Methodist Beliefs and Denominations

1. What Methodists Believe

Methodists confess the Trinity, the incarnation, the bodily resurrection of Christ and the historic creeds, and they add to that common inheritance a distinctive doctrine of grace worked out by John Wesley. God gives prevenient grace to every human being, which restores enough freedom for a person to accept or refuse him; justifying grace pardons the sinner who trusts Christ; and sanctifying grace genuinely remakes the believer over a lifetime toward holiness. Grace on this account can be resisted, and a Christian who has received it can still fall away.

Methodists baptise infants as well as adults, keep two sacraments (baptism and the Lord's Supper), affirm a real presence of Christ in the Supper while declining the term transubstantiation, and organise congregations into a connexion rather than leaving each one independent. Their standards of doctrine are Wesley's abridged Articles of Religion, his published Sermons, and his Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament. British Methodism adds a Deed of Union; American bodies add the Confession of Faith inherited from the Evangelical United Brethren.

That is the doctrine. The bodies that carry it are numerous, and they carry it with real differences of temperament, church order and moral teaching. Section 8 onward walks them one at a time. For where Methodism sits on the wider map of Christian bodies, see our guide to the Christian denominations, which places the Methodist family among the free churches that grew out of the English Reformation.

Source note on numbers: the World Methodist Council, the association of Methodist and Wesleyan denominations, describes its member churches as present in more than 130 countries and representing tens of millions of people worldwide. Figures below are attributed to the body that published them, and where a reliable published figure does not exist this page describes the direction rather than inventing a number.

2. John Wesley and the Origin of Methodism

Methodism began as a renewal movement inside the Church of England, led by an Anglican priest who never left it. John Wesley (1703 to 1791) and his brother Charles (1707 to 1788) gathered a small group of Oxford students from 1729 for prayer, fasting, frequent communion, Scripture study and visits to prisoners and the sick. Fellow students mocked the group's regimented devotion and called them the Holy Club, and also Methodists, for the method in it. The insult became the name of a worldwide church.

Aldersgate and the Turn to Field Preaching

The Wesleys sailed to the new colony of Georgia in 1735 as missionaries and returned discouraged. On 24 May 1738, at a meeting in Aldersgate Street in London, John Wesley heard someone reading Luther's preface to the Letter to the Romans and recorded in his journal that he felt his heart "strangely warmed" and that he trusted in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation. Methodists have treated Aldersgate ever since as the movement's founding experience, the moment at which Wesley's rigorous religion of duty became a religion of assurance.

The following year George Whitefield persuaded a reluctant Wesley to preach outdoors to the colliers of Kingswood near Bristol. Wesley found that people who would never enter a parish church would stand in a field at five in the morning to hear preaching. Field preaching, lay preachers, and societies of converts organised for mutual discipline became the machinery of the revival. Charles Wesley supplied the hymns, several thousand of them, and Methodist doctrine reached ordinary people through singing at least as much as through sermons.

The Split With Whitefield Over Predestination

Whitefield was a Calvinist and Wesley was not, and the two friends divided publicly in 1740 over predestination. Wesley's sermon Free Grace attacked unconditional election as a doctrine that made God's love partial and human preaching pointless. Whitefield replied in print, and English evangelicalism carried two streams from then on: Calvinistic Methodism, which survives in Wales, and the Arminian Methodism of Wesley, who from 1778 published a journal called the Arminian Magazine to make his position unmistakable. The bodies described in this guide all descend from the Wesleyan side of that argument. The Catholic teaching that God wills all to be saved and that the human will genuinely cooperates is set out in our guide to free will and predestination.

How Methodism Became a Separate Church

Wesley insisted to the end of his life that he lived and died a member of the Church of England, and he wanted his societies to remain within it. Two pressures broke that intention. The first was America. After the Revolution the Anglican bishops would not ordain clergy for the new republic, and Wesley concluded that as a presbyter he could ordain in a case of necessity. In 1784 he set apart Thomas Coke as superintendent for America, and at the Christmas Conference in Baltimore that December the Methodist Episcopal Church was constituted, with Coke and Francis Asbury as its first bishops. Charles Wesley regarded the ordinations as a breach and said so bitterly.

The second pressure was England after Wesley's death in 1791, where societies wanted their own preachers to administer the sacraments rather than depending on Anglican parish clergy. The 1795 Plan of Pacification allowed it, and British Methodism became a separate church by degrees rather than by a single declaration. The Methodist family therefore has an unusual origin story among Protestant bodies: it separated from the Church of England for practical reasons of pastoral supply, without ever formulating a doctrinal protest against it.

3. Prevenient, Justifying and Sanctifying Grace

Wesleyan theology describes the Christian life as one continuous work of grace passing through three phases: prevenient, justifying and sanctifying. The phases are not three different graces from three different sources. They are the one grace of God meeting a person at successive points, and Methodist preaching has always moved through them in order.

Prevenient Grace

Prevenient grace, sometimes spelled preventing grace in Wesley's older English, is the grace that goes before. Wesley agreed with the Reformers that fallen humanity cannot, by unaided nature, turn toward God. He then argued that no human being is in fact unaided, because God has given to every person a measure of grace that restores conscience, awakens desire for him, and makes a free response possible. Wesley put it in his sermon On Working Out Our Own Salvation that no one sins because he has not grace, but because he does not use the grace he has.

The doctrine does two jobs at once. It preserves the seriousness of original sin, because the freedom in question is a gift rather than a natural capacity. It also secures genuine human responsibility, because a person who refuses God refuses a grace actually offered. Prevenient grace is the hinge on which Wesley's whole quarrel with Calvinism turns, and it is also the point of closest contact with Catholic teaching, which says in almost the same words that the preparation of a person for grace is already itself a work of grace (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2001).

Justifying Grace and the New Birth

Justification, in Wesleyan teaching, is God's pardon of the sinner, received by faith, on account of the atoning death of Christ. Wesley held to justification by faith with all the force of a Reformation preacher, and he preached it as an actual event in a person's life rather than as a doctrine to be assented to. Alongside justification he set the new birth: justification is what God does for us, regeneration is what God begins to do in us, and Wesley insisted the two happen together and must never be separated.

He added a third element that has marked Methodist spirituality ever since: assurance. Wesley taught, from Romans 8:16, that the Holy Spirit bears witness with the believer's spirit that they are a child of God, and that a Christian may know, and normally will know, that they are forgiven. He moderated the claim over his lifetime, allowing that some sincere believers lack that felt assurance. The expectation of a knowable, datable turning point entered evangelical Christianity largely through this teaching. For the Catholic account of what happens in justification, see our guide to salvation.

Sanctifying Grace

Sanctification, for Wesley, begins at the new birth and continues for the whole of life. Grace does not merely change a person's legal standing before God. It changes the person. Sin's power is broken progressively, holy tempers are formed, and love becomes the governing motive of the will. Wesley taught that this growth is nourished through what he called the means of grace: prayer, searching the Scriptures, fasting, Christian conference, and above all the Lord's Supper.

This is the point at which Wesley parts company with any purely forensic account of salvation, in which righteousness is credited to the believer's account while the believer himself remains unchanged. Wesley thought such a scheme made grace legally effective and spiritually inert. He preached instead that God intends to restore the divine image in real human beings, and that a religion which promises pardon without transformation has cut the gospel in half. Our guide to faith and works argues the same case from the Catholic side, against a sola fide that leaves the believer unchanged.

4. Christian Perfection and Entire Sanctification

Christian perfection is the most distinctive and most misunderstood Methodist doctrine. Wesley taught that a believer may, in this life, come to a state in which love of God and neighbour so fills the heart that no rival affection governs the will. He called it perfect love, entire sanctification, and holiness of heart and life, and he described it in A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, which he revised across decades because the doctrine was constantly misrepresented.

What Wesley Meant, and What He Denied

Wesley's definition depends on a narrow definition of sin. In this discussion he means by sin a voluntary transgression of a known law of God. He expressly denied that the entirely sanctified Christian is free from ignorance, error, mistakes in judgement, physical infirmity, or temptation. He denied that such a person no longer needs the atoning blood of Christ, and said the opposite: perfection depends on Christ moment by moment. He denied that the state is fixed, holding that it can be lost. He also discouraged people from announcing that they had received it.

Read with those qualifications in place, the doctrine claims less than the word perfection suggests to modern ears and more than most Protestants of Wesley's day were willing to grant. Wesley took his warrant from the plain commands of Scripture: be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48), love the Lord your God with all your heart (Mark 12:30), and Paul's prayer that God would sanctify believers entirely (1 Thessalonians 5:23). His argument was that God does not command what he refuses to enable.

Gradual or Instantaneous

Wesley held both, which is why the doctrine has been read in two directions ever since. He taught that sanctification grows gradually from the new birth, and also that the entire work may be given in a moment, received by simple faith. Nineteenth-century American Holiness preaching seized the instantaneous side and taught entire sanctification as a definite second work of grace, a crisis experience subsequent to conversion and testified to publicly. British Methodism and much of the older American Methodism kept the gradual emphasis, and many United Methodist congregations today rarely preach the doctrine at all.

The Catholic Response

The Catholic Church shares Wesley's central conviction and differs on the mechanism. Vatican II's Lumen Gentium devotes an entire chapter to the universal call to holiness, teaching that every Christian in every state of life is called to the perfection of charity. Catholic spiritual theology has always described a progress toward union with God in which charity comes to govern the whole person, and the saints are held up as evidence that it happens.

Catholic teaching differs on three points. It does not teach a second, definite work of grace distinct from baptismal regeneration and the ordinary sacramental life. It holds that concupiscence, the disordered inclination left by original sin, remains in the baptised for life and is an occasion of struggle rather than a sin in itself. And it situates growth in holiness inside the sacraments, especially the Eucharist and confession, rather than principally in a moment of consecrated faith. The disagreement is about how sanctification comes and how it is verified. The goal described is nearly the same one.

5. The Wesleyan Quadrilateral

The Wesleyan Quadrilateral names the four sources Methodists draw on in theology: Scripture, tradition, reason and experience, with Scripture holding authority over the other three. Methodists use the framework constantly, and the honest history of the term is worth knowing, because it is often quoted as though Wesley coined it himself.

Where the Term Came From

Albert Outler, the twentieth-century Wesley scholar who edited the critical edition of Wesley's sermons, coined the word in the course of the work that produced the United Methodist doctrinal statement of 1972, as a description of the pattern he saw in Wesley's actual arguments. Outler later said he regretted it, because the geometrical image suggested four sides of equal length, which Wesley never held. Wesley called himself a man of one book and treated Scripture as decisive. The other three do supporting work: tradition tests a reading against how the Church has understood it, reason tests it for coherence, and experience confirms in a believer's life what Scripture promises.

What Each Source Does

• Scripture. The final authority in matters of faith. Wesley's Articles of Religion state that Scripture contains all things necessary to salvation and that nothing outside it may be required as an article of faith.
• Tradition. Wesley read the Fathers closely, particularly the Eastern writers on deification, and drew on the Anglican divines. He used tradition as a check on private interpretation.
• Reason. Wesley wrote on logic and expected preachers to think. Reason cannot generate revelation; it orders and applies what revelation gives.
• Experience. The witness of the Spirit in the believer, and the observable fruit of grace in a changed life. Wesley used experience to confirm doctrine rather than to establish it.

The Catholic Church would recognise three of the four immediately and would press hard on the arrangement. Catholic teaching holds that Scripture and Tradition flow from a single divine source and are entrusted together to a living teaching office charged with interpreting them authentically. The Methodist scheme has no such office, and Methodist bodies settle contested questions by the vote of a Conference. Our guide to Scripture and Sacred Tradition sets out the Catholic case for why an interpreting authority is needed, and section 8 below shows what happens to a Methodist body when a Conference vote is the highest court available.

6. Class Meetings and the Methodist Discipline

The class meeting was Wesley's organisational invention and arguably his most durable contribution to Protestant Christianity. Every member of a Methodist society belonged to a class of roughly a dozen people who met weekly with a lay leader, gave an account of their spiritual state, confessed their faults, and received counsel and correction. Membership in the society depended on attendance at the class, and the leader issued a quarterly ticket without which a member could not remain.

The General Rules

Wesley set out the terms of membership in The Nature, Design, and General Rules of the United Societies (1743), and the three rules are still printed in Methodist disciplines today. Do no harm, avoiding evil of every kind. Do good, of every possible sort, as far as possible to all people. Attend upon all the ordinances of God, which Wesley listed as public worship, the ministry of the word, the Lord's Supper, family and private prayer, searching the Scriptures, and fasting or abstinence. The rules were enforced, and members were expelled for breaking them.

Below the class Wesley placed the band, a smaller group of four or five of the same sex and marital state, meeting for closer confession. The band questions were searching: what known sins have you committed since our last meeting, what temptations have you met, how were you delivered, what have you thought, said or done of which you doubt whether it be sin. Wesley expected Christians to be known by other Christians at that depth.

What Catholics Should Recognise Here

A Catholic reading the band questions is reading a Protestant reconstruction of something the Catholic Church has always had in the sacrament of penance and in spiritual direction. Wesley worked in a church where private confession to a priest was provided for in the Prayer Book and had largely fallen out of ordinary use, and he built a lay structure that did part of the same work. It produced a movement of unusual moral seriousness. Methodists were prominent in the campaign against the slave trade, in the temperance societies, in prison reform, in Sunday schools for working children, and in much of the nineteenth-century social gospel. Wesley's own Thoughts Upon Slavery (1774) and his last surviving letter, written to William Wilberforce in 1791, put him on that side of the argument to the end.

7. Sacraments, Worship and Church Order

Methodists keep two sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper, on the ground that Wesley's Articles of Religion recognise only those two as ordained by Christ in the Gospel. The other five that Catholics count as sacraments are described in Wesley's Articles of Religion as states of life allowed in the Scriptures or practices that have grown up in the Church, and are honoured in Methodism without the status of sacraments of the Gospel. Methodist teaching on both sacraments is higher than most outside observers expect.

Baptism

Methodists baptise infants and adults, normally by sprinkling or pouring, and they do not rebaptise a person already baptised with water in the name of the Trinity. Wesleyan teaching treats infant baptism as the sign and means of God's prevenient grace claiming the child before the child can respond, with confirmation and personal profession following later. That is why Methodists rarely quarrel with Catholics about baptism and quarrel constantly with Baptists about it, a dispute set out from the Baptist side in our guide to Baptist beliefs. The Catholic doctrine of what baptism accomplishes is covered in our guide to baptism.

The Lord's Supper

Wesley believed in a real presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper and communicated as often as he could, urging in his sermon The Duty of Constant Communion that Christians receive at every opportunity. The Hymns on the Lord's Supper that he published with Charles in 1745 use language of sacrifice and presence that would surprise many modern Methodists. Wesley also taught the Supper as a converting ordinance, meaning that a seeker not yet converted might meet Christ there, which is why most Methodist churches practise an open table.

Methodism rejects transubstantiation by name in its Articles of Religion, and it does not hold that the Eucharist is a propitiatory sacrifice offered by a priest. The presence affirmed is real and spiritual, given to faith, without a claim about a change in the elements themselves. The Catholic doctrine, and the reasoning behind it, is set out in our guide to the Eucharist.

Ministry and Connexion

Methodist churches are connexional, meaning that congregations belong to a whole and hold their property, appoint their clergy and set their doctrine through a shared structure. American Methodist bodies are episcopal: they have bishops who appoint clergy to congregations, and appointment rather than congregational call remains the norm. British Methodism has no bishops and is governed by a Conference under an annually elected President. Wesley's itinerancy survives in the practice of moving ministers between circuits.

Methodist bishops exercise real authority, and Methodism does not claim that its bishops stand in apostolic succession in the sense the Catholic and Orthodox churches mean. Wesley himself argued, from his reading of the early Church, that bishops and presbyters are one order, which is precisely what allowed him to ordain for America. The Catholic understanding of holy orders and why succession is held to matter is set out in our guide to the priesthood.

Women in Ministry

Wesley authorised women to preach in his lifetime, beginning with Sarah Crosby and Mary Bosanquet Fletcher, on the ground of what he called an extraordinary call. The AME Zion Church ordained Julia Foote as a deacon in 1894 and as an elder in 1900, among the earliest ordinations of a woman in American Methodism. The United Methodist Church and most Methodist and Holiness bodies today ordain women to full ministry. The Catholic Church holds that it has no authority to ordain women to the priesthood, a position stated by St. John Paul II in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (1994). This is one of the plainest differences between the two traditions and it should be stated plainly.

8. The United Methodist Church and the Global Methodist Church

The United Methodist Church is the largest Methodist body in the United States, formed in 1968 by the merger of the Methodist Church with the Evangelical United Brethren Church. Between 2019 and 2023 it lost more congregations than at any point since it was formed, and a new denomination, the Global Methodist Church, launched in 2022 out of that separation. Getting the sequence right matters, because it is widely reported inaccurately.

How the UMC Was Assembled

American Methodism divided in 1844 over slavery, when the General Conference suspended a bishop who held slaves and the southern delegates withdrew to form the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. A third body, the Methodist Protestant Church, had separated in 1830 over lay representation and the power of bishops. Those three reunited in 1939 as the Methodist Church, and the 1939 plan of union created a segregated Central Jurisdiction that placed Black congregations in a separate structure regardless of geography, an arrangement that lasted until it was dissolved in the 1960s. The 1968 merger with the Evangelical United Brethren, a body of German-speaking American origin with its own Wesleyan roots, produced the United Methodist Church.

What Actually Triggered the Separation

The dispute was about the ordination of clergy in same-sex relationships and about clergy officiating at same-sex weddings. The UMC's Book of Discipline had said since 1972 that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching; the General Conference added the prohibition on ordaining self-avowed practising homosexual clergy in 1984 and the prohibition on clergy conducting same-sex union ceremonies in 1996. Every one of those provisions was contested at General Conference after General Conference from the 1990s onward. A special General Conference held in St. Louis in February 2019 voted to retain and strengthen the prohibitions, in what was called the Traditional Plan. The same session adopted Paragraph 2553, a temporary provision allowing United States congregations to leave the denomination with their property, on stated financial terms, for reasons of conscience related to those questions, with a deadline of 31 December 2023.

Traditionalist leaders who had expected the 2019 decision to hold concluded through 2020 and 2021 that enforcement was not occurring in many annual conferences. A negotiated Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace, published in January 2020, would have funded an orderly separation, and it was never voted on, because the pandemic pushed the General Conference from 2020 to 2021, then to 2022, then to 2024. When the further postponement to 2024 was announced in March 2022, traditionalist leaders stopped waiting for it. The Global Methodist Church launched on 1 May 2022 as a denomination for congregations holding the traditional position. At the General Conference held in Charlotte in the spring of 2024, with many traditionalist delegates from the disaffiliated United States churches no longer seated, the United Methodist Church removed the prohibitions on ordaining clergy in same-sex relationships and on clergy performing same-sex weddings. The same conference approved a regionalisation plan giving regions of the world greater latitude over their own church law, in the form of constitutional amendments that then went to the annual conferences for ratification.

How Many Congregations Left

Roughly 7,600 United States congregations were approved for disaffiliation under Paragraph 2553 before the December 2023 deadline, which is about a quarter of the denomination's United States churches.

Source: United Methodist News Service and the denomination's General Council on Finance and Administration reported the disaffiliation totals as annual conferences ratified them through 2023. Two cautions apply to any figure quoted anywhere. First, congregations that disaffiliated did not all join the Global Methodist Church; some became independent, some joined other Wesleyan bodies, and some closed. Second, this page does not state a membership figure for either denomination, because reported totals moved substantially during and after the separation and we could not verify a current number to the standard this site requires. Treat any single number you see for either body as approximate.

Where the Two Bodies Stand Now

The United Methodist Church remains a large international denomination with a substantial presence in Africa, the Philippines and Europe, and its regionalisation plan was designed in part to hold those regions together with a United States church that has changed its discipline. The Global Methodist Church held its convening General Conference in Costa Rica in September 2024 and adopted a Book of Doctrines and Discipline, retaining the historic Wesleyan standards, keeping bishops, and setting term limits on the episcopacy. Both bodies teach Wesleyan doctrine on grace. Their disagreement is about sexual morality and about how church law is enforced.

9. The AME, AME Zion and CME Churches

Three historic denominations carry Wesleyan doctrine through the story of Black Christianity in America: the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Each has its own founding, its own bishops and its own general conference, and none is a branch of the United Methodist Church. They separated over racial exclusion rather than over doctrine, and their theology is Wesleyan throughout.

The African Methodist Episcopal Church

Richard Allen, born into slavery in 1760 and later self-purchased, was a licensed Methodist preacher at St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. By Allen's own account in his autobiography, he, Absalom Jones and other Black members walked out in 1787 after being pulled from their knees during prayer and directed to segregated seating in the gallery. Historians differ over the exact year of the incident, and 1787 is the date the AME Church itself keeps. Allen and Jones founded the Free African Society, and Allen went on to establish Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, known as Mother Bethel, on ground he purchased himself. After years of legal conflict with St. George's over control of the congregation, the Pennsylvania courts confirmed Bethel's independence in 1816.

That same year, delegates from Black Methodist congregations in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Wilmington and elsewhere met and organised the African Methodist Episcopal Church as a denomination, with Richard Allen consecrated as its first bishop. The AME Church is the oldest independent Black denomination in the United States. It bought Wilberforce University in 1863, making it the first American college owned and run by Black Americans, sent missionaries to West and Southern Africa in the nineteenth century, and became a central institution of Black civic life. Its doctrine is Wesley's Articles of Religion; its separation was about who was permitted to kneel where.

The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church

A parallel and independent movement produced the AME Zion Church in New York City. Black members of the John Street Methodist Church, restricted in worship and denied ordination, began holding separate meetings and in 1800 built a church they named Zion. The congregation sought and eventually organised its own connexion, holding its first annual conference in 1821, and consecrating James Varick as its first bishop in 1822. AME Zion is a distinct denomination from the AME Church, with its own bishops, its own discipline and its own founding, and outsiders confuse the two constantly.

AME Zion is often called the Freedom Church for its role in abolition. Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were associated with it, and Frederick Douglass was licensed as a preacher in an AME Zion congregation in New Bedford, Massachusetts, before his career as an orator began. The denomination was also early in ordaining women: Julia Foote was ordained a deacon in 1894 and an elder in 1900, and Mary J. Small was ordained an elder in 1898.

The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church

The CME Church has a different founding story again. After emancipation, Black members remaining in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, asked for their own separate and self-governing denomination, and the southern church agreed and transferred property to it. The new body was organised in December 1870 at Jackson, Tennessee, as the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, with William H. Miles and Richard H. Vanderhorst as its first bishops. It changed its name to the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in 1954. The CME founded Lane College, Paine College and Miles College, and its congregations were widely used as meeting places during the civil rights movement.

10. Free Methodists, Wesleyans and Nazarenes

The Holiness churches are Methodist bodies that separated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to press Wesley's doctrine of entire sanctification harder than the mainstream Methodist churches were pressing it. They typically teach entire sanctification as a definite second work of grace subsequent to conversion, maintain stricter standards of personal conduct, and emphasise revival preaching. They are the direct ancestors of much of modern Pentecostalism.

The Wesleyan Church

The Wesleyan Methodist Connection was formed in 1843 by abolitionists led by Orange Scott, who left the Methodist Episcopal Church because it would not condemn slaveholding outright. The body also objected to episcopal authority and adopted a more congregational polity. In 1968 it merged with the Pilgrim Holiness Church, itself founded in 1897 out of the Holiness revival, to form the Wesleyan Church. It teaches entire sanctification, ordains women, and runs a network of colleges including Indiana Wesleyan University.

The Free Methodist Church

The Free Methodist Church was organised in 1860 at Pekin, New York, under B. T. Roberts, who had been expelled from the Methodist Episcopal Church for his criticisms of it. The name carries the movement's programme: free seats rather than rented pews, which excluded the poor from the better places in church; freedom from slavery; freedom from secret societies; and freedom in worship. Free Methodists teach entire sanctification, keep bishops, and have long had a larger presence outside the United States than within it.

The Church of the Nazarene

The Church of the Nazarene is among the largest of the Holiness denominations, formed by a series of unions of Holiness groups that came together at Pilot Point, Texas, in 1908, with Phineas F. Bresee among its founders. Entire sanctification as a second definite work of grace stands at the centre of its Articles of Faith. The word Pentecostal appeared in the denomination's name in its early years and was dropped in 1919 to avoid confusion with the tongues-speaking movement, which the Nazarenes did not join. The church runs a substantial network of colleges and a large international mission programme.

The Salvation Army and the Route Into Pentecostalism

The Salvation Army began as William and Catherine Booth's East London Christian Mission in 1865 and took its military structure and name in 1878. Its theology is Wesleyan Holiness, its officers are ordained ministers, and it is unusual among Christian bodies in not practising baptism or the Lord's Supper at all, holding that the inward grace can be received without the outward sign. Catholic teaching cannot accept that, since Christ commanded both (Matthew 28:19, Luke 22:19), and the disagreement is a real one rather than a matter of style.

The Holiness movement also supplied the soil for Pentecostalism. The Azusa Street revival of 1906 in Los Angeles was led by William J. Seymour, who had been formed in Holiness teaching, and early Pentecostal bodies including the Church of God in Christ and the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) began as Holiness churches that added the baptism of the Holy Spirit with tongues as a further work of grace. Wesley's doctrine of a sanctifying experience after conversion is the structural ancestor of that claim. The Catholic teaching on the gifts and the person of the Spirit is set out in our guide to the Holy Spirit.

11. The Methodist Bodies Compared

The table below sets the main Methodist and Wesleyan bodies side by side on the points that actually distinguish them. All of them hold Wesley's doctrine of prevenient, justifying and sanctifying grace, so the differences fall on polity, on how entire sanctification is taught, and on moral discipline.

Sources: founding dates, polity and doctrinal standards are taken from each body's own published discipline or book of order, including the United Methodist Book of Discipline, the Global Methodist Book of Doctrines and Discipline, the AME and AME Zion Books of Discipline, the CME Book of Discipline, the Nazarene Manual, and the Methodist Church in Britain's Deed of Union. No membership figures are given, for the reason stated in section 8.

12. Where Rome Agrees With Wesley, and Where It Differs

Catholic and Methodist teaching converge on grace to a degree that surprises members of both churches, and they diverge on authority, the sacraments and the ministry. Setting out both halves honestly is more useful than pretending either the agreement or the difference away.

The Real Agreement

• Grace goes first. Wesley's prevenient grace and the Catholic teaching that grace prepares the will are describing the same movement. The Catechism states that the free initiative of God demands the free response of man and that the preparation for grace is already a work of grace (CCC 2001-2002).
• Grace can be refused. Both traditions reject irresistible grace and both hold that a justified person can fall away through grave sin. The Council of Trent and Wesley's Free Grace are opposing the same Calvinist propositions from different sides of the Reformation divide.
• Justification changes the person. Trent taught that justification includes the remission of sins together with the sanctification and renewal of the inner man. Wesley refused to let justification stand apart from the new birth for exactly that reason.
• Holiness is the point. Wesley's Christian perfection and the universal call to holiness in Lumen Gentium chapter 5 both insist that God intends actual sanctity in ordinary Christians in this life.
• The Church has said so formally. In 2006 the World Methodist Council formally associated itself with the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, the 1999 agreement between the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation. A Catholic and Methodist international dialogue has met since 1967 and publishes an agreed report every five years.

The Real Differences

• Authority. Methodism has no magisterium. Contested questions are settled by a General Conference vote, which means a doctrinal position can be reversed by a later vote, as the United Methodist Church demonstrated between 2019 and 2024. Catholic teaching holds that Christ gave a teaching office to Peter and the apostles and their successors (Matthew 16:18-19, Luke 10:16).
• The sacraments. Methodism keeps two. The Catholic Church holds seven, all instituted by Christ.
• The Eucharist. Methodism affirms a real presence given to faith and rejects transubstantiation and the eucharistic sacrifice. Catholic teaching holds that the whole Christ is present under the appearances of bread and wine, and that the Mass is the same sacrifice as Calvary offered sacramentally.
• Holy orders. Methodist ministry is not held by Rome to be sacramental priesthood in apostolic succession. Methodists generally do not claim it is.
• Mary, the saints and the departed. Methodism honours Mary and does not invoke her, and it has no doctrine of purgatory.
• Sanctification and concupiscence. Catholic teaching holds that disordered inclination remains in the baptised throughout life. The Holiness form of entire sanctification claims more than Catholic theology will grant about what is available in this life.

Wesley on Catholics

Wesley wrote a Letter to a Roman Catholic from Dublin in 1749, after Methodist preaching had provoked sectarian violence in Ireland, and the letter is remarkable for its period. He set out the faith he held, recognised how much of it his Catholic reader held too, asked that they cease reviling one another, and proposed that they help each other toward the kingdom. He wrote the sentence Methodists still quote, that if we cannot as yet think alike in all things, we may at least love alike. He held real objections to Catholic doctrine and stated them elsewhere without softening. The letter shows a man capable of both. Our guide to ecumenism sets out what the Catholic Church now teaches about relations with other Christians, and Catholic vs Protestant compares the two positions doctrine by doctrine.

13. Talking With a Methodist Neighbour

Most conversations between Catholics and Methodists go badly for one reason: each side argues against a caricature of the other. A few practical rules fix that.

Start From the Agreement, Because It Is Large

A Methodist who says salvation is by grace through faith holds at the same time that grace produces obedience, and Wesley spent much of his ministry attacking the antinomians who denied it. The Catholic case against the bare form of that slogan, the version that treats works as spiritually irrelevant, is set out in our guide to faith and works in Catholic teaching, and Wesley is one of the Protestants that argument is not aimed at. A Methodist who talks about holiness and growth in love is describing something a Catholic can affirm without qualification. Begin there. The 2006 association of the World Methodist Council with the Joint Declaration on Justification means the two churches have already put a substantial part of the agreement in writing.

Ask Which Methodist Church

The word Methodist covers a United Methodist congregation, a Global Methodist congregation, an AME congregation, a Nazarene congregation and a Salvation Army corps, and their teaching on entire sanctification, their moral discipline and their worship differ substantially. Asking which body someone belongs to is a courtesy and it prevents most misunderstandings.

Know the Two Questions That Actually Divide

Strip away the surface differences and two questions remain. Who has authority to settle a disputed doctrine, and what happens at the Lord's table. Every other Catholic and Methodist disagreement is downstream of those two. A Catholic who can give a clear account of the teaching office and of the Real Presence can hold a serious conversation. A Catholic who cannot will lose the argument regardless of who is right.

Do Not Treat the Methodist Separations as Entertainment

The division between the United Methodist and Global Methodist churches has cost congregations their buildings, split families, and ended friendships between ministers who trained together. Christ prayed that his followers would be one so that the world would believe (John 17:21). A Catholic response to any Christian division begins with prayer for the people inside it.

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