Pursuing Social Holiness: The Band Meeting in Wesley’s Thought and Popular Methodist Practice by Kevin M. Watson (review)

In Pursuing Holiness Kevin Watson has given us a lavishly documented historical study of the inception, role, and transitions that occurred in the “band meetings” that played a significant role in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British Methodism. Using John Wesley’s original understanding of “social holiness” as referring to the life of sanctity as being worked out within the Christian community, Watson gives the reader an insightful and stimulating study of the bands of early British Methodism.

Watson rightly views the bands as being distinct from Wesley’s more famous “class meetings,” where those who had been raised up by Wesleyan evangelism were prompted to experience the fruits of conversion or initial justification. The bands, which Watson described as a locus for “communal Christian formation” (p. 2), were more properly the place for a person’s quest for holiness of heart and life (in Wesleyan theological parlance “entire sanctification” or “Christian Perfection”). The Band was a small group of four to six intentional and mature Christian disciples, who—as one of the early Methodists, Charles Perronet put it—“aim at being wholly devoted to God . . .” (p. 141, emphasis in original). In this sense, the band meeting was “a means of grace” (p. 62) for the early Methodists, in which spiritual formation practices and the discipline of examination of the conscience were practiced among Protestant laity.

Watson does a wonderful job of showing how the band meetings were a synthesis of Moravian experiential religion and Anglican-style spiritual formation. He gives the reader a generous dose of the Wesley brothers’ ardent and sometimes conflicting understanding of the role and value of this small group. He does us the further service of taking the reader inside the sessions of the bands through a careful study of letters, journals, and diaries of early Methodists. He also traces the decline of the band meetings as they were gradually replaced by prayer meetings, revivals, camp meetings, and other experiences that were focused more on Christian fellowship than intentional spiritual formation.

Watson’s concluding sentences read like a mild indictment against the Methodist movement for leaving aside the bands in favor of more popular forms of Christian fellowship:

Wesley was convinced that God had raised up the Methodists in order to proclaim the doctrine of entire sanctification. He was also convinced that this vision would not be actualized without Christian community. The band meeting offered the most effective approach to social holiness that Methodism has deployed to date. It was abandoned not because it was tried and found to be wanting, but because it was laid aside as the early Methodist emphasis on entire sanctification began to be watered down and the understanding of social holiness shifted toward larger-scale revivals and away from more intimate and frequent gatherings where people unburdened themselves and shared the burdens of others.

(p. 186)

This book is highly recommended for students of Methodism, as well as for all those readers interested in the vital role played by that Christian community in the challenging process of spiritual formation and sanctity. It is, further, a poignant reminder that the spiritual individualism that characterizes so much of contemporary Christianity is neither entirely helpful nor desirable.