Sound
What Methodists believe
Methodists hold the common faith of the creeds: one God in three persons, the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ, the authority of Scripture and the hope of his return. What distinguishes them is John Wesley’s account of salvation. God’s grace goes before anyone seeks him, so that the will is freed to respond; the atonement is offered for all, not for an elect few; assurance of forgiveness is an ordinary part of Christian experience rather than a rare gift; and holiness of heart and life is the goal towards which grace is working, in this life and not only the next.
Wesley never wrote a new confession. He gave his preachers his published sermons, his notes on the New Testament and a pruned version of the Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles, and expected the doctrine to be learned by practice: in class meetings, in hymns, and in visiting the poor and the imprisoned. Charles Wesley’s hymns carry as much of the theology as the sermons do.
Worship: what a service is like
A Methodist service is ordered but unfussy: hymns, extempore and written prayer, Scripture, and a sermon that expects a response. Singing matters a great deal, and the hymn book is close to a doctrinal standard. Holy Communion is celebrated less often than in Anglican or Lutheran practice, monthly in many congregations, and the table is open to any baptized Christian who loves Christ. Infants are baptized, and children are presented and prayed for.
In the British Methodist Episcopal tradition the service is warmer still, with testimony, call-and-response preaching and a strong gospel-music inheritance, and the congregation’s history is part of the worship rather than a footnote to it.
How Methodist churches are organized
Methodism is connexional: congregations are not independent but bound together, and ministers are stationed by the wider body rather than called by a single church. Episcopal Methodist bodies, including the British Methodist Episcopal Church, are led by bishops who ordain and appoint; others are governed by conference alone.
In Canada most Methodist congregations joined with Congregationalists and the majority of Presbyterians to form the United Church of Canada in 1925, which is why a Canadian town of any size usually has a United church where its Methodist one stood. The congregations that remained Methodist include the British Methodist Episcopal Church, organized in 1856 by Black Canadians who had separated from the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Free Methodist Church in Canada.
Compared with Reformed churches
Methodists and Reformed churches share the creeds, the authority of Scripture, justification by faith and infant baptism, and both grew out of the Reformation’s insistence that salvation is God’s work and not ours. They part on the questions Calvinists and Arminians have disputed since the seventeenth century. Reformed churches confess that God chose a people before the foundation of the world, that Christ died to save them, and that he keeps them to the end; Methodists teach that grace is given to all, that it may be resisted, and that a believer may fall away. Methodists also expect sanctification to be capable of a decisive advance in this life, while Reformed confessions describe a lifelong struggle in which sin is never entirely left behind.