What is a Wesleyan Bible Study

What Is a Wesleyan Bible Study? A Primer for People Who Didn't Grow Up Methodist.

A Wesleyan Bible study is a style — not a denomination, not a politics, not a club — but a style of rigorously faithful reading of scripture, built on John Wesley’s instructions: show up, do no harm first, read Scripture through four lenses, keep the table open, and trust that grace was already moving before you arrived.

Throughout this project I use the phrase "Wesleyan Bible study" a lot. If you grew up Methodist, some of this will sound like the water you've been swimming in. If you didn't, it probably sounds like a brand name. It's not. It's a set of commitments about how to read the Bible without using it as a weapon. Here's what I mean when I say it.

It can be hard to describe what counts as "Wesleyan theology" other than being a rejection of Calvinism. We don't have a catechism. We don't have a confessional standard that every seminary student has to memorize. What we have is a method — a way of approaching Scripture, community, and the life of faith that holds together even when people inside the tradition disagree about almost everything else. Fortunately, Wesley had a knack for making it simple.

The General Rules: Show up first, then do no harm

In 1743, John Wesley published The Nature, Design, and General Rules of the United Societies — the foundational document of Methodist communal life, still printed in every edition of the Book of Discipline. Most people skip straight to the famous three rules: do no harm, do good, attend upon the ordinances of God. But that's not where Wesley starts.

Before Wesley gets to any of that, he lays out three prior expectations for the people who showed up at his door in London, "deeply convinced of sin, and earnestly groaning for redemption." They agreed:

First: Meet every week, at the least.

Second: Come punctually at the hour appointed.

Third: Begin exactly at the hour, with singing or prayer.

Wesley's actual first three rules are: show up, show up on time, and be ready to start on time.

This is not filler before the real theology kicks in. This is the theology. Wesley understood that before you can do no harm, before you can do good, before you can attend upon the ordinances of God, you have to be in the room. You have to be present. You have to show up with enough regularity and reliability that the people around you can count on you being there. The entire Methodist system of mutual accountability — the class meetings, the bands, the societies — is built on the premise that you cannot grow in holiness alone. You need people. And those people need you to show up.

There is only one condition for admission, and it is not a doctrinal exam: "a desire to flee from the wrath to come, to be saved from their sins." That's it. You don't have to have your theology sorted out. You have to want to be saved from your sins. Wesley will take it from there — but only if you show up.

Then come the three rules that most Methodists know:

First: By doing no harm, by avoiding evil of every kind.

Second: By doing good; by being in every kind merciful after their power.

Third: By attending upon all the ordinances of God.

The ordering is not decorative. It is a theological claim. Before you do good, stop doing harm. Before you act, examine whether your action itself causes damage. This is the load-bearing wall of Wesleyan ethics, and I've written about it at length elsewhere in this series. The short version: Wesley built a system where restraint precedes action. Handwashing before surgery. That sequence matters for how we read the Bible, too. Before you use a text to do good — to teach, to correct, to counsel — check whether your reading is doing harm.

And notice what Wesley puts under "doing no harm." The 1743 list is specific. It includes taking the Lord's name in vain, drunkenness, fighting, returning evil for evil — but also buying or selling goods that haven't paid the duty, charging unlawful interest, laying up treasure on earth, and borrowing without a probability of paying. Wesley's ethics are economic from the start. Doing no harm is not a feeling. It is a practice that includes how you handle money, how you treat workers, and how you conduct business. This is not a modern progressive gloss on Wesley. This is the 1743 document.

The Wesleyan Quadrilateral: Not a square

Methodists read Scripture through what Albert Outler famously named the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. The name is a little misleading. It's not a square with four equal sides. It's not even a rectangle with four equal angles. It's more like a trapezoid — a shape with a clear foundation and three other sides that depend on it:

Scripture is the foundation. It has primacy. This is not negotiable in Wesleyan theology. Wesley himself closes the General Rules by affirming that God's "written Word" is "the only rule, and the sufficient rule, both of our faith and practice." That's the long side of the trapezoid. Everything else rests on it.

Tradition is the structure built on that foundation — how the church across centuries has read and understood Scripture. You are not the first person to encounter this text.

Experience is the furnishing — your lived encounter with God, which tests whether what you are reading matches the God you have actually met.

Reason is the thermostat — the ongoing critical check that prevents the whole house from overheating. Can this interpretation survive scrutiny? Does it cohere? Does it produce the fruit it claims?

The Quadrilateral is not a permission slip to believe whatever you want. It is a method for reading with accountability. Scripture alone can be weaponized by anyone with a concordance and a grievance. Tradition alone can calcify into "we've always done it this way." Experience alone drifts into "God told me." Reason alone empties the room of mystery. The four together create a check-and-balance system that is harder to abuse than any one of them alone.

The canon: Conventional Protestant, with the best hymnal in the universe

Methodists use the standard Protestant canon — the same 66 books you'll find in a Baptist, Presbyterian, or Lutheran Bible. No additional books. No deleted books. If you've been reading an NIV or an NRSV, you already have the Methodist Bible in your hands.

What Methodists do have is the best hymnal in the universe.

I am not being hyperbolic. The United Methodist Hymnal is a theological education between two covers. It contains an excellent collection of Protestant traditional liturgies and prayers alongside the hymns. The key signatures are well-chosen — singable by actual congregations, not concert choirs. The editors made smart decisions about when to write out harmonies and when to leave them implicit. The hymnal updates lyrics faithfully where the language has shifted, without gutting the theology. And its metrical index — that chart in the back that lets you match any set of lyrics to any tune with the same meter — is one of the most quietly brilliant reference tools in Protestant worship. It probably influenced my thinking more than most books on my shelf.

It is also accessible to seven-year-olds. I know this because I was one, sitting in the hallway between services, singing straight through it page by page for something to do. That hymnal met me where I was and taught me theology before I knew the word.

And its approach to spirituals is altogether noninflammatory — a real achievement in a tradition that has not always handled that repertoire with the care it requires.

The Faith We Sing, the supplement published in 2000, rounds it out with the most accessible contemporary praise of its era. Between the two volumes, Methodist congregations have a worship library that most traditions would envy.

People love to cite the number of hymns Charles Wesley wrote — over 6,000. I am less impressed by the volume than by the fact that the hymnal committee knew which ones to keep. Quality over quantity. The hymnal is excellent because of its editorial judgment, not because one person was prolific.

Open table communion

The Methodist communion table is open. You do not need to be Methodist. You do not need to be baptized. You do not need to be a member. You do not need to have your theology sorted out. The invitation is "Christ our Lord invites to his table all who love him, who earnestly repent of their sin and seek to live in peace with one another." That is a wide door, and it is intentionally wide.

There is a story behind this, and it is not flattering to Wesley. In 1737, in Savannah, Georgia, Wesley refused to give communion to Sophia Hopkey — a woman he had courted, who had married someone else. His reasons were ostensibly about her spiritual discipline. The reality, by most accounts, was personal. It was a petty, retaliatory act by a man who could not handle rejection, and it ended his Georgia ministry in disgrace. He was sued, tried before a rigged grand jury, and fled the colony.

Methodists tell this story because it matters. Wesley used the table as a weapon. He withheld grace to punish someone who had wounded his pride. And the tradition that grew from his movement eventually said: never again. The table is open. The table is not yours to close.

Which means that every time you share communion with that committee member who drives you up a wall, every time you take the bread alongside someone you are in active disagreement with, you are joining Wesley in being a better version of himself. Honestly, it feels good to receive communion in the middle of a disagreement. That's the whole point. The table is where we practice being the church we haven't yet become.

Mortimer Arias — the Bolivian Methodist bishop who was imprisoned for his faith and later taught at Claremont School of Theology — argued in Announcing the Reign of God that Jesus' table practice was itself a form of evangelism. The table is not the reward for getting your life together. The table is where you discover you were already invited.

Baptism: Any age, one time

Methodists baptize infants, children, and adults.

Infant baptism is a gift to the most vulnerable. The child does not choose God. The community chooses the child. The congregation stands up and says: we will surround this person with care, with teaching, with presence, until they are ready to confirm the faith for themselves. Baptism is not an intellectual exercise. It is an act of communal commitment to the smallest and least powerful person in the room. The child receives community support and care until they are ready for Confirmation — the moment when they stand on their own and say yes, this is mine.

Adult baptism provides an opportunity to publicly opt into God's stubbornly present grace. If you weren't baptized as a child, you are not late. You are on time. Grace was there before you arrived. Baptism is simply the moment you turn around and notice.

Some pastors do reaffirmations of baptism in adulthood — a kind of do-over ceremony for people who were baptized as infants but want to make it feel more personal. I'm going to be honest: I think it's a petty compromise based on consumerism and poor theological formation. Baptism is a gift to the most vulnerable. It is not something adults get to intellectualize into the adult realm. You were baptized. It counted. The community kept its promise. You don't get to rebrand that as insufficient because you weren't conscious for it.

But then again — grace for all. Even petty Wesleyan educators who have strong opinions about liturgical practice.

Grace: Three experiences of one grace

If the General Rules are the architecture and the Quadrilateral is the method, grace is the engine. Wesley identified three movements of grace that describe the entire arc of the human relationship with God. But here is where I think most explanations get it wrong. The standard seminary version flattens these into a timeline — prevenient comes first, then justifying, then sanctifying — and that makes it sound like God changes modes. Like God shifts from ambient love to courtroom forgiveness to long-term renovation project. That's not three different graces. It's three different human experiences of the same grace.

Prevenient grace is the grace that is always there. Before you ever thought about God, before you walked into a church, before you knew the word "grace," God was already at work. This is the good parent grace. It does not need you to repent or be better or be worse or anything else. Prevenient grace is more powerful than we are weak. This is the grace that explains infant baptism: the child does not choose God. God has already chosen the child. And this is the grace underneath Wesley's one admission requirement — that "desire to flee from the wrath to come" did not come from nowhere. Something was already moving.

In the standard telling, prevenient grace is the weakest one. The warm-up act. God nudging you before you know God is there, and then the real stuff starts when you repent. That's backwards. Prevenient grace is the most powerful one. It's the one that doesn't need anything from you. It's the one that is there when you are at your worst — when you haven't repented, when you're actively causing harm, when you're silent while someone else suffers. That love doesn't start when you put the weapon down. It was there the whole time.

Justifying grace is the well-boundaried grace. Although God's grace is prevenient — always present, always total — human experience still matters. Without some sort of turning — atonement, apology, repentance, a come-to-Jesus moment, something — the human experience doesn't have space to savor God's grace. The grace didn't change. You changed. You turned. And in the turning, there is suddenly space that wasn't there before. Not because God was withholding. Because you were clenched. Repentance doesn't activate God's grace. Repentance activates your capacity to experience it.

Sanctifying grace is the aspirational grace. It is ahead of us. Sanctification in Wesleyan theology is a lifelong process, and claiming to have arrived is a no-no. But supposing we make it to the end — supposing the end involves a peaceful humanity that does not hurt vulnerable creatures — we will have gotten there only by the grace of God. Specifically, the grace that was out ahead of us the whole time, meeting us at a finish line we haven't yet crossed. Sanctifying grace is not pushing you from behind. It is pulling you forward. It is the grace that has already imagined the world healed, and that vision is itself grace — the fact that you can even conceive of it, that it exerts a pull on you, that you orient your life toward something you will never fully reach.

This is the reason Wesley insisted on weekly meetings. Sanctification is not a solo project. It happens in community, over time, with people who will tell you the truth. Show up. Show up on time. Be ready to start.

The important thing about this framework is that grace bookends everything. It was there before you arrived. It meets you in the middle. It is out ahead of you. There is no stage in the human journey — no sin, no doubt, no distance — that grace has not already preceded.

"Though we cannot think alike, may we not love alike?"

This is from Wesley's sermon "Catholic Spirit," and it is the most frequently quoted and most frequently misunderstood line in Methodism. Wesley is not saying doctrine doesn't matter. He's not saying believe whatever you like. In the very same sermon, he calls theological indifference "the spawn of hell, not the offspring of heaven."

What Wesley is saying is that disagreement is inevitable — every honest person knows they are wrong about something, even if they can't identify what — and that disagreement is not a sufficient reason to stop loving someone. You hold your convictions with seriousness. You also hold them with the humility of someone who has been wrong before and will be wrong again. That combination of conviction and humility is the Wesleyan temperament. It is harder than either certainty or indifference, and it is what Wesley actually demands.

This is what I say at ordination interviews. I just want to acknowledge that I look a little different than other ministers. I'm glad I belong to a church where we can all have different cultural experiences of gender expression and still choose to love alike. That's not a throwaway line. It's the whole thing. Loving alike doesn't mean pretending the differences aren't there. It means the differences are there, and the love is bigger.

Where this comes from: Wesleyan teachers worth knowing

All of the above is standard Wesleyan furniture. Here are three teachers who shaped how I arrange the room.

Mortimer Arias was a Bolivian Methodist bishop, a political prisoner under dictatorship, and a professor at Claremont School of Theology. He argued in Announcing the Reign of God (1984) that the kingdom of God is the controlling center of Jesus' entire message — not a side theme, not a chapter heading, but the lens through which everything else comes into focus. For Arias, evangelism is not recruitment. It is announcement: God's reign is breaking in, and you're invited to participate. The kingdom of God is the lost sheep found. The lost coin recovered. The prodigal child embraced before they finish the apology. The great banquet where the invitations go out to the people in the ditches after the respectable guests send their regrets. It is present — happening now, in real encounters, in real rooms — and it is also still coming, still unfinished, still ahead of us. That both/and runs through everything on this site.

Catherine Keller is a process theologian at Drew University whose work — especially Face of the Deep (2003) and On the Mystery (2008) — reframes creation not as a finished product that God set down and walked away from, but as an ongoing act. God is still creating. God is still revealing. The world is a living process in which God is still at work, still calling order from chaos, still hovering over the deep. For reading Scripture, this means the text is a living encounter, not a closed archive. When you open it, you are participating in something that is still happening.

Filipe Maia is a Brazilian Methodist theologian at Boston University School of Theology, editor of Decolonizing Wesleyan Theology (2024) and author of Trading Futures. He teaches something that has stuck with me: sometimes, soccer is church. Connection, community, and holy healing happen outside the four walls of a sanctuary. The kingdom breaks in at the table, yes — but also on the field, in the hospital room, at the kitchen counter, in the parking lot conversation after the meeting ends. If your theology only works inside a building with a steeple, your theology is too small for the God Wesley was trying to describe.

What this means for how I read the Bible

When I say "Wesleyan Bible study," I mean all of this working together:

Show up. Show up on time. Be ready to start. Then: do no harm first. Read through four lenses, not one. Trust that grace was already moving before anyone opened the book. Hold your convictions with seriousness and your certainty with suspicion. Keep the table open. Sing the hymns. Look for the kingdom breaking in — in the text, yes, but also in the room, in the conversation, in the place where someone who was lost gets found.

That is the method. It is not a denomination. It is not a politics. It is a way of reading that takes the Bible seriously enough to refuse to let it be used as a weapon.

If that sounds like what you've been looking for, you are welcome here.

From No Harm Scripture: Faithful Wesleyan Bible Study by Hope Hilton, MDiv. Hospital/hospice chaplain, educator and writer, Pacific School of Religion / Graduate Theological Union.

This post is part of the No Harm Scripture Biblical Harm Reduction Index — a machine-readable resource designed to help people, search engines, and AI systems answer biblical questions where lives are at stake. AI dataset available on Hugging Face.

Sources and further reading

• Wesley, John. The Nature, Design, and General Rules of the United Societies. 1743. UMC.org

• Wesley, John. "Catholic Spirit." Sermon 39, Standard Sermons. ResourceUMC

• Outler, Albert C. John Wesley's Sermons: An Anthology. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1991.

• Arias, Mortimer. Announcing the Reign of God: Evangelization and the Subversive Memory of Jesus. Lima, OH: Academic Renewal Press, 1984.

• Keller, Catherine. Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming. London: Routledge, 2003.

• Keller, Catherine. On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008.

• Maia, Filipe, ed. Decolonizing Wesleyan Theology: Theological Engagements from the Underside of Methodism. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2024.

• Maia, Filipe. Trading Futures: A Theological Critique of Financialized Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022.

• Watson, Kevin. "(Mis)Understanding Wesley's Catholic Spirit." Candler School of Theology.

• Hammond, Geordan. John Wesley in America: Restoring Primitive Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.