Baptism, Youth Ministry, and the Means of Grace

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Notes

The Duke Youth Academy was inaugurated with its initial summer session in 2001. It has been held annually on the campus of Duke University for the past thirteen years since that time. For more information go to: http://divinity.duke.edu/initiatives-centers/youth-academy (accessed June 4, 2013).

While I will not go into detail to describe the specific daily schedule of the youth academy, Dr. Fred P. Edie has done so in a number of difference contexts. See, e.g., Edie, “Cultivating Baptismal Spirituality in High School Youth,” Doxology 19 (2002): 94–101; and Book, Bath, Table, and Time: Christian Worship as Source and Resource for Youth Ministry (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2007), 27–31.

Edie, “Theological Premises of DYA” (lecture, Duke Divinity School, Durham, NC, June 18, 2010).

Edie, “Considering the Ordo as Pedagogical Context for Religious Education with Christian High School Youth,” Religious Education 100:3 (Summer 2005): 267.

Edie, “Considering the Ordo,” 266–67.

Edie's comment on this point is worth quoting at some length: “Such a way of life envisioned and practiced through the holy things of the ordo can be instructive for us. It offers the church the possibility of renewed vision and renewed practice of ministry that is resistant to current cultural ills including misplaced esteem for personal fulfillment as the supreme end of life. It offers a way of reclaiming worship, evangelism, formation, and servant ministry as interdependent pieces in a living ecology rather than boutique services offered by a religious shopping mall. Its emphasis on organic relationship between the liturgical and extraliturgical practices of church bears the promise of clearer congregational identity and purpose” (Edie, Book, Bath, Table, and Time, 9).

Tracing Wesley's inheritance and development of the concept of the means of grace is a significant part of my thesis in Andrew C. Thompson, “John Wesley and the Means of Grace: Historical and Theological Context” (ThD diss., Duke University, 2012). The best published overview of the means of grace in Wesley's theology can be found in Henry H. Knight III, The Presence of God in the Christian Life: John Wesley and the Means of Grace (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992).

John Wesley, “The Means of Grace,” ¶II.1, in Sermons I, vol. 1 of the Bicentennial Edition of the Works of John Wesley, edited by Albert C. Outler (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1984), 381. Hereafter cited as Works of John Wesley.

Wesley, “A Second Letter to the Author of the Enthusiasm of Methodists, Etc.,” ¶39, in Works of John Wesley 11:418.

The best example of this is Wesley's Treatise on Baptism, which he adapted from an essay written by his father, Samuel Wesley, Sr. See Albert C. Outler, ed., John Wesley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 318–32.

This fear in Wesley is expressed in his sermon, “The Marks of the New Birth,” ¶¶IV.2–3, in Works of John Wesley 1:428–29.

For example, see Knight, “The Significance of Baptism for the Christian Life: Wesley's Pattern of Christian Initiation,” Worship 63:2 (March 1989): 133–42; and “The Baptismal Shaping of Christian Lives: Wesley's Class Meetings and Service of Covenant Renewal,” Doxology 7 (1990): 17–22.

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Notes on contributors

Andrew C. Thompson

Andrew C. Thompson serves as the assistant professor of Historical Theology and Wesleyan Studies at Memphis Theological Seminary in Memphis, Tennessee. From 2008 to 2013, he worked on the staff of the Duke Youth Academy for Christian Formation as Ministry Coordinator for Arts & Community Practices.