Yes, The United Methodist Church has a new vision statement: The United Methodist Church forms disciples of Jesus Christ who, empowered by the Holy Spirit, love boldly, serve joyfully, and lead courageously in local communities and worldwide connections.
As we embrace the new, fresh vision, we also recognize a vision that is deeply rooted in our Wesleyan roots, a denominational DNA with a tradition of scandalous grace, joyful discipline, and fearless leadership that has, from the start, disrupted societal norms in order to embody God’s love for all people. Let’s dig into the history of how we’ve loved boldly, served joyfully, and led courageously.
Love Boldly: The Vile Origins of Inclusive Grace
In the spring of 1739, John Wesley, an Oxford-educated clergyman of the Church of England, stepped into the muddy outskirts of Bristol and changed the world. He had been summoned by George Whitefield to witness the crowds flocking to outdoor preaching. What he found was a moral and literal mess—coal miners and factory workers swarming to hear the gospel outside church walls. His reaction was a blend of horror and divine compulsion. Just two days after arriving, he wrote in his journal, “At four in the afternoon, I submitted to be more vile.” With that phrase—submitted to be more vile—John Wesley preached outdoors for the first time, violating his own standards of clerical decorum, and in doing so, ignited a movement that would become Methodism.
John Wesley’s submission to be “more vile” was not an aesthetic shift—it was a theological earthquake. Preaching in the open air to miners, dock workers, and the poor wasn’t just a new location for ministry; it was a new direction for the gospel. Wesley equated the soot-covered fields of Bristol with the ornate sanctuaries of London. He proclaimed that God’s love belonged as much to the outcast as to the elite. This was a scandal. It was also love in action.
Even before Bristol, Wesley was engaged in a different kind of radical love: prison ministry. In 1732, he and his Holy Club companions took food, medicine, and spiritual care to prisoners at Oxford’s Bocardo. Among those inmates was Thomas Blair, sentenced to death for an alleged homosexual relationship. Wesley didn’t just visit Blair; he defended him. He helped marshal his legal defense, rose at 4 a.m. to attend the trial, and paid Blair’s fine when others wouldn’t. Wesley’s association with Blair was public and costly. It also marked the earliest known moment when he and his companions were derisively called Methodists—a name that stuck because their faith was not merely theological but lived, embodied, and bold.
To love boldly in our day is to embrace this legacy. It is to advocate for LGBTQ+ inclusion not as an innovation but as a recovery of our truest Methodist roots. It is to say, as Wesley did, that no human being is outside the reach of God’s grace—and to act accordingly.
Serve Joyfully: Methodism as Faith Acted Out
To *serve joyfully* may sound like a simple command in 2025, but in the 18th century, joy was not a quality typically associated with religious life—especially not for the poor, the imprisoned, or the marginalized. Faith in Wesley’s time was often austere, hierarchical, and restricted. Church was something you endured, not something you celebrated. It was a place where your worth was tied to your station, your dress, and your silence. Religion was solemn, rule-bound, and deeply suspicious of emotion – or “enthusiasm.”
Into this rigid world came a movement that sang—loudly, publicly, and often. A movement that fasted with intention and feasted with thanksgiving. A movement that rejoiced not in power, but in mutual love, spiritual accountability, and care for neighbor. The Methodists, as John Wesley shaped them, were a bit… weird. They walked around with strangely warmed hearts, talking openly about grace, crying tears of repentance and joy in small groups, and delighting in the spiritual growth of one another.
This was not only uncommon—it was revolutionary.
The early Methodists didn’t just study the Bible. They embodied it. Their joy came not from status or salvation as a reward after death, but from knowing they were loved—fully, freely, and without condition—by the living God. They gathered in bands and classes to share life, confess struggles, and encourage each other. They visited prisons and hospitals not out of duty, but from a spirit of compassionate delight. They organized schools, medical dispensaries, and mutual aid networks not just to correct injustice, but because they believed joy could be cultivated through holy community.
And that joy—shared, practiced, and infectious—was one of their most distinctive and scandalous qualities. People couldn’t quite figure them out. They sang hymns while being jeered. They smiled while being beaten. They built communities of love in the face of cruelty. They broke social codes with laughter and praise on their lips. It wasn’t just what they believed—it was how they believed that turned heads.
Joy was their protest. Joy was their spiritual discipline. Joy was their public witness.
When we serve joyfully today, we are not just being optimistic. We are embodying the rare, countercultural witness of those early people called Methodist – who dared to find delight in faith, community, and transformation. We are saying, as they once did, that faith as loved lived out doesn’t drain us—it enlivens us. Because joy, in the Wesleyan tradition, is not a mood. It’s a movement.
Lead Courageously: Turning the World Upside Down
Courageous leadership has always meant risking reputation, safety, and power to proclaim the gospel. The early Methodists knew this. In 1743, Charles Wesley was visiting a Methodist society in Wednesbury, England, and was accosted. The story goes: Charles accompanied the society on their four-and-a-half-mile walk to their meeting house. Since they were led by Charles, they, of course, sang hymns as they walked – drawing attention and derision to themselves. Upon arrival at the meeting house, they were confronted by a hostile group who shouted a quote from Acts 17:6, with a slight alteration: “Behold, those people called Methodists, who turn the world upside down, have come here also.” The same words that were shouted to Paul and Silas for proclaiming Jesus as Messiah were shouted at Charles Wesley and early Methodists. How were the early Methodists turning the world upside down? By leading the church outside of its own comfort zone. The Wesley brothers and other Methodists were jailed, assaulted, and mocked. Their crime? Singing hymns in public, inviting women to preach, visiting prisoners, and denouncing slavery in a time when the Atlantic slave trade was at its peak.
John Wesley’s courage was not only in the fields or the pulpits—it was in the policies he challenged and the systems he disrupted. His 1774 tract Thoughts Upon Slavery condemned the institution unequivocally. He refused communion to those who enslaved others. He structured the Methodist societies so that enslavers could not be members. When the Methodist Episcopal Church compromised these principles to preserve institutional comfort, schisms followed—not because people left the faith, but because the institution’s leaders had lost their prophetic edge.
Wesley feared not the extinction of Methodism but its domestication: “a dead sect, having the form of religion without the power.” That power was not about institutional dominance but spiritual fire—the same Spirit that drew him into Bristol’s filth, into prison cells, into scandal.
And today? We face similar choices. Will we lead with courage into new fields? Will we risk the ire of Christian nationalists to proclaim a God who cares for the poor, the queer, the undocumented, the unhoused? Will we prioritize people over property, justice over comfort, faithfulness over familiarity?
The United Methodist Church’s new vision statement—loving boldly, serving joyfully, leading courageously—is not a marketing slogan. It is a call to reclaim our roots. It is the essence of what it means to be Methodist.
This is our heritage. This is our calling. And in this moment—when the church is rebuilding, reforming, and reopening itself to God’s Spirit—this is our opportunity.
Let us love boldly. Let us serve joyfully. Let us lead courageously.
Amen.
Dr. Ashley Boggan is the general secretary of the General Commission on Archives and History. Content was published Aug. 6, 2025. Media contact is Crystal Caviness.