Editorial

With Easter upon us, we are as ever gifted a time of reflection. It is fitting that around this season we are offered four articles here which encourage both reflection on how things have been done, and from this how we might move forward. Again, fittingly, throughout all of them the presence of the Spirit is celebrated and asserted.

Two pieces examine contemporary issues and grounds them in the thought and works of the Wesley brothers. Roger Walton and Mike Long are moved to think about the notion of ‘social justice’ in response to the 2023 British Methodist Conference report ‘A justice seeking church’. Whilst we might feel we have a firm grasp of this term in the present, the authors detail how its use and meaning has shifted over time. The case is made that whilst Charles Wesley invokes the term, hymns that make use of it in a way familiar to us in the present entered Methodist hymnody in the 20^th century. With this in mind and with renewed vigour towards the challenge of achieving justice in our time, the call is made that ‘more hymns on the theme of justice need to be found or created to help feed a justice-seeking church’. Dust off your manuscript paper and dive in.

Glen O’Brien invokes John Wesley’s ‘catholic spirit’ in speaking into present Methodist differences over human sexuality. He writes that a failure to ‘live together’ with these differences represents the ‘failure of twenty-first century Methodists to live out’ Wesley’s eclectic heart. To raise these issues to a matter of ‘church-dividing principle’ results in ‘exclusionary harm for LGBTQI+ Methodists’. We must instead look to ‘engage in some theological weaving’ to bring together sources of wisdom and ‘catching the wind of the Spirit to journey to new places’. It is this that can manifest a ‘fully affirming Methodism of the future’.

Reflecting on the parish and parishioners, two articles examine what it means to be in and to be a Methodist Church in the present through ethnographic and auto-ethnographic fieldwork. Isaac McNish examines how the notion of ‘belonging’ exists as an expression of salvation through reflection on his doctoral research amongst a Methodist Church in Cornwall. Reasserting the importance of belonging as a ‘concrete ecclesiological concept’ which operates ‘as a vital locus of salvation in the world today’. This offers powerful remedy ‘in a fragment age marked by loneliness’, as the Spirit moves to join ‘the believer to Christ and others within the love of God’.

Stacey Spence reflects similarly on her time preaching, leading and reviving parishes in the rural south east USA to offer deep analysis of some of the symptoms and solutions for this decline. Offering a novel framing as remedy she advocates ‘re-innergizing’ congregations through a ‘fulsome embrace’ of ‘the ministry of the holy spirit’. Utilising interviews, observations and ‘discovery workshops’ from stakeholders across the three churches that make up her case studies, Spence details the Holy Spirit ‘implants God’s love in the church’. Through this, the church is moved ‘into mission and ministry in unexplained ways’, brining presence and vitality back into spaces it had departed.

As ever, I dearly hope readers enjoy the enlivening contents of this issue.