This post may only interest my Methodist friends. Indulge me. I’ll get back to broader themes soon.

If you’re a Methodist, you may be surprised to see how clearly John Wesley distinguished between the itinerant ministry and pastoral ministry. He insisted that he wasn’t appointing pastors, but preachers. Look at what he says in his sermon “The Ministerial Office”:

So, the great High-Priest of our profession sent apostles and evangelists to proclaim glad tidings to all the world; and then Pastors, Preachers, and Teachers, to build up in the faith the congregations that should be found. But I do not find that ever the office of an Evangelist was the same with that of a Pastor, frequently called a Bishop. He presided over the flock, and administered the sacraments: The former assisted him, and preached the Word, either in one or more congregations. I cannot prove from any part of the New Testament, or from any author of the three first centuries, that the office of an evangelist gave any man a right to act as a Pastor or Bishop. I believe these offices were considered as quite distinct from each other till the time of Constantine.

Let’s highlight two of those points. According to Wesley:

1 – Pastor, Bishop… same thing. Wesley wouldn’t concede any differentiated role between pastors and bishops. It’s hard to make a strong argument for the distinction in the NT either. In other places, Wesley makes his feelings about bishops loud and clear — the people called Methodists should “put a full end to this!” Let the Presbyterians have their bishops, but let the Methodists know their calling better.

2 – Pastor, Evangelist… big difference. He said he could not prove from any part of the NT, or any time until Constantine, that the offices of evangelist and pastor were one in the same.

You should go read that whole sermon if you’re interested in these things. You’ll see a full, deeply theological explanation of ministry orders according to Wesley.

Wesley associated the pastors of the New Testament with priests in the Old Testament. He described them as the “ordinary, established, institutional ministers of the church.”

Meanwhile, he associated Methodist preachers with the prophets of the Old Testament. They were extraordinarily called to the work of itinerant evangelism: “It is true extraordinary prophets were frequently raised up, who had not been educated in the ‘schools of the prophets,’ neither had the outward ordinary call. But we read of no extraordinary priests” (see this in “Ought We to Separate from the Church of England?”).

Wesley did not believe he was appointing institutional ministers of the church for the ordinary work of the church. Wesley was raising up extraordinary leaders as traveling evangelists and apostles “to proclaim glad tidings to all the world.”

John Wesley never heard of a traveling pastor. Pastors were the local ministers, building up congregations in their faith. Wesley was calling traveling preachers to proclaim glad tidings to all the world.

The question for Methodists today: what is the point of our traveling ministers? Are they sent “to proclaim glad tidings to all the world”? If so, we should take a closer look at what they’re actually doing, because it looks more like that ordinary pastoral ministry. Whatever the case, it seems that we have blurred two roles that Wesley was at pains to keep distinct.

You may ask what we do with Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury, and the American ministry that followed. If you want to talk about that, we can use the comments section for it. In short, I think much of what Wesley had taught and fought for elsewhere got undermined when he ordained these two.

Yet we still see in the early American ministry that the traveling preachers were not pastors. You should go to this brilliant article by Don Haynes to see more. He shows that circuit riders weren’t pastors and also argues that “local elders were the pillars and backbone of local churches.”

Next: a proposal for better ministry today.

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