Quick United Methodist 101: our denomination wasn’t actually supposed to become its own thing.
It started with John Wesley and his brother Charles, two Church of England clergy in the 1700s trying to do the work of reformation — trying to figure out how to live and lead faithfully within the church they already belonged to. In the process, they accidentally kicked off a movement that eventually became its own tradition. If you know your hymns, you probably already know Charles — he wrote a staggering number of them. John is the one whose theological fingerprints are all over how we do things at Checkpoint, even now, nearly three centuries later.
A few of his ideas matter enough to name directly:
Grace, and especially prevenient grace. Wesley talked a lot about the different ways grace shows up in a person’s life, but prevenient grace — the grace that goes ahead of us, working before we’re even aware of it or looking for it — was central to how he understood God’s posture toward people. It’s grace that doesn’t wait for you to get your theology sorted out first.
“There is no holiness but social holiness.” For Wesley, holiness was never meant to stay inside the four walls of a church. It was supposed to spill out into your relationships, your home, your street — wherever you actually live. That’s a big part of why Checkpoint doesn’t think of “church” as something that only happens during a scheduled event. It’s supposed to show up in how we treat each other in a random Discord thread at 11pm on a Tuesday too.
Holy living as both piety and charity. Piety being the inward stuff — prayer, sacraments, tending to your own relationship with God. Charity being the outward stuff — how you actually serve and show up for other people. Wesley wanted both, not one at the expense of the other.
The General Rules. Wesley gave people three simple commitments to hold onto: do no harm, do good, and attend upon the ordinances of God. When we built our own version for Checkpoint, we kept the first two exactly as they were and adapted the third, since we’re not an exclusively Christian space and not everyone here is ready — or ever will be — for that kind of language. Ours became: do no harm, do good, and strive to grow.
Wesley also gets credit for a framework you’ll hear us reference a lot: the Quadrilateral.
That one deserves its own post, so we’ll pick it up next.