This is from the Transitional Book of Doctrines and Discipline of the Global Methodist Church, downloaded in July 2024. The whole book is up for revision and formal adoption at the Global Methodist Church’s Convening General Conference Sept. 20-26, 2024. The complete book can be found here.
¶ 102. THE WESLEYAN WAY OF SALVATION.
1. The Wesleyan tradition celebrates the universal love of God in affirming that Christ died for all people with the result that the gift of salvation is available to all persons through the ministrations of the Holy Spirit. Our Father in Heaven is not willing that any should be lost (Matthew 18:14), but that all may come to “the knowledge of truth” (1 Timothy 2:4). With the Apostle Paul, we affirm the proclamation found in Romans 10:9, “That if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”
2. God’s love toward fallen creation is made manifest in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ; his
life, ministry, death, and bodily resurrection. This gift of salvation is available to all humanity by
grace through faith. Grace includes the active, empowering presence of God, through the Holy
Spirit, enabling believers to trust, love, and serve God. This undeserved gift works to liberate
humanity from both the guilt and power of sin, and to live as children of God, freed for joyful
obedience. In the classic Wesleyan expression, grace works in numerous ways throughout our lives, beginning with the general providence of God toward all.
3. God’s prevenient or preventing grace refers to “the first dawning of grace in the soul,” mitigating the effects of original sin, even before we are aware of our need for God. It prevents the full consequences of humanity’s alienation from God and awakens conscience, instills a basic knowledge of the moral law, gives an initial sense of God, and restores a measure of liberty to receive the further graces of God – all of this issuing in the first inclinations toward life. Received prior to our ability to respond, preventing grace enables genuine response to the continuing work of God’s grace.
4. God’s convincing grace leads us to what the Bible terms “repentance,” awakening in us a desire to “flee the wrath to come” and enabling us to begin to “fear God and work righteousness.” Clearly, repentance is at the heart of what Methodism has always been about: the calling of sinners to forsake their self-referential ways and to embrace the good news of Jesus Christ. Indeed, so important was repentance to John Wesley that he referred to it as one of the three main doctrines of Methodism, along with both faith and holiness. In fact, he even described repentance as “the porch of religion.”
5. God’s justifying grace is received by faith to reconcile us to God through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ, what God does for us. It is pardon for past sins and ordinarily results in the
direct assurance of “God’s Spirit witnessing with our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom. 8:16) as well as the indirect witness of a good conscience in the midst of the fruit of the Spirit.
6. God’s sanctifying grace begins with God’s work of regeneration, sometimes referred to as
“being born again,” or “initial sanctification.” It is God’s work in us as we continually turn to Him
and seek to be perfected in His love. Sanctification is the process by which the Holy Spirit
increasingly cleanses the heart in Christlikeness and to put to death the carnal nature in an ever
increasing abundance of the fruit of the Spirit. With John Wesley, we believe that a life of holiness and ultimately “entire sanctification” should be the goal of each person’s journey with God.
7. Our ultimate hope and promise in Christ is glorification, where our souls and bodies will
be perfectly restored to live with God eternally through the new creation.