Methodist Revolutions

Something feels off, and you are not alone in that feeling. Many faithful people across the church are sitting with a quiet but persistent tension between the hope the gospel carries and the reality they encounter week after week in congregational life and in the world beyond it.

Methodist Revolutions: Evangelical Engagements of Church and World, edited by Joerg Rieger and Upolu Lumā Vaai, is the kind of book that honestly engages with that tension and brings theological depth to questions that deserve more than easy answers. An international gathering of Methodist scholars brings together perspectives from across the global church to ask a question that the Wesleyan tradition has always carried at its core: if holiness is real, what does it change? Not just in individuals, not just within congregational walls, but in the world itself?

The holiness tradition has not always gotten this right. These contributors know that, and they say so. There have been moments of narrowness and moments of triumphalism that closed off the very renewal being sought. But running beneath those shortcomings is something the editors and contributors refuse to abandon: an evangelical expectation, rooted in Methodist history, that the status quo in church and world is not the final word. That expectation is not optimism borrowed from cultural trends. It is a claim about the gospel itself.

What this volume offers is a theologically grounded, globally informed case that comprehensive transformation is not only possible but already underway. The chapters move from historical recovery to concrete engagement, drawing on holiness histories and evangelical commitments that have fueled renewal since the earliest Methodist movements. Contributors, including Timothy R. Eberhart, Kisitu Gyaviira, R. Simangaliso Kumalo, Filipe Maia, Keegan Osinski, Pablo Guillermo Oviedo, Helmut Renders, Upolu Lumā Vaai, and Rieger himself bring the kind of geographic and theological breadth that keeps any single tradition from claiming too much while still holding the center.

This is for pastors, scholars, and thoughtful Christians in the Wesleyan and Methodist traditions who are ready to recover what church renewal and social transformation have always had to do with each other and who want a theologically serious conversation to help them get there.

The tradition you inherited has more in it than you may have been told.

Joerg Rieger is Distinguished Professor of Theology and Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair in Wesleyan Studies, and the Director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee. His work addresses the relation of theology and public life, reflecting on the misuse of power in religion, politics, and economics. Author and editor of 27 books and over 210 academic articles, his books include Jesus vs. Caesar: For People Tired of Serving the Wrong God; No Religion but Social Religion: Liberating Wesleyan Theology; Unified We Are a Force: How Faith and Labor Can Overcome America’s Inequalities (with Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger); Faith on the Road: A Short Theology of Travel and Justice; and Occupy Religion: Theology of the Multitude (with Kwok Pui-lan).