ABSTRACT
Methodists tend to be active rather than contemplative: we don’t practise the presence of God, we acknowledge it or pray for it, seeking to ground an essentially pragmatic way of life in worship and private devotion. We look for ‘scriptural holiness’, not in those who withdraw from the world, but those who engage with it. So it is hardly surprising how often I have felt I should be doing some good in the world, instead of being a theologian. Indeed, there is resistance to Quietism and a bit of a Pelagian tendency in our tradition, though it is always counterbalanced by the evangelical sense that God’s salvation in Christ is sheer gift, to be received with thanksgiving through the means of grace. Even if it is all sheer gift, including the sense of God’s presence, you won’t, of course, get it if you don’t put yourself in a position to receive it; and while it is all too easy for the means of grace to become routinized, faithful attention to those means of grace ensures the possibility of knowing oneself held in God’s reality, caught up in love and thanksgiving, and also by being able to carry over a sense of God’s presence into the everyday living of one’s life.
