Wherever Grace Finds a Channel
My own introduction to sacramental theology came not from a pulpit or a classroom but rather from conflicting values following a youth revival twenty years ago. As a fifteen-year-old, I’d accepted an invitation to accompany my Southern Baptist friends to a youth conference out of state. At the end of the weekend’s highly emotional worship services, an altar call was extended, though reasons for responding were limited to the trifecta of making a first-time commitment to Christ, repenting from backsliding into sin, and answering the call to vocational ministry. While I did not resonate with the first two criteria, I felt something stirring within me regarding the latter, and I sensed the urge to mark the moment.
Upon arriving at the altar to pray, I was whisked away to a back room, given a card to fill out and a Bible, then paraded through a tunnel of people welcoming me to the family to which I had believed I already belonged. I did not have the theological vocabulary at the time to question or correct what was happening. I only knew that a response that I understood to be connected to a call to ministry had been misinterpreted by close friends and mentors as a first-time conversion.
When my United Methodist parents picked me up at the bus later that evening, they were told that I would need to have a second, official baptism now that I had been “saved.” After they assured the youth director that I had indeed been baptized, my baptism as a child—within the denomination that raised and formed me—was referenced as a baby dedication and treated as if it only counted once I had “done my part.” It was my father who took it upon himself to better help me understand our Wesleyan theology, something he had previously explored in depth as a layperson in an effort to better own and articulate why we remained United Methodists in our evangelically weighted small town.
Over the next few months, with the guidance of our pastor, my dad introduced me to phrases and concepts with which I had not previously come in contact, such as prevenient grace, sacraments as a means of grace, and our denomination’s historic conviction that there is one baptism, not to be repeated. That ongoing conversation not only settled a cross-congregational dispute for the moment, but it helped me decline the second baptism offer confidently on my own and planted the theological seeds of what this paper sets out to defend: that the sacraments are not defined by human acts of testimony but rather by divine acts of grace.
God’s grace was paramount to the theology of Methodism’s founding father, John Wesley. He experienced, understood, and articulated this grace as having three distinct yet interconnected manifestations: prevenient grace, justifying grace, and sanctifying grace. In his sermon titled “The Means of Grace,” Wesley wrote, “By ‘means of grace’ I understand outward signs, words, or actions, ordained of God, and appointed for this end, to be the ordinary channels whereby he might convey to men, preventing, justifying, or sanctifying grace.”
When we are discussing prevenient (or, as Wesley called it in the previous quote, preventing) grace, we are referring to the grace that goes before us, that speaks to the goodness and image of God within us, and that seeks us out, drawing us toward God before we are fully aware or able to make decisions on our own. Justifying grace refers to the grace of forgiveness extended by God and received by us through faith; it is this grace of conversion that reconciles us to God and one another. Lastly, sanctifying grace refers to the grace that continues to meet, grow, and transform us throughout our lives toward Christian perfection. These three experiences of grace, Wesley believed, were not separate steps along a ladder. Rather, in his sermon, “The Scripture Way of Salvation,” he outlined how sanctification begins the very moment a believer is justified, stating, “And at the same time that we are justified, yea, in that very moment, sanctification begins.”
Grace in its varying forms, for the theologian, was not merely boxes to check off and leave behind but a continuous, overlapping work of God throughout a person’s whole life. This lifelong grace, Wesley argued, meets us again and again through outward channels (or means). Most notably among these channels are the sacraments, which his own Anglican tradition defined as “an outward sign of inward grace, and a means whereby we receive the same.” Explicitly, Wesley named communion as the foremost means of grace, alongside prayer and the searching of Scripture, stating that “these we believe to be ordained of God, as the ordinary channels of conveying his grace to the souls of men.”
In United Methodism, we uphold two sacraments—baptism and the Lord’s Supper—understood as means through which grace meets us as a gift, not as a response to or reward for our own effort. This matters greatly to our understanding of faith and Christian formation. If grace must be earned or initiated by a person’s own testimony, then salvation becomes primarily about our action and achievement. In this light, the sacraments stand as opportunities to prove our ability to meet or merit God’s grace rather than opportunities for God to give such grace even before we can meet or merit it. Wesleyan theology turns this logic on its head, offering believers deeply good news. It suggests that grace precedes and empowers human response, meaning the sacraments are not about what we’ve done but about what God is doing in and through us throughout our lives.
In fact, Article XVI of The United Methodist Book of Discipline reads, “Sacraments ordained of Christ are not only badges or tokens of Christian men’s profession, but rather they are certain signs of grace, and God’s good will toward us, by which he doth work invisibly in us, and doth not only quicken, but also strengthen and confirm, our faith in him.” Despite the insistence of the youth directors with whom I traveled to the conference at fifteen, this specific Article of Religion not only rejects the emphasis on the testimony-initiated sacramental model but favors the understanding of sacraments that channel the grace of God which pursues us even and especially before we deserve it. Furthermore, unlike Roman Catholicism or Orthodox tradition that uphold additional practices as sacraments (such as marriage, confession, confirmation, ordination, and anointing of the sick), Methodists believe that channels which Jesus did not himself directly institute or which pertain to seasons of life that do not include every Christian—while they may hold meaning and allow us to experience grace—are not the same kind of God-established, universally accessible channels as those sacraments of communion and baptism.
Baptism, then, is where this theology transcends the abstract. It is also where my own sacramental questions as a fifteen-year-old began, and where the church’s answer to those questions comes alive. The baptismal rite, practically within United Methodism, is the Christian practice of applying water (by sprinkling, pouring, or immersing) in the spoken name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is administered only once in a person’s life by an ordained clergyperson or licensed pastor within a gathered community of faith, as it is understood to be an act of covenantal agreement by the whole church, not simply a family or an individual. Both infants and believing adults are invited to participate in holy baptism, which typically follows an established liturgy (the “Baptismal Covenant” in The United Methodist Hymnal). This liturgy includes the renunciation of sin, a profession of faith (either spoken by the adult candidate or the parents/guardians of an infant), and the congregational vows to nurture the baptized person in faith.
Delving deeper into the practice, we can begin to explore the theological claims of United Methodism, which considers baptism to be a sacrament, not merely a symbolic ordinance. Put simply: the former recognizes baptism as something God does for a person; the latter recognizes it as something a person does for God. The church’s official theological statement on the sacrament, By Water and the Spirit, says that “Baptism is the sacrament of initiation and incorporation into the Body of Christ.” Highlighting the words initiates and incorporates, this means of grace surpasses the mere symbol of a decision already made. It is also much more expansive than an act of prevenient beginnings that sits in limbo, waiting for a future profession of faith to activate it. Rather, baptism is an act of God, enacting the whole arc of grace (prevenient, justifying, sanctifying) previously mentioned above.
This stands distinctly apart from traditions like the one I encountered as a young person, in which baptism functions not as a sacrament but as an ordinance—as a symbolic act of obedience undertaken by a believer who’s testifying to a conversion that has previously, independently, taken place. Within such a framework, baptism does not convey the story of grace received as much as it marks a person’s own efforts given. For Methodists, following Wesley’s conviction that grace precedes and enables response rather than waits on it, baptism offers us something rather than announces something we have offered.
In this understanding, infants—who cannot yet make decisions on their own—can be baptized fully and completely. Baptism does not wait on the recipient’s readiness, because baptism is not primarily the recipient’s move. It is God’s move toward us, and the church’s move for us on God’s behalf, which names the child as an inheritor of the covenant and incorporates that child into the body of Christ. When I was baptized as a child, I was not, according to this theology, placed on a waiting list for a more legitimate baptism, nor was I simply dedicated as a future participant in the faith. Rather, I was fully incorporated and welcomed, as I described earlier, into “the family to which I had believed I already belonged.” That belief, it turns out, was not a naive hope, but rather an accurate intuition about my own story of received grace.
It’s important to note that this same grace is understood to be present in an adult believer’s baptism, which carries just as much validity in Methodism as infant baptism. Both modes of the sacrament are met with the community of faith’s vow to “[provide] the nurture which makes possible a comprehensive and lifelong process of growing in grace.” By Water and the Spirit continues on to name that a congregation upholds its end of the baptismal covenant through “its worship life, its Christian education programs, its spiritual growth emphases, its social action and mission, its examples of Christian discipleship, and its offering of the various means of grace” in an effort to “shape persons in the image of Christ.” Baptism therefore acts as our unifying rite, bringing us into a new life with Christ and the body who will nurture that life through the arc of grace unto sanctification.
It is this covenantal aspect that anchors the church’s insistence that baptism, once it occurs, is full and complete with no need or requirement for repetition. To baptize a person multiple times would go against the very unity the rite establishes while demonstrating that something the church has already recognized as complete is incomplete. To baptize a person multiple times based on that person’s actions and testimony would insinuate, for United Methodists, a lack of understanding of the sacrament’s true power and meaning. “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism,” it says in Ephesians 4:4-5 (NRSVUE). If I could step back in time to when I was fifteen, I would gently pull myself out of that tunnel of people and share this scripture with her, assuring her that her baptism was never an incomplete story awaiting a sufficient ending, but a full and finished act of grace, already accomplished and offered. Then, I would point her back to her covenanted, nurturing community and tell her that her baptism was only the beginning of a sacramental life within the body of Christ, a life that grace would continue to meet, again and again, every time she comes to the table of the Lord’s Supper.
A few years ago, I worked for a United Methodist Church that began offering contemplative prayer services on Saturday nights as an alternative worship experience. One evening, a young woman whom I knew tangentially walked through the doors of the narthex and made her way down the aisle to the silent circle of chairs near the pulpit. There weren’t many of us there, but within the slow and quiet rhythm of the liturgy, there was an intimacy that invited low-pressure authenticity. I did not know the woman to be religious, let alone Christian; in fact, on the rare occasions we’d connected, it’d likely been over institutional deconstruction conversations.
Still, there she was, passing a small saucer and cup of the elements to the person on her right. After the service, we exchanged pleasantries, then walked together out to our cars, which is when she turned to me and said, “I hate the church. But I miss communion.” Without necessarily knowing the depth of what she was naming, the woman’s words nodded to the truth that communion is where the theology of grace continues to feed us, repeatedly, regardless of our standing with the institution that offers it. Her words have remained with me since, as they emphasize that a person could reject the institution of the church entirely and still hunger for the table. And it has made me curious: what is it about this particular sacrament that survives, even on the other side of that kind of exit?
The sacrament of the Eucharist (also known as holy communion or the Lord’s Supper), is the practice of sharing bread and wine (or juice) within the liturgy of the Great Thanksgiving, which is presided over by ordained clergy or licensed pastors, and offered at frequencies and in settings that vary by congregation. Some congregations take part in communion every opportunity they gather, some every Sunday, and others once a month or less frequently. The church I am a member of offers communion once a month on the first Sunday during all worship services. The style of the elements (as well as the mode of reception) can differ and shift, even within the same body of people. Some may break from one large loaf of bread in real time and offer juice by intinction out of one cup. Others may distribute pre-cut bread and/or wafers with individually filled cups of juice, while still others may incorporate the Eucharist into a meal shared around a dinner table. This last practice, though less common today, is actually closer to the meal’s earliest form, where, in the New Testament church, the Lord’s Supper was shared within the context of a full communal meal, or agape feast, before the logistical realities of a growing church gradually separated the sacrament from the dinner table from which it was born.
Regardless of style or mode, the United Methodist Church affirms that Christ is truly present in the elements through the work of the Holy Spirit, without defining the mechanism of what is meant by presence. Unlike Catholic transubstantiation or Baptist memorialism, Methodists uphold that Christ meets us in the bread and the wine while leaving the manner of that meeting to mystery. This pneumatological understanding is not simply implied but prayed directly into existence in the Great Thanksgiving, where the presiding minister asks God to “pour out your Holy Spirit on us gathered here, and on these gifts of bread and wine,” that they “may be for us the body and blood of Christ.” Presence, then, is not manufactured but asked for and received as grace. Echoing the same conviction that grace is not confined to a single moment, This Holy Mystery states, “Christ’s presence in the sacrament is a promise to the church and is not dependent upon recognition of this presence by individual members of the congregation.
Holy Communion always offers grace. We are reminded of what God has done for us in the past, experience what God is doing now as we partake, and anticipate what God will do in the future work of salvation.” Unlike some traditions which practice a closed communion, the United Methodist Church’s communion table is open, imposing no requirement of church membership or prior conversion. The liturgy’s invitation, spoken each time the Lord’s Supper is offered, states specifically: “Christ our Lord invites to his table all who love him, who earnestly repent of their sin and seek to live in peace with one another.” There is no membership necessary, nor even a settled and affirmed certainty; rather, all who love, who repent, and who seek are encouraged to come.
Consistent with the Wesleyan understanding that sacraments are what God does for us, not that we do for God, Wesley himself insisted that communion could be a means by which a person moves toward faith, not merely a reward for those who had already arrived at it. This is fairly radical when set beside other traditions that suggest that readiness merits grace rather than grace leads to readiness. This is good news for many, including the young woman who attended the contemplative service that Saturday, who was not required to resolve her relationship with the institutional church or arrive at settled and certain belief for the meal to be genuinely hers. Her hunger for the table wasn’t an exception to the theology; rather, it is exactly for what the table was built.
The full arc of grace embodied in baptism finds its counterpart in the Lord’s Supper, which does not simply point us backward toward the remembrance of the cross but also forward to the fulfillment of God’s Kingdom where “Christ comes in final victory and we feast at his heavenly banquet.” This is not the only piece of good news encapsulated in the rite. Rather, grace meets partakers of the elements in the recognition that the communal dimension (one loaf, one cup, one body, given for many) insists that the sacrament was always intended to point outward toward a shared and interdependent life. This characteristic, alongside the implicit inclusive nature of the sacrament from the very beginning, affirms Wesley’s conviction that there “is no holiness but social holiness.” I believe something in the young woman who attended the contemplative service registered this, even without the theological language for it: that there is something about communion that transcends individual and collective failure and empowers us toward what we and the church are called to become.
Growing up United Methodist in a small, heavily evangelical, southern town, I ingested from the surrounding culture the belief that sacraments followed human decision and testimony. However, the more I grew to understand Methodist theology, the more I felt that I had been raised in the denomination in which I was always supposed to be—one that understood baptism as that which initiates us in grace and communion as that which sustains us in grace. Among the questions posed to those, like me, seeking ordination in the United Methodist Church is this: candidates must be prepared to speak to “the meaning and significance of the Sacraments” before the Board of Ordained Ministry. Having now traced this question through Wesley’s own theology, the church’s official doctrine, and my own story, I can offer an answer that speaks directly to this.
The sacraments are the means by which grace, which is already in motion toward us, becomes physical, embodied, and shared. Baptism is where grace incorporates us, once and fully, into the body of Christ, regardless of our capacity to make decisions about it. The Lord’s Supper is where that same grace sustains us, meeting us again and again, at whatever stage of belief or doubt we bring to the table, feeding a life that baptism begins but does not, on its own, complete. Neither sacrament asks us to arrive prepared. Both meet us as we are and carry us further than we could carry ourselves. This is not merely an answer I would recite for a Board interview, but rather one I would take into my vocation as a deacon who utilizes words to connect the church and the world (with the liturgies I help write, the grants I help fund beyond the sanctuary walls, and the books that might reach someone who will never sit in a pew). Wherever grace finds a channel, it meets people not as a reward for arriving, but as a gift for those still on the way.
Twenty years after that youth conference, I am reflecting on a rich journey of sacramental understanding. What began as a personal conflict has become, through years of study and ministry, an embodied theological conviction. The sacraments are not achievements to be earned but gifts already given by the Father who precedes us, the Son who redeems us, and the Spirit who transforms us for the sake of our souls and for the sake of the world that God loves.
***
The Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church, 2020/2024. The United Methodist
Publishing House, 2024.
Felton, Gayle Carlton. By Water and the Spirit: Making Connections for Identity and Ministry.
Upper Room Books, 2003.
Felton, Gayle Carlton. This Holy Mystery: A United Methodist Understanding of Holy
Communion. Upper Room Books, 2005.
"A Service of Word and Table I." In The United Methodist Hymnal: Book of United Methodist
Worship. The United Methodist Publishing House, 1989.
Stookey, Laurence Hull. Eucharist: Christ's Feast with the Church. Abingdon Press, 1993.
The United Methodist Church. "The Articles of Religion of the Methodist Church." UMC.org.
Accessed July 22, 2026. https://www.umc.org/en/content/articles-of-religion.
Wesley, John. "The Duty of Constant Communion." In The Sermons of John Wesley (1872 ed.).
Wesley Center Online, Northwest Nazarene University. Accessed [date].
https://wesley.nnu.edu/john-wesley/the-sermons-of-john-wesley-1872-edition/sermon-101-the-
duty-of-constant-communion/.
Wesley, John. "The Means of Grace." In The Works of John Wesley, 3rd ed., edited by Thomas
Jackson. Wesleyan Conference Office, 1872.
Wesley, John. Preface to Hymns and Sacred Poems, by John Wesley and Charles Wesley. 1739.
Center for Studies in the Wesleyan Tradition, Duke Divinity School.
https://divinity.duke.edu/sites/default/files/documents/04_Hymns_and_Sacred_Poems_(1739).pd
f.
Wesley, John. "The Scripture Way of Salvation." In The Sermons of John Wesley (1872 ed.).
Wesley Center Online, Northwest Nazarene University. Accessed July 22, 2026.
https://wesley.nnu.edu/john-wesley/the-sermons-of-john-wesley-1872-edition/sermon-43-the-
scripture-way-of-salvation/.