Greetings Glen Mar,

I hope you had a good week and a great beginning to the New Year! I have been down at Duke Divinity School this week, working on my thesis.

For those of you who may not know, I have been in the Doctor of Ministry program at Duke Divinity School since August 2023. I completed my coursework in May 2025, but delayed beginning my thesis writing until this week so that I could focus on our first six months of transition at Glen Mar. I drove to Durham, North Carolina, on Sunday afternoon and began working on my thesis by rewriting my statement of interest, meeting with advisors, connecting with cohort members, and gathering more research materials for my paper. It has been a full but worthwhile week!

I share all of this with you because I want you to know that for the next year or so, I will be working on this while serving Glen Mar Church. It may seem like a lot, and it is, but it will also be rewarding because I will be sharing what I learn along the way with you in hopes of building up the Body of Christ.

The tentative focus of my thesis is on developing a renewed vision of Wesleyan Spiritual Formation within the local church that draws on the historical small groups that John Wesley formed within the Methodist movement. Perhaps you have heard of the Methodist Societies, Class Meetings, and Band Meetings. If not, you will!

The general idea behind this is that the church, and by church I mean the universal church, has many learning opportunities available: from Bible Studies to Sunday School, and so much in-between, but we generally lack offering organized spiritual formation at the local level. Yes, we have small groups, and Glen Mar is very good at Small Groups and Bible Studies, etc., but Class Meetings and Bands are often categorically different than most of these. In Wesley’s Class Meeting, disciples would gather not just to learn about God, but to listen to one another, check in, pray together, and try to strengthen one another in their walk with God. Or, for those seeking even deeper growth and accountability, what about the Band Meeting? No, it had nothing to do with playing music! In Wesleyan Band Meeting, disciples gather in smaller groups of around three to five people to pray together, confess their sins to each other, and walk alongside each other in covenant with God to seek holiness through loving God and neighbor.

As someone who has been involved in one Band or another over the last 15 years, I believe that the accountability and concept of “iron sharpening iron” that can happen through this method and community has likely had the most significant impact on my spiritual journey, apart from my daily time with God. There’s something about God meeting a person through your brothers or sisters in these kinds of intentional discipleship groups that I haven’t received anywhere else…even as there have been other amazing programs that have impacted my walk with God greatly. I guess that’s why I want to spend the next year or so researching and writing about them, and hopefully, by God’s grace and direction, creating a way to implement them in local churches.

If any of this sparks an interest in you, please let me know. If it does not, no worries! Jesus says, “Freely you have received, freely give.” That is all I intend to do with this. I received a tremendous gift in being invited into a Wesleyan discipleship group, and I want to find a way to invite others to experience God through this inherently Wesleyan method of Spiritual Formation.

Have a blessed Friday, and I hope to see you on Sunday as Pastor Gayle will be helping us to remember our baptisms!

In Christ,

Pastor Chris