Take a look at the photograph I’m using in the masthead of this blog.  I chose an image of people holding hands not simply because it is a nice metaphor for “Staying Connected.” I chose it because hand-holding is a quintessentially Wesleyan metaphor, calling to mind a phrase, taken from 2 Kings 10:15, that John Wesley deployed more than once, most famously in his 1749 sermon “Catholic Spirit,” but also in his 1788 essay “Thoughts Upon A Late Phenomenon,” four years after the Methodists in America established their own church based on a theological and organizational model supplied entirely by Wesley himself.  Even then, Wesley chose these words to describe what made Methodists unique:

One circumstance more is quite peculiar to the people called Methodists; that is, the terms upon
which any person may be admitted into their society. They do not impose, in order to their admission, any opinions whatever. Let them hold particular or general redemption, absolute or conditional decrees; let them be Churchmen or Dissenters, Presbyterians or Independents, it is no obstacle. Let them choose one mode of baptism or another, it is no bar to their admission. . . . They think, and let think. One condition and one only, is required—A real desire to save their soul. Where this is, it is enough: they desire no more: they lay stress upon nothing else: they ask only, “Is thy heart herein as my heart? If it be, give me thy hand.”

John Wesley, “Thoughts Upon a Late Phenomenon“ (Nottingham, July 13, 1788), in The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, Vol. VII, (New York: J. Emory and B. Waugh, 1831), 321.

And such passages — the tone, the theme, if not always the same words — are hardly isolated in Wesley’s writings; they are central, even foundational. In the earliest days of his movement (c. 1743), Wesley introduced his landmark “The Nature, Design and General Rules of the United Societies” with the admonition (for it is surely that, considering the source) that a Methodist society “is no other than a company of men having the form and seeking the power of godliness, united in order to pray together, to receive the word of exhortation, and to watch over one another in love, that they may help each other to work out their salvation.” Discipline, ¶ 104 at 78 (emphasis added).  And thirty-five years later, then sermonizing on “The Late Work of God in North America,” Wesley credits the burgeoning Methodist movement in America to the formation of societies, so that individual souls “were no longer a rope of sand, but clave to one another and began to watch over each other in love.” John Wesley, “Sermon 131: Some Account of The Late Work Of God In North-America” (1778), in The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, Vol. VII, Third Edition (London: John Mason, 1829), 411.

Friends, that — heeding Wesley’s charge to take each other’s hand, and to watch over one another in love — is the authentic way, the truly Wesleyan way, to keep covenant with John Wesley, and with each other along the way. You may hold fast, as well, to what you believe to be God’s other commandments.  I am quite sure some of us will always have differing points of view on many things, even on many vital things, as Christians always have.  And I don’t mind your trying to persuade me of your perspective on those points.  I’ll listen.  And I’ll likely return the favor.  But don’t let go of my hand in the meantime. That’s what makes us Methodists.