A woman told me she was raised Free Methodist, and she said it carefully — the way you say something when you're checking whether it's about to be a problem.
It wasn't. So let me say what I love about the tradition she grew up in, then tell you the three or four places we'd say it differently, and you can do what you want with that.
Who we're talking about
In Mecosta County the Wesleyan-holiness family is the biggest bloc there is — Free Methodist congregations in several townships, Wesleyan churches, a Church of the Nazarene, Church of God congregations out of the Anderson, Indiana stream, a Salvation Army corps, and some community churches that never took a label but are holiness-flavored down to the studs. They all trace back to John Wesley, and they are not interchangeable. Church of God (Anderson) is congregational on purpose and has historically wanted nothing to do with denominational machinery. The Salvation Army is organized like an army, with commissioned officers who get posted, and practices no water baptism and no communion at all. One brush won't cover them.
What we hold together
More than you'd guess from outside. Scripture is God's Word and the rule of faith and practice — these are formally Protestant bodies with no magisterium over the text. The Trinity, the virgin birth, the blood atonement, the bodily resurrection, the return of Christ. And justification by grace through faith. Let me be blunt, because I've heard it said wrong by people who ought to know better: holiness churches are not works-salvation churches. Anybody who says they teach you to earn it is describing a church he's never sat in.
We also stand with them against a good chunk of American evangelicalism. These are Arminian bodies — grace is genuinely offered to every man, and a man can refuse it. Same here. Salvation is offered to all men, whosoever will. And I won't hurry past the holiness emphasis to get to the arguments. This tradition has spent a century and a half insisting that being saved changes how you live, in an era when plenty of churches quit insisting on anything. The Free Methodists came out in 1860 over slavery and over renting pews, which had the poor sitting in back. The Salvation Army has been putting food in bags and people in beds in towns like this one longer than most of us have been alive, and doing it in January. That's not decoration hung on the doctrine. That's the doctrine working.
Scripture, and the other three legs
Wesleyan bodies read Scripture through what's called the Wesleyan Quadrilateral — Scripture, tradition, reason, experience. Stated fairly, and this is how their own theologians state it, Scripture is primary, not one of four equals; the other three are how you go about reading it. Wesley never used the term. Each of these bodies also has a short set of Articles of Religion, descended from Wesley's trim of the Thirty-Nine Articles, that fences the reading in.
Honestly, everybody uses all four. The question is whether any of the three can ever outvote the text. We say Scripture is the final authority by itself, over every other voice including mine and including this church's own statement of faith — all Scripture is given by inspiration of God and makes the man of God complete, thoroughly furnished, 2 Timothy 3:16 and 17. Of those four legs, the one that worries me is experience, because experience grows. Quietly. And a framework that hands it a formal seat has a hard time telling it to sit back down.
Prevenient grace, and the babies
Prevenient grace says God's grace goes before — a dead sinner can't crank himself over into faith on his own, so God gives grace ahead of time that frees the will to say yes or no. Put that way we agree with most of it. No man comes to Christ except the Father draw him, John 6:44.
Where we part is infant baptism. These churches practice both infant and believer's baptism, by sprinkling, pouring, or immersion at the family's request, and they ground the infant's baptism in prevenient grace rather than in a Reformed covenant argument. They do not teach that the water regenerates the child; it's a sign and a means of grace, bringing the child into the covenant community.
We baptize believers only, after they've trusted Christ, by immersion — because of the order every single time in Acts. They that gladly received his word were baptized, Acts 2:41. When they believed Philip preaching, they were baptized, Acts 8:12. The Ethiopian asks what hinders him and gets told, if thou believest with all thine heart thou mayest, Acts 8:36 through 38. And what Romans 6:3 and 4 pictures is a burial and a resurrection, which you can only act out one way. Plainly, though: we don't think a sprinkled baby is ruined. We think the baptism came before the thing baptism pictures. If you were baptized as an infant and later trusted Jesus for yourself, we'd ask you to be baptized as a believer, show you why in the text, and not be weird about it.
Entire sanctification
This is their real distinctive, and it gets misrepresented constantly by people who think it means "these folks claim they never sin." It doesn't. Entire sanctification is a work of grace after conversion in which the believer's love for God and neighbor is made whole — Christian perfection, heart purity, the second blessing. Wesley meant perfect love, not flawless performance, and said outright that a person in that state can still be ignorant, mistaken, and tempted. Nazarenes and the Salvation Army hold it most explicitly; Free Methodists and Wesleyans teach it with varying emphasis.
We'd say sanctification is progressive rather than a second crisis. We all, beholding the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, 2 Corinthians 3:18. Paul says flat out he has not already attained, Philippians 3:12. The mechanism is a daily one — walk in the Spirit and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh, Galatians 5:16. Anything done in the flesh, even something that looks like ministry, is sin. That's not a mountaintop you arrive at. That's a Tuesday you either surrender or you don't. Still, I've sat across from holiness people whose walk with God embarrasses mine. If there was a night when God broke your pride and you were never the same after, thank him out loud for it. I'd only say the crisis was the occasion, not the machinery.
Can a saved person be lost again
This is the real dividing line in this county, so let's go slow. State their side properly. Arminian bodies do not teach that you lose your salvation over a bad temper or a rough month. They teach that grace is resistible going in and resistible going on — that a person can, through persistent unbelief or settled willful rebellion, walk away from Christ. The argument is relational: you can leave a Person, and a relationship you aren't free to leave isn't much of a relationship. Their texts are real texts — Hebrews 6:4 through 6, Hebrews 10:26 through 29, Galatians 5:4, 2 Peter 2:20 through 22, John 15:6. And their pastoral concern is one I share. They've watched people treat a card signed at a youth camp as a lifetime pass and then live like the devil for forty years, and they refuse to tell that man he's fine.
Here's where we land. Salvation is free, and it's permanent. I give unto them eternal life, and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand; my Father which gave them me is greater than all — John 10:28 and 29. After that ye believed, ye were sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise, which is the earnest of our inheritance, Ephesians 1:13 and 14. He which hath begun a good work in you will perform it, Philippians 1:6. If it can be handed back, it was never a gift. It was a lease.
And notice what we're both looking at — the same man. He prayed a prayer at sixteen and there's been no evidence of God in him for twenty years. A holiness pastor says he fell away. I say what John says: they went out from us because they were not of us, 1 John 2:19. Different diagnosis, identical alarm. Neither of us walks up to that man and tells him he's fine. And both of us land on the same verse next — these things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God, that ye may know that ye have eternal life, 1 John 5:13. It was written so you'd know.
Who calls the pastor, and who owns the building
These are connectional bodies, with bishops or general superintendents over districts and conferences. Free Methodist pastors are appointed by the conference. Nazarene congregations call their own pastor subject to district approval. Salvation Army officers are commissioned and posted. And in most of them the denomination holds the church property or has a reversionary interest in it, which surprises people the first time they hear it. Church of God (Anderson) is the exception, congregational by conviction.
That system has real strengths and I'd be a fool not to say so. A pastor in it is never out there alone. A small country church that could never run a search still gets a qualified man. And when a pastor goes bad, somebody with actual authority can come deal with it. We're congregational — self-governing, led by a plurality of biblically qualified elders, owning our own building and calling our own pastor. Paul and Barnabas ordained elders in every church, Acts 14:23. Titus was left to ordain elders in every city, Titus 1:5. Local, and plural. The cost of our way is honest, so I'll name it: when a congregational church goes off the rails, there's nobody outside to come fix it. That's exactly why we insist on a plurality of elders instead of one man with a microphone.
The Salvation Army and the ordinances
The Salvation Army practices neither baptism nor the Lord's Supper. That isn't a denial of grace — their reasoning is that the inward reality doesn't require the outward sign, and they'd watched the signs swallow the substance for a lot of people. We'd say the Lord commanded both, and a command doesn't stop being one because people have abused it. Go teach all nations, baptizing them, Matthew 28:19 and 20. Ye do shew the Lord's death till he come, 1 Corinthians 11:26. Till he come. There's an expiration on it and it hasn't hit yet. But I'll take the kettle in the cold and the beds in the shelter seriously long before I take a swing at their theology.
Two people are reading this. The first one has been trying to be good enough for a long time, maybe raised around all this holiness language, and somewhere it turned into a scoreboard you could never get ahead of, so you quit checking it. Hear me. Jesus didn't come to help you clean up enough to be acceptable. He died in your place, took what your sin earned, and walked out of the grave on the third day with a body. Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. Whosoever. Not the ones with a good week behind them. Call on him where you sit and no amount of holiness afterward would make it any truer than it is in that first second.
The second one of you has that settled already. Here's your week: find somebody from one of the holiness churches around here — a neighbor, a guy at work, the woman ringing the bell — and thank them out loud for something specific. Don't debate them. Don't correct them. Thank them. The tradition that handed this country camp meetings and rescue missions and a pile of missionaries has that coming from us, and self-righteousness is still the worst seat in the house.