If your heart is as my heart … give me your hand.[1] John Wesley
I will not sit quietly while the world aches for redemption. I belong to a Christ who sets hearts on fire and sends them out to burn.
I am a true Wesleyan.
I believe there is more than forgiveness. The Holy Spirit does not merely pardon me. He makes me new. He calls me to be holy, not as a burden to bear but as the very freedom for which I was made. Grace is not permission to remain as I am, but the power to become who God created me to be.
I am a true Wesleyan.
I come from a people who took that freedom and rode on horseback into the wilderness frontier, who packed their belongings in coffins knowing they were never turning back. They preached in barns, schoolhouses and open fields. They were beaten, imprisoned and exiled to the margins. They chose to shelter the hunted as they were fleeing and opened pulpits to women when no one else would. They crossed to the other side of the tracks to minister to prostitutes, alcoholics and everyone the “respectable” church had written off. This is the Christ-haunted, kingdom-building lineage I carry.
I am a true Wesleyan.
I am not my own. Whatever God asks of me, whether it costs me comfort, reputation or safety, I give it freely. No parish is too far, no people beyond reach. I will exhaust every means and every moment doing all the good I can for everyone I can. I will carry this message of hope across borders and barriers, into classrooms and clinics, offices and shop floors, city streets and forgotten corners. I will be a living witness of the good news in the ordinary spaces and places of my world.
I am a true Wesleyan.
Not because I love the name of John Wesley, but because I love the Christ whose fire Wesley carried. I will be a folk theologian in the thick of culture, a circuit rider in frontier places, a freedom fighter wherever people are enslaved or marginalized in body or spirit. I will preach for a decision and live as proof of one.
I am a true Wesleyan.
Matthew Tietje is the director of communication of The Wesleyan Church.
[1] https://wesley.nnu.edu/john-wesley/the-sermons-of-john-wesley-1872-edition/sermon-39-catholic-spirit.
