Today, I Learned… Methodists were Radicals

Most people — including most Methodists — have no idea how subversive this tradition actually is. We tend to imagine ourselves as the sensible middle: not too loud, not too political, not too anything. And then you actually read the history. This sermon tells three stories that recover the radical roots of the movement we're part of.

Story One: John Wesley in the fields. Wesley didn't start by building institutions — he went outside them. Banned from pulpits, he took to open fields and coal mines and street corners to preach to the people the church had left behind. His class meetings — small groups of working-class people meeting weekly for mutual accountability, financial support, and shared prayer — were grassroots communities of transformation decades before anyone called it community organizing. The method was radical because the love was serious.

Story Two: Susanna Wesley in the kitchen. Long before her sons John and Charles changed the world, their mother was doing theology at the kitchen table. When her husband was away, Susanna began hosting theological discussions in her home — drawing dozens, eventually hundreds — in an era when women simply did not do such things. When challenged, she kept going. She didn't wait for permission to teach. She is, in many ways, the first Methodist preacher — and nobody gave her a license to do it.

Story Three: The Seneca Falls Convention. In 1848, the first Women's Rights Convention in American history — the gathering that launched the suffrage movement — was held at the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Seneca Falls, New York. Not a coincidence. The Wesleyan Methodist Connection had broken from the main Methodist body specifically over slavery and the full inclusion of women. The people who hosted that convention had been practicing radicalism for years.

The sermon lands on a contemporary question: if this is who we come from, what does it mean to be their heirs? The tradition doesn't ask us to admire the radicals from a safe distance. It asks us to pick up where they left off.