United Methodist Church

Methodists' views of the sacraments have traveled through three distinct phases. At the beginning of the Wesleyan movement in the nineteenth century, Wesley emphasizes a strong divinely experiential sense of the sacraments as means of grace. From the late eighteenth century to the 1960s, the Enlightenment understanding of the sacraments as marginal and mostly memorial dominated Methodism. However, beginning in the 1960s, United Methodists have experienced a sacramental renewal. The emphasis in the sacraments has shifted from a human undertaking to a divine covenant by God to make believers share in Christ's royal priesthood.

Methodist attitudes towards sacraments have gone through three quite distinct periods. Each has to be understood in the light of its predecessors so I will treat them in sequence. Elements of each era survive in subsequent periods, but the periods are largely distinct. The first period is that of the Wesleyan movement in England during the eighteenth century. Early Methodism was characterized by a strong experiential sense of the sacraments as divinely appointed means of grace. This is all the more striking in the context of the Enlightenment when sacramental life had been pushed to the margin of Anglican piety. Yet, early Methodism in England is full of the sense of a warm personal experience of the immediacy of God's presence in the Lord's Supper. Many, including Susannah Wesley, experienced the Lord's Supper as a converting ordinance in which a dead religion became one of the heart. Early Methodism was a sacramental revival, one of the first in Protestantism. This was manifest in an emphasis on frequent Communion such as in John Wesley's 1732 sermon, "?The Day of Constant Communion,?" in which he endeavored to "?show that it is the city of every Christian to receive the Lord's Supper as often as he can.?" The same thought appears half a century later when he wrote to the Americans in 1784 that "?I also advise the elders to administer the supper of the Lord on every Lord's day.?" The 166 Hymns of the Lord's Supper of John and Charles Wesley are the greatest treasury of eucharistic poetry in the English language and surprisingly contemporary in their emphasis on pneumatology, eschatology, and the Eucharist as a sacrifice. Wesley's thought on baptism is more ambiguous. He affirms its importance for infants: "?infants need to be washed from original sin; therefore they are proper subjects of baptism.?" He retains a sense of baptismal regeneration in the case of infants, but is unwilling to allow adults to presume regeneration at their baptism, a view largely dictated by his own observations. And he echoed the Puritan belief that confirmation was superfluous by deleting any reference to it in his prayer book. One cannot speak of a baptismal piety in Wesley as one might in Luther. The American Methodist experience of the sacraments, from the late eighteenth century to about 1960 reflects a different world both figuratively and literally. In this case, the Enlightenment mentality which Wesley had resisted so forcibly came to prevail. For the Enlightenment mind, any supernatural aspect of the sacraments was suspect and its God appeared to be emeritus as far as any present activity in the sacraments is concerned. Sacraments were tolerated as conducive to morality, but with little or no sense of them as moments of divine intervention into the lives of humans. In this context, sacraments became marginal events for American Methodists. The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, did decree a monthly Eucharist, but most northern Methodists by the twentieth century were content with four times a year. The 1905 and 1935 hymnals each had only seven hymns for the Lord's Supper, none of them by the Wesleys. The 1935 hymnal reflects the high tide of the Enlightenment in one of the eucharistic rites in which all references to real presence have been converted to references to a memorial meal. Baptism underwent a rather different trajectory, but with a similar destination. Early on, American Methodists made it clear they would have none of Wesley's lingering affirmation that baptism even signified regeneration. By 1916, the northern church had discarded the Wesleyan prayer over the water which asked God to sanctify the water in order to affect the mystical washing away of sin. The emphasis had switched from saving infants from the condemnation of original sin to welcoming them into the church. Nineteenth century Methodists added a probationary period for those baptized as adults. This delayed adult's admission into church membership; the twentieth century turned this practice into a preparatory membership status only for those baptized as infants. Just as the Eucharist had come to focus largely on human recollection of the past work of Christ, so baptism came to concentrate on human engagement in rearing the child in the church. Enlightenment reluctance to mention God's intervention had prevailed in both cases. A good monument of this period is Robert W. Goodloe's 1953 book, The Sacrament in Methodism. A third era began to emerge in the 1960s and is gradually becoming more apparent. This period is engaged more deeply in sacramental life. Indeed, there is now a United Methodist periodical entitled Sacramental Life. Many factors have gone into forming this new era: the excitement of the Roman Catholic reforms after the Second Vatican Council; the advent of professors of worship in all United Methodist seminaries (a process that took thirty years); a growing interest in sacramental theology; and the revision of the sacramental rites between 1972 and 1989. Now Abingdon Press finds books on worship one of its best selling fields. The most conspicuous demonstration of this new era is the 1989 United Methodist Hymnal. Its first page presents "?The Basic Pattern of Worship?" which presumes that the normal service involves thanksgiving and Communion. An increasing number of churches celebrate the Eucharist every Sunday. What is even more striking is the move away from the late medieval penitential rite which the Reformers inherited to the new rite which proclaims God's past work and invokes God's present work through the Holy Spirit. Though the words are nothing like Wesley's, the theology is similar to his eucharistic hymns and the early church sources on which he drew. The changes in the baptismal rites are even more striking. The emphasis has shifted from a human undertaking to a divine covenant by God to make believers "?share in Christ's royal priesthood.?" The prayer over the water invites the Holy Spirit to bless the water and wash away sin. The new rites are controversial because they represent such a drastic break from the Enlightenment-dominated past. Methodism is gradually moving into a new era. The eucharistic hymns in the 1989 Hymnal have increased from the twenty hymns in the 1965 Hymnal to thirty hymns. The sacramental nature of other rites—marriage, burial, healing, and ordination—is much more apparent in the 1992 United Methodist Book of Worship. Even the title of a 1983 Abingdon book, Sacraments as God's Self Giving, indicates a whole new era. Changes some slowly, but surely.