What is the Wesleyan Diaspora Fellowship?

John Wesley envisioned the original Methodist movement to be ecclesiola en ecclesia, “a little church within the church.” Methodism, as Wesley intended, was not to be a separate denomination or sect, but a renewal movement within the established (Anglican) church, raised up by God specifically “to spread Scriptural holiness.” The revival sparked by Wesley and the original Methodists engulfed both sides of the Atlantic, in Great Britain and in America. But American Methodism quickly coalesced into a separate denomination following the Revolutionary War. British Methodism also went its own way after Wesley’s death, but has recently found its way back into the Anglican fold.

Today, American Methodism desperately needs to reclaim Wesley’s original vision. Its largest denominational expression in the United States, The United Methodist Church, is a moribund institution thoroughly accommodated to a corrupt and godless post-modern culture. Scriptural holiness has been laid aside in favor of the revisionist agendas of radical feminism, gay rights, and religious pluralism. Those who remain true to the purpose for which God raised up Wesley and the original Methodists are finding it difficult, if not impossible, to worship, serve, and contend for the faith within the present United Methodist framework. As a result, many of the faithful are moving to greener pastures, some to smaller Wesleyan, evangelical, or charismatic denominations; others to new and emerging mission-focused expressions of the church catholic. These United Methodist expatriates carry with them to their new ecclesiastical homes a desire to serve God faithfully through a passionate witness for the faith in the midst of an emerging culture populated with countless lost souls who know not the Scriptures nor the power of God in Christ to transform their lives. The doctrine of Scriptural holiness is needed now more than ever.

The United Methodist Church, at present, is a withered stalk whose living shoots are being grafted into more fruitful branches as faithful believers come out of the dying denomination into more vibrant, living expressions of the church. As these faithful are planted in new vineyards, so too are planted the seeds of the next great revival of Scriptural Christianity. A new Methodist movement is being born which will know no denominational or sectarian bounds and will offer the glorious doctrine of Scriptural holiness to the whole Church of Jesus Christ.

The Wesleyan Diaspora Fellowship seeks to recover Wesley’s original vision of ecclesiola en ecclesia and appropriate it on an even larger scale throughout the various sectors of Christianity. It is “A New Methodism for a New Century,” a Methodism unbound from the grave clothes of bloated bureaucracies and suffocating infrastructures and set free “to spread Scriptural Holiness” throughout the church and, through the church, throughout the whole world.