c. 1997 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ When theologian Leonard Sweet talks about how to spark a renewal in U.S. churches, he sums it up in one word: Wesley.

And when syndicated columnist and church historian Diana Butler Bass talks about how to reverse the shrinking memberships of today’s mainline Protestant churches, she points to one man: John Wesley.”A tornado touches down and stirs things up _ that’s the way the church needs to be today,”said Sweet, dean of Drew Theological Seminary in Madison, N.J., and author of”Eleven Gateways to a Spiritual Awakening”(Abingdon Press), to be published later this year.

Sweet ranks among the most influential historians and futurists in the United Methodist Church, which traces its founding to Wesley, the 18th-century British cleric.

But Methodist churches today rarely exemplify their Wesleyan roots, he said.”We’re out of touch with our own heritage. We don’t get it,”said Sweet, who deals with the issue in his upcoming book.

Echoing Sweet is Bass, who said that American churches need what Wesley and his brother Charles, the hymnwriter, gave to the United Kingdom more than 200 years ago.”John and Charles Wesley’s Christian compassion transformed England,”said Bass, a visiting assistant professor of religious studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., and author of”Standing Against the Whirlwind: Evangelical Episcopalians in 19th-Century America.” But, she said, John Wesley was not always a spiritual giant. Like many churches today, he too needed to undergo a spiritual awakening.

During a trip to North America, Wesley showed his stunted spiritual growth by refusing Holy Communion to a woman who had rebuffed his romantic overtures, said Bass, who grew up Methodist and is now Episcopalian.

The episode, which got Wesley ejected from Georgia, caused him to confront his spiritual shortcomings, she said. In 1738, Wesley returned to England and had a spiritual reawakening in which he confronted his”evil and unbelief,”she said.

From then on, he began to transform his actions to be consistent with his beliefs.”Wesley knew his faith was more than words,”Bass said.”He was constantly giving away money to people who had none.” The Wesleyan revival renewed the Christian church in England and America, and created a wave of compassion that helped alleviate the suffering of the poor.”It was a faith that transformed the world,”she said.

If Wesley were alive today, he would have the right approach to reach modern America, Sweet said.”God gave Wesley an insight into what it means to proclaim the gospel in a post-modern world,”he said, and churches need to recapture Wesley’s emphasis on small groups, Bible study, prayer and solid theology.”Our churches think big and simple,”said Sweet.”Wesley’s approach was think small and think complicated.”

MJP END GARRISON