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Wesleyan Life

Holiness in the Twenty-First Century

By Lawrence W. Wilson

The holiness of The Wesleyan Church in the current century will be different from the holiness of the previous two. In the days ahead, this movement will reclaim its Wesleyan heritage by fusing personal purity with missional living. We will again become a transformed people who transform the world.

Our Founding Passion

Our movement was born from the fiery conscience of leaders such as Seth Cook Rees, Martin Wells Knapp, Orange Scott, and Luther Lee who were consumed with a passion for righteousness. The abolition of slavery, ministry to the poor, inner-city evangelism, and the equality of women were distinguishing features of our movement. We aimed to see the world put right or die in the attempt.

The Personal Drift

By the early twentieth century, many of those national issues had been resolved and the growing disparity between our mostly underclass constituents and the increasingly prosperous society around them caused us to turn holiness inward. Even temperance, our final social passion, became personalized as the avoidance of alcohol shifted from a crusade to reform society to a test of individual piety. The same movement that had campaigned for the abolition of slavery stood silent on the issue of civil rights, preaching instead against the personal sins of immodest adornment and worldly entertainment.

We became better known for our devout personal lives than for our passion to transform the world.

Holiness Abandoned

By the end of the second world war, the children of the holiness movement had inherited a religion that seemed more a collection of rules than a life-transforming experience. Rather than reform the movement, the upwardly mobile baby boomers largely abandoned it, seldom again mentioning the word holiness. We adopted evangelism (without a corresponding emphasis on discipleship) as the mission of the church, and our ministry tended to deemphasize the transforming power of the Holy Spirit, relying increasingly on leadership principles, managerial expertise, and psychological solutions to the sin problem.

The Coming Revival

Already in the twenty-first century, we are seeing revived interest in the classic doctrine of holiness. This new movement will likely bypass the ethos of the twentieth century, however, and perhaps even that of the nineteenth. Younger Wesleyans are intent on recapturing the dynamic holiness of the eighteenth century, the holiness promoted by John Wesley himself, which is a deep love for God that produces both heart purity and the transformation of society.

We have discovered that the terms personal holiness and corporate holiness are each incomplete, for holiness must always be both. A flame that generates no light is no flame at all, and holiness that does not move beyond itself to impact the world is not holiness. Likewise there is no holiness that makes a just world but not a pure person. If we believe that we can save the planet, end a war, or ensure fair treatment of immigrants while we ourselves remain slaves to sin, we are as sadly mistaken as those who have believed they could purify their hearts without loving their neighbor. Heart holiness will inevitably change both the person and the world. This is the holiness the first century and, God willing, it will be the hallmark of our church in the twenty-first century.

- Lawrence W. Wilson is editorial director at Wesleyan Publishing House, Indianapolis, Ind.