A few years ago, someone in our church’s youth ministry decided to make a list of rules for the church gym. If I recall correctly, the rules were written in red letters on white poster board. Someone hung the rules at the main entrance, and with gems like “no profanity”, “no...

No, I don’t mean that Erasmus. The one I’m referring to was an 18th Century Eastern Orthodox bishop, from the Diocese of Arcadia on the Greek island of Crete. What does he have to do with Methodists, you ask? Well, not much or a lot, depending on what you think of the Catholic view of a...

Nothing John Wesley preached created more controversy in his day than the doctrine of Christian perfection, also known as entire sanctification. And it would probably cause a big stir now too, except no one preaches it. Okay, maybe some people do somewhere, but I don’t hear it in the United M...

In A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, John Wesley includes some Q & A sessions from his preacher’s conferences. In 1745, these questions made the list: Q. Is [inward sanctification] ordinarily given till a little before death? A. It is not, to those who expect it no sooner. Q....

A recent article of mine has raised some questions in my inbox and on Twitter. Some of you are wondering if I now support breaking up the United Methodist Church into 2 or more denominations. No, I don’t. But I will admit, there has been a shift in my thinking about keeping the denominatio...

In the comments section of  a post at Wesley Report, Jessica Kelley made the observation that in a connectional system like the United Methodist Church, multi-site congregations could be rare because, in theory, UMC’s are in many ways locations of one church anyway. She then confessed tha...

A few months ago, NBC took a big risk. The network killed five hours of popular (and expensive) dramatic shows and filled those hours with what was essentially a retooled Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Critics were merciless, viewers defected, local news ratings took a nosedive and affiliates bega...

There has been some discussion about my post “Methodists Doing Ministry”. The main question seems to be concerning Methodist laity and the sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion. Why can’t non-clergy consecrate Communion elements or perform baptisms? Well, I suppose we tec...

Dave Warnock writes about the priesthood of all believers. As a British Methodist, Dave is not part of the United Methodist Church, but his post helped me remember one of the things I love about our Methodist system. With the exception of the sacraments, ordinary “non-clergy” Methodi...

If you want to be a radical Methodist, reading from the Bible should become one of your daily habits. Covering a lot of scripture each day isn’t necessary. For me, even the One Year Bible is too much, because I prefer quality over quantity. Sure, there’s some value in reading throug...