United Methodist Church

Methodists' views of the sacraments have traveled through three distinct phases. At the beginning of the Wesleyan movement in the nineteenth century, Wesley emphasizes a strong divinely experiential sense of the sacraments as means of grace. From the late eighteenth century to the 1960s, the Enlightenment understanding of the sacraments as marginal and mostly memorial dominated Methodism. However, beginning in the 1960s, United Methodists have experienced a sacramental renewal. The emphasis in the sacraments has shifted from a human undertaking to a divine covenant by God to make believers share in Christ's royal priesthood. Methodist attitudes towards sacraments have gone through three quite distinct periods. Each has to be understood in the light of its predecessors so I will treat them in sequence. Elements of each era survive in subsequent periods, but the periods are largely distinct. The first period is that of the Wesleyan movement in England during the eighteenth century. E…