Covenant Prayer in the Style of John Wesley

    A Methodist tradition I cherish is the Watch Night service. It all began, as John Wesley recounts in his Short History of the People called Methodists (1781),¹ on the evening of August 11 1755 in the French church of Spitalfields in London (that is, in the "Old French Church" on Grey Eagle Street, which, after acquisition, became the base for Wesleyan expansion in London's East End). 1,800 people were in attendance. Huguenots whose ancestors had escaped France in the wake of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (Oct 22 1685) had built the chapel. Like the Huguenots who built the chapel, the early Methodists knew themselves to be pilgrims and strangers in a strange land. They were acutely aware that we have nothing on earth to call our own except the relationship we nurture with the good, the true, and the beautiful, a relationship they cultivated in the Christ of God encountered in worship and the preaching of the Word.