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Well, Asbury Theological Seminary’s President beat me to it. Dr. David Watson was the first to get the word out about the book we’ve written together. His Substack post, “A Methofesto: Introducing a New Book by Those Watson Boys” is really funny and gives some interesting backstory to the challenges we faced getting this book into print.
For my part, I am grateful to finally have a book in print with David Watson. People keep thinking that David wrote The Class Meeting. (And I’m pretty sure he’s been taking credit for it. Not that I’ve ever taken credit for his book Scripture and the Life of God.) At least people won’t get us confused on this one.
David has long been a kind of older brother for me in the faith and in the academy. It really is an honor to be able to reflect on the meaning of the Wesleyan/Methodist theological tradition and its contribution to the contemporary church with him.
I don’t remember when these conversations first started, but for well more than a decade, we have had innumerable informal conversations about things wrong with the Methodist movement and how to fix them. It was a healthy and invigorating challenge for me to have the task of putting pen to paper to make a considered argument for the contribution of the tradition started under the leadership of John Wesley in the late 1730s in our day.
The chapter I most enjoyed working on was the one on “Methodism and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit.” This has been one of the areas where the riches of the Wesleyan theological heritage have been an asset. And it has been where I’ve most enjoyed learning and growing as a Christian, a pastor, and a teacher. I share a personal story in that chapter that is a piece of my experience of the work of the Spirit in my life that I haven’t ever shared in print.
David shared a brief excerpt from the introduction in his Substack, which you can read there. I want to share a different part from the same, which points to the book’s big idea:
Why do the people called Methodist exist today? No movement can thrive without a clear sense of identity, and the Methodist movement in the West suffers from an identity crisis. In the interest of being modern, relevant, or attractional, we have lost a clear sense of why we exist in the first place. Put more sharply, Methodists have time and again compromised our particularity by accommodating our beliefs to the spirit of the age. It’s time for a different approach….
We cannot simply re-create early Methodism, but we can recover aspects of its life that gave it such power. We want fire, not ashes.
If you want to see fresh faith and fire in the Methodist and Wesleyan family in our day, please buy a copy of this book. The work we put into this can only make an impact if people read the book. Currently, physical copies are only available through Seedbed (the publisher). You can buy the Kindle version through Amazon.
P.S. Yesterday was a great day at Asbury Church! We had 6,300+ in person for our 3 Easter services. Rodney Adams, Asbury’s Executive Director, and I were reflecting at the end of the morning about how blessed we are as a staff to see what the Lord is doing in our midst right now. Large churches catch a lot of strays these days. There is a lazy sophomoric critique that says “we care about people, not numbers.” But that is exactly why I’m fired up about our numbers. The numbers represent actual people. We had more than 800 more people in worship yesterday than we did last year on Easter (a 14% increase from last Easter). That is 800 individual people, created in the image of God, who heard the best Easter Sunday sermon I’ve ever heard. And they were explicitly invited to count the cost of following Jesus and come back next week ready to make a profession of faith in him.
I hope your Easter was fantastic. God is good!
I cannot wait for Pentecost this year.
P.P.S. It is not too late to apply for the Asbury Fellows Program, which I lead at Asbury Church. The first year has been great and I am really excited to welcome the next group of Fellows to Asbury. Applications are due by April 17, 2026. Details here.
Kevin M. Watson is a Pastor and the Senior Director of Christian Formation at Asbury Church in Tulsa, OK. He is also on the faculty at Asbury Theological Seminary, anchoring the Seminary’s Tulsa, OK Extension Site. His most recent book, Doctrine, Spirit, and Discipline describes the purpose of the Wesleyan tradition and the struggle to maintain its identity in the United States. Affiliate links, which help support my work, used in this post.
Kevin M. Watson 