A Blueprint for Discipleship: Wesley’s General Rules as a Guide for Christian Living is by Kevin M. Watson, published by Discipleship Resources in March 2009.
Know what tradition you are picking up
This is a Methodist book, written by a Methodist, published by a Methodist house, for Methodists. Watson is an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church and completed a PhD in the History of Christianity and Wesleyan Studies at Southern Methodist University. Called to Better is non-denominational, and we are recommending this to a mostly non-Methodist audience, so it is worth saying plainly rather than leaving you to discover it in chapter one.
That is not a warning. It is a description. John Wesley’s practical wisdom about how ordinary Christians actually change belongs to the whole church, and this book is one of the clearer short introductions to it.
What the General Rules are
Wesley wrote three rules as the terms of membership in the early Methodist societies: do no harm, do all the good you can, and attend upon the ordinances of God, meaning the ordinary practices of prayer, Scripture, worship, and the Lord’s Supper. Watson takes each in turn and argues they still work as a framework for Christian living.
The part most worth your attention is the fourth element that made the rules function at all: small-group accountability. Wesley’s societies met weekly and asked each other direct questions about how the week had actually gone. Watson’s argument is that the rules without the group are just good advice, which is roughly what has happened to them.
Format
It is built as a nine-week study, so it is designed for a group working through it together rather than for a single sitting. It is short and written in plain language, not academic prose, despite the author’s credentials.
What we removed
Our previous review quoted two customer reviews and described how “our community of men” had responded to the book. We could not verify those quotes and the community response was invented. Both are gone.
Where we land
Worth reading if you want a concrete, tested answer to the question of what a small group is actually supposed to do. Wesley’s answer is nearly three hundred years old and it is still better than most of what gets used on a Tuesday night. Read past the denominational furniture; the method underneath is portable.
A Blueprint for Discipleship by Kevin M. Watson on Amazon