By Pastor Mike Plasters and Pastor Stephen Carr

One of the things we love most about being United Methodist is the Wesleyan understanding of grace. We believe that before we go looking for God, God is already looking for us.

John Wesley called this prevenient grace: the grace that goes before us. God is at work in our lives before we recognize it, before we understand it, and sometimes long before we respond to it. Like the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine to search for the one, God does not simply wait for us to find our way home.

That understanding of grace shapes much of what makes us Methodist.

It is why we baptize infants. Baptism is not primarily a declaration of what we have decided about God. It is a sign of what God has already decided about us. God claims us and loves us before we are capable of explaining what that means. And because baptism is God’s work rather than ours, we believe one baptism is enough, whether that involves sprinkling or full immersion. The amount of water doesn’t make God’s promise stronger or weaker. God’s promises are rock solid, and He was here first.

Grace is also why the Communion table is open in a Methodist church. The table doesn’t belong to us as pastors or even to the church. It belongs to God, who uses Communion as a means of grace, a way of reaching us. We don’t have to, and in fact we can’t, get ourselves sufficiently cleaned up before approaching the table. Instead, we believe that it is at the table that God works to change us.

A few years ago, Pastor Mike served at a church where a family began attending after coming from another congregation. At their previous church, members of the family had not been allowed to receive Communion because of various rules. When Mike explained that everyone was welcome at the table, not because Methodists are winging it, but because radical grace is the theology of the Methodist Church, their twelve-year-old son came forward. As he received the bread and heard the words, “This is the body of Christ for you,” tears ran down his face.

Later he explained that he had always been told God loved him, but because he had been excluded from Communion, he had never quite believed it. At that table, he understood something different: this was for him, too.

That is grace.

But grace doesn’t leave us where it finds us. Wesley spoke of justifying grace, when we recognize our need for Christ in the dark parts of our lives, and sanctifying grace, God’s continuing work of making us more like Christ.

We firmly believe that Christian salvation isn’t simply a moment when we say yes to Jesus and arrive at our destination. It is a journey in which God keeps working on us, and it is a real relationship with our Creator.

That’s why our church doors and our table are open. That’s why there is room here for people who haven’t got everything figured out. None of us arrived here with everything figured out! But God got here first.

– Pastor Mike & Pastor Stephen