I’m one of those Calvinists who thinks a lot about John Wesley—and my thoughts are uniformly positive ones. Actually, one of my Calvinist heroes, Charles Spurgeon, also entertained kindly thoughts about the founder of Methodism. Noting that many of his fellow Calvinists in 19th century Britain had harsh things to say about Wesley, Spurgeon confessed that while he seriously disagreed with many of Wesley’s theological ideas, “yet for the man himself I have a reverence second to no Wesleyan.” Indeed, Spurgeon said, Wesley “lived far above the ordinary level of common Christians, and was one ‘of whom the world was not worthy.’"
One of my favorite Wesley lines is his oft-quoted manifesto, “I look upon all the world as my parish.” In saying that, he was responding to the folks who were upset with him for not staying within the boundaries of ministry assigned to him by the ecclesiastical rules of his day. It was, he went on to explain, “my bounden duty to declare unto all that are willing to hear, the glad tidings of salvation.”
Actually, I have some nostalgia for the old parish system. I have been known to defend some aspects of the present-day “church shopping” syndrome, but the promiscuous erasing of parish boundaries also has its downside.
Anyway, there are larger issues at stake in dealing with Wesley’s manifesto. Parishes are usually familiar and friendly places. But most of us who are called to various forms of ministry these days would not describe the arenas of service in which we operate as “parishes.” They are more like mission fields. And the missionary analogy is, I think, a helpful one. It is both helpful and important to look at the broad cultural arena these days as a mission field, an arena of spheres of collecive interaction wherein we should be bringing Christian concerns to bear—not only justice and peace, but even some good old-fashioned benevolence and a commitment to the common good.
To be sure, we have to do all of this in ways that are appropriate to our pluralistic contexts, which is no easy task. But neither was the missionary enterprise of the past an easy venture. At its best it took a lot of careful reflection on cultural realities. And it also—again, at its best— took a genuine affection for those realities, an affection that nurtured a sense of familiarity and friendship with the human contexts in which the missionaries were called to serve. That kind of affection is a response to the call of the God who “so loved the world” into which Jesus was sent as a Savior. Again, the old parishes were familiar and friendly places. There is, then, some genuine spiritual wisdom for us to explore today in the Wesleyan claim that we should work at seeing the larger world in which we are called to serve as something like a parish—a world which, in spite of all of its brokeness and rebellion, is worth of our familiarity and friendship.
Richard J. Mouw is president of Fuller Theological Seminary.
