The nature of a society

The Text

Having told the story of how the society rose, Wesley now says what it is — and does so in a single sentence he clearly already regarded as a definition, because he puts it in quotation marks. A society is “a company of men having the form and seeking the power of godliness, united in order to pray together, to receive the word of exhortation, and to watch over one another in love, that they may help each other to work out their salvation.” Every clause is doing work. The members already have the form and are after the power. They are united — gathered, voluntary, not merely parishioners who share a postcode. The purpose is fourfold: pray together, receive exhortation, watch over one another, and — the governing clause — help each other to work out their salvation. This is the document’s ecclesiology in miniature, and it is startlingly thin on doctrine and thick on company.

Translation Notes

“having the form and seeking the power of godliness.” This is 2 Timothy 3:5 turned inside out. Paul warns of those “having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.” Wesley takes the same two terms and refuses to let them be opposites. His members have the form — they do not despise it, abandon it, or wait until they feel the power to keep it — and at the same time they are seeking the power. The sentence is a deliberate refusal of the two errors Wesley spent his life between: dead formalism (form without power) and enthusiasm (power claimed without form). The grammar holds them together: having and seeking, present tense, simultaneously.

“a company of men.” Company is military and commercial before it is religious — a company marches, a company trades; it acts together or not at all. The word chosen is not assembly or congregation but the word for people whose fortunes are bound. As for “men”: the 1743 word is generic, and the society’s own practice settled the question — women led classes and bands from the beginning. Current use reads it inclusively, and on this the document’s deeds and its words agree.

“to work out their salvation.” Philippians 2:12 exactly — “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” — and Wesley always hears verse 13 with it: “for it is God which worketh in you.” Work out is not earn; it is the unfolding, the bringing-to-completion, of a salvation God has begun and sustains. The verb carries the entire Wesleyan synthesis of grace and response in two words, and the preposition help each other to makes that working-out irreducibly plural.

Historical Context

By 1743 this sentence had a history. The Anglican religious societies of the previous half-century had their own published rules; the Pietist collegia pietatis had theirs; the Moravian Fetter Lane Society — which Wesley had helped draft rules for and then left in 1740 — had bands and “watching over.” Wesley’s definition is a deliberate distillation of that whole tradition with one accent moved. The older Anglican societies were largely devotional and reforming: prayer, alms, the reformation of manners. Wesley’s keeps prayer and exhortation but makes the controlling purpose explicitly soteriological — to help each other to work out their salvation. The society is not a club for the already-pious; it is an instrument of salvation for people in motion.

The phrase “having the form and seeking the power” also carries the scar of the stillness controversy. The Moravian quietists at Fetter Lane had taught that one should abstain from the means of grace (“the form”) until one had assurance (“the power”). Wesley broke with them precisely over this. The definition here is, among other things, his answer to them, written into the constitution of his own societies: you keep the form while seeking the power, not after.

Lines of Interpretation

The contested question is the one the sentence’s last clause forces: is salvation private or social? The definition makes company constitutive — you join in order to help each other — and the traditions divide on how strong that “in order to” really is.

Anglican

Tradition: the religious-society rule; Wesley as a churchman

Read in its Anglican key, the society is a supplement, not a church: it presupposes the parish, the sacraments, the Prayer Book, and adds intensive mutual care within them. “The form” the members already have is precisely the Church of England’s form, which the society exists to vivify, not replace.

Strengths

• Faithful to Wesley’s own intent and to the document’s later insistence on the church’s ordinances
• Explains the definition’s restraint — it defines a society, and pointedly stops short of defining a church

Weaknesses

• The “in order to work out their salvation” language already claims more than a devotional supplement comfortably bears
• History overran it: these societies became, in effect, the church for many of their members

Reformed

Tradition: sanctification and the communion of saints

The Reformed reading hears Philippians 2:12–13 and recognizes covenanted, mutual sanctification: the saints are kept by being kept by one another; perseverance is communal. “Watch over one another in love” is the communion of saints given a working procedure.

Strengths

• Takes the work out your salvation / God works in you dialectic with full seriousness, neither moralizing nor quietist
• Grounds the mutual watching in a robust theology of perseverance

Weaknesses

• Wesley’s optimism about attainable holiness presses harder than most Reformed accounts of remaining sin will allow
• Can subordinate the society’s evangelistic edge to the maintenance of the already-converted

Modern / Ecumenical

Tradition: ecclesiology of the small accountable group; koinōnia theology

The modern reading treats this sentence as one of Protestantism’s most portable ecclesiologies: church defined not by belief, building, or boundary but by a shared seeking under mutual watch. It has fed everything from Bonhoeffer’s Life Together to the base ecclesial communities to contemporary discipleship movements.

Strengths

• Names why the formula travels: it locates the church’s reality in practiced relationship, not institutional form
• Recovers the lay, plural, voluntary character the institutional reading buries

Weaknesses

• Detached from “the form,” the definition can authorize groups that despise the very church Wesley assumed
• “Company” can soften into mere affinity, losing the hard edge of watching over — which the next annotation will show had teeth

Wesleyan Voice

Wesley’s gloss on this sentence is the most quoted thing he ever wrote about the church, and it is brutally short. In the preface to Hymns and Sacred Poems (1739) he wrote: “the gospel of Christ knows of no religion but social; no holiness but social holiness.” The definition here is that axiom turned into a constitution. The purpose clause — “that they may help each other to work out their salvation” — is not a nice feature of the society; for Wesley it is the reason salvation needs a society at all. Holiness, on his account, is not a private transaction with God to which fellowship is added for encouragement. It is something that does not happen, or does not last, alone.

This is also where The Character of a Methodist belongs, because Wesley wrote it to answer exactly the question this definition raises: what, then, distinguishes these people? His answer is a string of refusals. “The distinguishing marks of a Methodist are not his opinions of any sort.” “Nor do we desire to be distinguished by actions, customs, or usages, of an indifferent nature… in the form of our apparel, in the posture of our body, or the covering of our heads.” Strip away opinions and indifferent customs and what is left is the definition’s own content: people having the form, seeking the power, watching over one another toward salvation. The Methodist is not marked by a doctrine or a costume but by a company and a direction.

And the phrase “having the form and seeking the power” is Wesley’s lifelong via media in five words. He is the great enemy of the form that has killed the power — but he is equally, and people forget this, the enemy of the claimed power that has discarded the form. The society keeps the ordinances (the Third Rule will make this a binding rule) precisely because Wesley refused the stillness teaching that one should wait, formless, for power to arrive. The Wesleyan note is not “power instead of form” but “the form, kept, and not rested in.” Lose either half and you no longer have a Methodist society; you have a museum or a riot.

Hymnody

The hymn that is this definition is Charles Wesley’s “All praise to our redeeming Lord, who joins us by his grace, and bids us, each to each restored, together seek his face.” Its stanzas are an almost line-by-line exposition of the purpose clause: “He bids us build each other up; and, gathered into one, to our high calling’s glorious hope we hand in hand go on.” “We all partake the joy of one; the common peace we feel” — social holiness, sung. “Help us to help each other, Lord, each other’s cross to bear” (from “Jesus, united by thy grace”) is the watching-over set to music. And “Try us, O God, and search the ground of every heart we bear” is what a company that watches over one another actually prays. The Wesleys did not merely write rules for the society; they gave it the hymns by which it could become what the rule defines — and the existence of so rich a body of mutual hymnody, hymns in the first person plural, is itself evidence that “no holiness but social holiness” was sung before it was theorized.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

The pastoral force of this sentence is a question to put to a congregation: which of these four things do we actually do together? Pray together — often yes, in a thin sense. Receive the word of exhortation — yes, one direction, from a pulpit. Watch over one another in love — rarely, and almost never structurally. Help each other to work out salvation — for most members, never named as the point of belonging at all. The definition is useful chiefly as a diagnostic: a church can have impeccable form — buildings, liturgy, programs — and contain almost none of the company this sentence describes. Naming that gap honestly is the first pastoral act this text calls for.

The second use is to defend the form while refusing to rest in it. There is a perennial congregational temptation, in both directions, that this sentence cuts against: the people who want the power and despise the form (skip worship, skip the sacrament, “I’m spiritual not religious”) and the people who have the form and have quietly stopped seeking anything. The definition gives the pastor language that condemns neither piety nor passion but binds them: we keep the ordinances because we are seeking the power, and we seek the power through the ordinances. That is not a compromise between two parties; it is the cure for both.

Finally, this is the sentence to read when someone asks why a small group, a class, a band, a covenant group should exist at all. The answer is not “for support” or “for community” in the modern thin sense. It is that salvation, in this tradition, is worked out — unfolded, completed, kept — and that on Wesley’s flat testimony it is not worked out alone. To offer someone the gospel in this tradition and not offer them a company is, by this definition, to have given them the form and withheld the means of the power.

Further Reading

• 2 Timothy 3:5 — “having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof”; the text Wesley inverts
• Philippians 2:12–13 — “work out your own salvation… for it is God which worketh in you”
• Hebrews 10:24–25 — “consider one another to provoke unto love… not forsaking the assembling”
• John Wesley, preface to Hymns and Sacred Poems (1739) — “no holiness but social holiness”
• John Wesley, The Character of a Methodist (1742) — what does and does not distinguish these people
• John Wesley, A Plain Account of the People Called Methodists, §I.7 — the same definition in narrative form
• Kevin M. Watson, The Class Meeting: Reclaiming a Forgotten (and Essential) Small Group Experience (2014) — “watch over one another in love” as a practice
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together — the definition’s most searching modern echo
• The structure that operationalized this: [[general-rules/the-classes]]