Methodist class meeting

Covenant Discipleship groups are a modern version of the early Methodist class meeting. The class meeting was developed during John Wesley's leadership of the Methodist movement. It was a small group structure that allowed men and women to come together each week to pray, sing, confess their sins to one another, and "watch over one another in love" for their discipleship. The class meeting's importance to early Methodism is hard to overstate. Every Methodists had to be a member of a class. As a disciplined fellowship of believers who wanted to know God more fully, the class was the forum where its members could pursue holiness of heart and life in obedience to the gospel. For John Wesley, it became the linchpin in the early Methodist movement that provided form and structure for the work that the Holy Spirit was doing through the people called Methodists. The class meeting worked well primarily because of a figure called the class leader. The leaders of classes were those who were dedicated and mature enough to look after 10 or 12 other people in their spiritual growth. In the General Rules, Wesley makes it clear that class leaders provided the pastoral guidance that made class meetings effective. In his book Class Leaders, David Lowes Watson writes, "Important though it was for the members to watch over one another in love, the class leaders were the ones who made it possible to do this. To the extent that they were responsible for convening the classes, for directing the weekly meetings, and for guiding the members in their walk with Christ, they fulfilled a pastoral role that Wesley himself could not possibly have provided" (p.28). We don't have class leaders in Covenant Discipleship groups today, but we do have something that serves much the same function: the covenant itself. Covenant Discipleship group members trust the covenant because they have all had a hand in writing it. And they can be obedient to it because they know it expresses the group's common hope for the members' discipleship. Its authority derives from the fact that everyone in the group has agreed to abide by it. The preamble is a prayerful statement of purpose that allows all the members the opportunity to think about their hopes and intentions for the group. The clauses themselves represent the meat of discipleship; staying faithful to them calls for a high degree of accountability among the members. The conclusion to the covenant offers a weekly reaffirmation of the hope that the whole group has for the growth in grace that comes through faithful obedience to the covenant. One of the great things about Covenant Discipleship groups is that pretty much anyone in the group can be a moderator of the conversation each week. And that is because it is not up to the weekly moderator to drive the discussion. That task falls to the covenant itself, which is the real leader of the group!