The Historical & Biblical Outlier of Wesleyan Salvation & Sanctification (Pt 19)

Part One     Part Two    Part Three     Part Four     Part Five     Part Six     Part Seven     Part Eight     An Aside (Between Parts Eight and Nine)   Part Nine     Part Ten     Part Eleven     Part Twelve     Part Thirteen     Part Fourteen  An Aside (Between Parts Fourteen and Fifteen)     Part Fifteen     Part Sixteen     Part Seventeen     Part Eighteen

John Wesley’s teaching and system divided the Christian life into two tiers: an initial saving experience followed by a second work of grace that supposedly brought the believer into a higher state of holiness. Although later movements modified Wesley’s terminology, the two-tier structure continued to influence how professing Christians understood conversion, assurance, sanctification, and spiritual maturity. This framework departed from the biblical relationship between salvation and God’s continuing work of producing a persevering, obedient Christian life.

This series has also considered historical and theological responses, which help demonstrate why experiences cannot serve as the final test of genuine saving grace. The question now is how true believers should respond to this history and its continuing effects. The way forward is not another tier, technique, or experience, but a return to Scripture as the authority for defining and recognizing the Christian life.  Part Eighteen began laying out some of what true churches and believers can and should do.

Reject the Idea That Sanctification Is an Optional Second Stage

The second task is to recover the biblical relationship between salvation and sanctification. Ephesians 2:8–10 provides a clear framework. We are saved by grace through faith, not by works. Yet those who are saved are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works. Good works do not earn salvation, but neither are they irrelevant to the purpose of salvation. Titus 2:11–14 teaches that God’s saving grace trains believers to deny ungodliness and worldly lusts and to live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world. The grace that saves also produces a people zealous of good works.

This does not mean that every genuine Christian immediately exhibits mature obedience or that all believers grow at the same pace. Christians can fail seriously, will struggle with particular sins, and need substantial correction. The New Testament (NT) addresses these realities through rebuke, repentance, instruction, discipline, prayer, and growth. It does not require a permanent lower class of saved people absent of the Christian life God intends to produce.

Churches should therefore stop presenting a second experience as the dividing line between ordinary and truly spiritual Christians. They should teach believers to walk in the Spirit, obey God’s Word, mortify sin, love the brethren, and persevere in faith. These are not optional benefits reserved for Christians who have reached another tier. They are responsibilities and fruits of the Christian life.

Recognize the Manufacturing of Religious Experiences

A two-tier system creates the conditions that attempt to prove the reality of the first tier. If a church teaches that salvation begins with a decision but spiritual victory requires a subsequent experience, people will naturally look for that experience. If a revivalist teaches that a person must surrender completely, come forward, testify, or make a public commitment to enter a higher condition, the meeting can be organized to elicit precisely those responses. The sequence quite often works this way:

1. Establish a deficiency. Teach that the ordinary Christian life is characterized by defeat, worldliness, powerlessness, or insufficient commitment.
2. Identify the missing experience. Present surrender, consecration, a crisis of faith, a second blessing, or a dramatic commitment as the way to move beyond that deficiency.
3. Create an occasion for the experience. Use a special meeting, emotionally intensified preaching, music, repeated invitations, public testimony, or a highly charged appeal.
4. Treat the response as evidence. Interpret tears, raised hands, a walk to the front, a spoken commitment, or a reported breakthrough as proof that the person has entered a higher condition.
5. Use the result to validate the method. Count responses, testimonies, decisions, or apparent transformations as evidence that the approach works.

Pastors and itinerant revivalists can sincerely believe that their methods help people respond to God.  However, sincerity does not mean biblical validity. A method can produce a genuine emotional response without regeneration, and a person can make a sincere commitment without experiencing actual change that the speaker attributes to it.

The same danger occurs when proponents attribute a decision as the first tier and then validate a second one with numerical soul-winning results. When the obtaining of professions becomes proof of spiritual maturity, the system rewards visible activity without adequately examining the gospel preached or the reality of the responses.  It counts decisions as conversions and uses those numbers to validate the methods that generated them.  Advocates blame the lack of lasting fruit on the carnality of professing converts rather than demand a reexamination of the evangelism methods.

The answer is to refuse to treat the event as proof of the spiritual condition it is intended to produce. Churches must distinguish between occasions for responding to biblical truth and methods that claim to produce or authenticate a work of God.

Eliminate the Role of Music in Producing a Second-Tier Experience

Using Music as a Tool

Music deserves particular attention because it shapes both what people believe worship is and what they expect worship to do. It creates an emotional state that people interpret as God’s presence, spiritual surrender, or a deep encounter with God’s grace. The issue is not simply what musical instrument or style a church uses. That alone does not establish whether worship is biblical.  More fundamental is what the music is meant to accomplish and what authority governs its use.

Consider a gathering where the preacher calls people to a second-tier complete surrender to God. The music grows softer, the song repeats, the emotional intensity rises, and the invitation continues until people come forward. Someone might repent of sin or make a biblically sound commitment. An outward response, however, cannot prove that a second work of grace has occurred. Nor does the emotional intensity of music establish the presence and work of the Holy Spirit.  Adherents to this methodology should consider that it does just the opposite.

In contemporary music settings, songs with repetition, instrumentation, lighting, and emotional peaks create an atmosphere and experience that people interpret as spiritual intimacy or breakthrough. Churches deliberately design these elements to elicit an experience. When an emotional experience becomes the expected evidence of God’s presence or a higher spiritual state, a church teaches people to conform Scripture to feelings rather than vice versa.

Correcting this Age-Old Abuse

Emphasis on personal emotion over biblical content also undermines biblical literacy and theological understanding. Rather than receive and sing substantial biblical truth, congregations increasingly depend on subjective intensity to create a sense of spiritual reality. A biblical evaluation of music must consider its words, theological content, musical character, function in the assembly, and compatibility with the church’s scriptural obligations. Music should reflect the truth rather than manufacture a feeling to use as evidence of spiritual truth.

When a church polls the community for its favorite music and then redesigns worship to attract that audience, it has made audience preference a controlling consideration.  A target audience’s musical preferences should not shape a church’s worship.  A service perceived as traditional can also manipulate emotions, neglect biblical substance, and encourage misplaced confidence. The correction is to make Scripture, rather than emotional effect, cultural preference, or numerical success, the governing authority.  God is the sole audience and arbiter of true worship.

Restore the Biblical Purpose of the Church’s Gathering

When proponents design a church meeting primarily to secure decisions, create a spiritual atmosphere, or produce a higher experience, the gathered church becomes a stage for eliciting responses rather than a congregation ordered by God’s Word.  A church gathering should serve the purposes Scripture gives it: the ministry of the Word, prayer, congregational singing, mutual edification, the ordinances, fellowship, discipline, and the corporate life of a people who belong to Christ.

Evangelism is a legitimate concern, and unbelievers may hear the gospel when the church assembles. But the assembly should not organize around the assumption that the most important measure of a service is how many people make a decision.  Paul describes the church as the house of God and the pillar and ground of the truth (1 Timothy 3:15). This makes the church responsible for upholding and practicing the truth, not for arranging its life around the production of religious responses. Churches must ask whether their practices teach sound doctrine, edify believers, honor God, and bring their lives into conformity with Scripture.

A congregation can reject contemporary worship music yet retain the same revivalist assumptions about altar calls, decision counts, emotional appeals, and visible results. It can insist on apparently traditional hymns while still using music to create a predictable response.  Again, churches should return to a biblical understanding of their purpose and how to attain it.

Correct the Methods Without Merely Replacing Them

Churches often respond to a problem by just changing methods. Those dissatisfied with historical revivalism may adopt seeker-sensitive services. Those dissatisfied with seeker-sensitive worship may return to older hymns but retain decision-centered evangelism. Those troubled by legalism may emphasize grace so exclusively that they neglect repentance, obedience, and the necessity of spiritual fruit. Others may react against emotional religion by substituting doctrinal correctness for practical holiness. None of these reactions necessarily corrects the underlying problem.

A church can use traditional methods to produce an experience, or contemporary methods to do so. It can preach sound doctrine while organizing its ministry around unbiblical measures of success. It can reject Wesleyan perfectionism while retaining a practical distinction between those who have made a decision and those who have become useful, committed, or successful Christians.

Churches must therefore evaluate both doctrine and practice. They should ask what its leaders teach about conversion, what assurance they offer, how they interpret Christian failure, what they mean by spiritual maturity, and what their methods are designed to produce. Churches should also ask what their members learn to regard as evidence of God’s work. If people are taught to trust an experience rather than Christ, a decision rather than the gospel, or ministry results rather than faithfulness to Scripture, then the problem remains.

A Practical Course of Correction for Churches

A church that wants to address this legacy can begin with a deliberate review of its doctrine and practice.

• The gospel itself.  Has the Wesleyan movement and its descendants mutated the gospel your church preaches?  What kind of corrupting influence did it have in this area?
• The gospel invitation. Does it explain repentance and faith, or does it make repeating words the decisive act? Does it distinguish a profession from the reality of conversion?
• Assurance. Is an event alone the primary basis for people’s assurance of salvation, instead of directing them to Christ, His promises, and the biblical evidence of new life?
• Examine sanctification teaching. Does the church teach progressive growth in holiness, or does it imply that a separate experience divides ordinary Christians from genuinely spiritual ones?
• Examine the use of music. Do the lyrics communicate substantial biblical truth? Does the musical arrangement serve the congregation’s singing, or does a church use emotional intensity as a proxy for God’s presence?
• Examine ministry reports. Are professions, baptisms, attendance, and other numbers reported honestly and treated as limited indicators, or are they used as proof that a method has produced spiritual life?
• Examine church membership and discipleship. Does the church teach and oversee those who profess faith, helping them grow in obedience and discernment?
• Examine the church’s standards. Are its decisions about worship, dress, family life, speech, and conduct grounded in Scripture, or are they driven by either popular culture or reaction against it?

No congregation can correct every historical problem overnight, and no one should question the sincerity of every unbiblical method.  Very often people don’t know what is wrong or the underlying source of the problem. The goal here is to shine light on the problem, how it started and developed, and how Scripture shows us to fix it.

Let Scripture Define the Christian Life

The deepest problem with the two-tier system is that it changed the one true gospel for hundreds of thousands of people.  Everyone needs to know this.  Furthermore, it encourages Christians to interpret their spiritual condition through experiences that Scripture does not establish as the defining marks of conversion or maturity. A second blessing, a dramatic surrender, an emotional worship experience, a public decision, or a record of successful soulwinning can become a substitute for the biblical examination of faith and its fruit.

The solution is to restore the biblical account of the whole Christian life. God saves sinners by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. At that moment, the true believer receives every resource He needs to live like God wants.  God does not justify sinners because they have attained a higher spiritual condition. He also does not save them so that holiness becomes an optional second stage.  God calls those He saves to grow in grace, obey His Word, resist sin, love the brethren, and persevere in faith. Their growth is real but imperfect, and their assurance rests in Christ rather than in a manufactured experience.

This correction must reach the way churches preach, invite, sing, report results, and evaluate ministry. Music should fulfill its scriptural purpose, not create an emotional substitute. Evangelism should proclaim the gospel and call for repentance and faith, not count responses as proof of regeneration.  Every aspect of worship should conform to Scripture rather than revolve around audience preference or a predictable emotional outcome. Church growth should be welcomed when God grants it, but it must never become the measure that determines what a church believes or how it worships.

The church does not need a more effective way to manufacture the second tier. It needs to abandon the assumption that the Christian life is divided into a saving experience and a separate, higher form of Christianity. It needs to preach the whole gospel, teach the whole counsel of God, and practice the whole Christian life as Scripture describes it. The enduring remedy is not a new experience or a better technique. It is the truth of God’s Word governing the faith, worship, and obedience of His people, all for the glory of God.

What Should a Genuinely Biblical Alternative Look Like?

I would use the following criteria to assess any church, including an unaffiliated Baptist one.