What a Difference a Day Makes!

As I write these words I am sitting in the beautiful international headquarters of the Wesleyan Church in Indianapolis, Indiana. Here the affairs of this God-focused, Jesus-sharing, Good News-witnessing, and socially-active integral part of Christ's Kingdom are directed for maximum effectiveness each weekday.

As one born into the home of a Wesleyan pastor and whose grandparents were Wesleyan ministers, I have a deep sense of love and gratitude for the spiritual nurture and social network I have received from this marvelous group of devoted people.

Unique to our history is the role of leadership in the struggle to abolish human slavery in Britain and America. Later, after that long and difficult contest had been won, it was in a Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, that a conference dedicated to obtaining women's equal treatment under the law -- including the right to vote --was first held. Again, Wesleyans led the way -- before the cause was popular, before it was deemed "the right course", while it was still opposed by the vast majority.

Wesleyans have taken courageous stands for the defense of the legally impotent and socially powerless, not because we were wild-eyed radicals looking for some cause for which we could agitate. We have simply followed where the Bible, the Word of God, dictated the right course lay and tried, to our utmost, to be faithful to the One Who has gifted us with our freedom and rights.

Yet, our mission to win the spiritually searching has never wavered. We see ourselves as the unembarrassed co-workers of an Almighty God who so loves the world that He will stop at nothing (short of the individual's own refusal) to reach and rescue a fallen, ruined and doomed world. He has come to change our doom into deliverance and our defeat into dancing!

But Wesleyans own one further distinction: we rejoice in all who know and follow the Lord Jesus Christ as fully as in those who bear our name and share our history. All who serve the Lord Jesus and are on mission with Him in the world are warmly embraced as our sisters and brothers in the Lord and as our beloved co-workers in the work of His Kingdom. There is, among us, to be no air of superiority, no glorying in anything but in the Christ by whose atoning work we have been redeemed from our sins and adopted into His family!

So every Wesleyan may enthusiastically say: "Wesleyan? Yes, and gratefully so! But Christian first and forever!"