Evangelical
Methodist
A body that kept believing spirits could afflict people after the church it came from had quietly stopped, and never licensed anyone to do anything about it.
In its own terms
What this body is doing
Wesley's abridgement of the Thirty-Nine Articles cut them from thirty-nine to twenty-four, and the cuts are the fastest way to see the position: the article on predestination goes, and so does the article on the authority of general councils. What is left is a body holding an Arminian doctrine of grace, a high doctrine of assurance, and no settled apparatus for the question this section asks.
It earns a node here for a reason beyond the tree's shape. Wesley's journals record cases he read as demonic affliction at a date when the established church had all but abandoned the category, and he responded with prayer and fasting rather than with a rite, because his church had removed the one it inherited and given him nothing in its place. That is a distinct answer rather than a missing one, and it is the answer most of the English-speaking evangelical world inherited.
Where it stands in the tree
Descent
Separated from
Church of England · 1784Not doctrine but orders. Wesley died an Anglican priest and never intended a separate church; the break came when he ordained ministers for America himself, which the bishops held he had no authority to do.
Bodies that separated from it
- Seventh-day Adventist1863
What to conclude after the Millerite expectation of 1844 failed. The body that organised in 1863 kept the prophetic reading and relocated the event rather than abandoning it, and added the seventh-day sabbath and the mortality of the soul.
- The holiness movement1867
A revival inside Methodism that its parent body increasingly declined to host, over entire sanctification as a second definite work of grace and over how much of the camp meeting a settled denomination could absorb.
The same questions asked of every body
What it holds
Are the gifts still given?
Described from a text the corpus holdsNot ceased, but not sought as a class of gift either.
Wesley argued against the cessationist reading directly, holding that the gifts withdrew as the church cooled rather than by any decree at the close of the apostolic age. He did not build a practice on that, and the Articles legislate nothing about it.
Who may act?
Inferred from the surrounding textsAny believer, by prayer — there is no office and nothing to license.
No order of exorcist and no rite survived the Prayer Book into Methodism, so what the journals show is a minister and a congregation praying, which is not an office exercised.
What counts as evidence?
Not established here. Where a tradition decides it is dealing with a spirit rather than an illness, a grief, or nothing at all.
Where is the spirit?
Not established here. All four inherit gospel scenes in which spirits are in people. What each adds beyond that is the largest difference between them.
Whom do the words address?
Not established here. A formal difference a reader can check by counting clauses rather than by weighing tone.
What restraint is written in?
Not established here. Every one of these traditions knows the practice can harm. What each does about that is what popular accounts leave out.
What closes the matter?
Inferred from the surrounding textsNothing declared. Relief is discerned by those present.
With no rite there is no form of words that ends the matter, and the journal accounts close by describing the person rather than by pronouncing anything.
This page records what a body holds and where that is written down. It takes no position on whether any of it is true, and nothing here is instruction — the rites are described by what they contain, never as something to follow.