Methodist vs Presbyterian: Free Will or Predestination, Bishops or Elders

Methodists and Presbyterians are both Protestant families that baptize infants and keep two sacraments. They differ on salvation and government: Presbyterians confess that God chose the saved and keeps them to the end, while Methodists teach that grace reaches everyone and can be refused. Elders govern Presbyterian churches; in the largest American Methodist churches, bishops appoint pastors.

The quarrel is an old one, and at its best it has been a family quarrel. John Wesley, the father of Methodism, said he abhorred the doctrine of predestination, “however I love the persons who assert it.” That is a good way to hold every difference that follows: honestly, and with love for the people on the other side.

Each name covers several churches. In the United States the Presbyterian bodies include the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC) and ECO: A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians. The Methodist ones include the United Methodist Church and the Global Methodist Church, which launched on 1 May 2022. The Methodist Church in Britain has no bishops: its annual Conference governs the church, and each year it elects a President to serve for one year.

Methodist and Presbyterian churches side by side

Who are the Presbyterians, and who are the Methodists?

Presbyterians come from the Reformation of the sixteenth century. In the words of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Presbyterianism “grew out of the theology and teachings of Protestant reformers such as John Calvin,” whose writings in Geneva stressed “the grace of God in Jesus Christ and church government by representative assemblies called presbyteries.” The name itself “comes from the Greek word for ‘elder.’” How Presbyterian teaching relates to Calvin’s is the subject of Calvinism vs Presbyterianism.

Methodists came two centuries later, from John Wesley’s revival inside the Church of England. How they became separate churches, and whether that makes them Protestants, is told in Methodist vs Protestant.

Both families confess the ancient creeds. The PC(USA) places the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed first in its Book of Confessions, and the Global Methodist Church’s Articles of Faith “affirm the creedal tradition of the church universal.” Before any of the differences, then, they stand on the same ground. The faith these creeds set out is the subject of Christianity: What Christians Have Believed for 2,000 Years, a free course of short lessons.

Do Presbyterians believe in predestination and Methodists in free will?

Both begin in the same place: no one turns to God by his own strength. The Methodist Articles of Religion say that since Adam’s fall a person “cannot turn and prepare himself, by his own natural strength and works, to faith, and calling upon God,” and needs “the grace of God by Christ preventing us,” an old word for grace that goes before. The two churches part over what God does next.

Presbyterians confess that God has chosen. The third chapter of the Westminster Confession says: “By the decree of God, for the manifestation of his glory, some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life; and others foreordained to everlasting death.” Among the passages it cites is Paul’s chain in Romans 8:30: “Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified.” PCA officers vow to “sincerely receive and adopt” the Westminster Standards “as containing the system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures.”

The PC(USA) holds the same chapter with a qualification added in 1903 by one of the churches that later formed it. That Declaratory Statement says that “the doctrine of God’s eternal decree is held in harmony with the doctrine of his love to all mankind,” and that “his decree hinders no man from accepting that offer.”

Wesley rejected predestination outright. In a sermon called “Free Grace,” preached at Bristol in 1740, he said that the grace of God “is free in all, and free for all,” and he pressed Paul’s words that God “will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4). It was in that argument that he called predestination a doctrine he abhorred, “however I love the persons who assert it.” The cost was real. Wesley and George Whitefield, who had preached the revival together, separated over Whitefield’s belief in double predestination. United Methodists today speak of “prevenient grace,” which their Book of Discipline describes as “the divine love that surrounds all humanity and precedes any and all of our conscious impulses.” The five points at the heart of this debate are laid out in Calvinism vs Arminianism.

Can a Methodist or a Presbyterian lose salvation?

Presbyterians say no. Those whom God has called and sanctified, the Westminster Confession says, “can neither totally nor finally fall away from the state of grace, but shall certainly persevere therein to the end, and be eternally saved.” That perseverance “depends not upon their own free will, but upon the immutability of the decree of election.”

Methodists say yes, in a sentence taken almost word for word from the Church of England’s articles: “After we have received the Holy Ghost, we may depart from grace given, and fall into sin, and, by the grace of God, rise again and amend our lives.” The same article insists that repentance “is not to be denied to such as fall into sin after justification.” A Methodist who has fallen away is called back, not written off.

Both churches teach that a believer can know where he stands. The Westminster Confession speaks of “an infallible assurance of faith,” and United Methodists speak of “assurance of our present salvation.” Both point to the same verse: “The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God” (Romans 8:16). They differ on what the assurance covers. For Presbyterians it may be “shaken, diminished, and intermitted,” yet a true believer cannot finally fall away. Because Methodists allow that a believer may fall from grace, their assurance is of present salvation.

Do Methodists believe a Christian can be perfect?

Yes, in love. Wesley taught that God can so fill a believer’s heart that he loves God and neighbor with nothing held back, and he called this Christian perfection. The United Methodist Book of Discipline describes it, in Wesley’s words, as a heart “habitually filled with the love of God and neighbor” and as “having the mind of Christ and walking as he walked.”

Methodists do not mean that a perfected Christian never errs. The Global Methodist Church’s Articles of Faith say that “perfect love, or Christian perfection, does not deliver us from the infirmities, ignorance, or mistakes common to all, nor from the possibility of further sin.”

Presbyterians expect growth in holiness without that completion in this life. Sanctification reaches “the whole man; yet imperfect in this life, there abiding still some remnants of corruption in every part,” the Westminster Confession says, so that the believer lives in “a continual and irreconcilable war” between flesh and Spirit, in which “the regenerate part doth overcome.” Anyone who has fought the same sin twice will recognise that war. Both churches promise that grace wins it.

Who runs the church: elders or bishops?

In a Presbyterian church, elders do. Authority, the PC(USA) explains, “is lodged not in individuals but in groups,” councils of ministers and ruling elders elected by the congregation. The local council is the session; above it come the presbytery, the synod and the General Assembly. Ministers, whom the PC(USA) also calls teaching elders, “are elected by the congregation.” The office goes back to the New Testament, where Paul and Barnabas “ordained them elders in every church” (Acts 14:23).

In a United Methodist church, a bishop sends the pastor. The Book of Discipline gives the bishop the work of “consecrating, ordaining, commissioning, supervising, and appointing persons in ministry,” and the denomination’s General Conference makes its laws. The Global Methodist Church also has bishops, elected by its General Conference for terms of six years, no more than two, after which they return to a local church or other service. The Methodist Church in Britain has no bishops; it is governed by its Conference and led each year by a President, always an ordained presbyter, and a Vice-President, always a lay person or deacon.

Do both baptize babies and take Communion the same way?

Both baptize the infants of believers. The Westminster Confession says that “not only those that do actually profess faith in and obedience unto Christ, but also the infants of one, or both, believing parents, are to be baptized,” and that baptism is “a sign and seal of the covenant of grace.” The Methodist Articles call baptism “a sign of regeneration or the new birth” and say that “the Baptism of young children is to be retained in the Church.”

At the Lord’s Table they stand close. Worthy receivers, in the Westminster Confession’s words, “spiritually, receive, and feed upon, Christ crucified,” his body and blood present “not corporally or carnally” but “spiritually present to the faith of believers.” For those who receive it rightly, the Methodist Articles say, “the bread which we break is a partaking of the body of Christ.” Methodist churches believe Christ to be truly present in the Supper without defining how.

Why did both churches split?

Both families have divided in recent decades, and it has been painful. The bodies that left gave their own reasons: theological liberalism, theology and bureaucracy, the authority of Scripture, and sexuality.

Among Presbyterians, the PC(USA)’s presbyteries approved Amendment 14-F in March 2015. It gave ministers “wider discretion in whose weddings they may conduct,” which could include same-sex weddings where the law allows them, and it compels no minister or session to take part. The PCA keeps the Westminster Confession’s teaching that marriage “is to be between one man and one woman” and opens the offices of elder and deacon to “men only.” Earlier departures formed other churches. The EPC was formed in 1980 and 1981 by Presbyterians concerned about “growing theological liberalism” in their denominations, and it leaves the ordination of women to “the Spirit-guided consciences of particular congregations” for elders and deacons and to presbyteries for ministers. ECO was formed in January 2012 by pastors and congregations leaving the PC(USA), who were troubled by “denominational disputes over theology and bureaucracy”; it affirms that “men and women alike are called to all the ministries of the Church.”

Among Methodists, more than 7,600 American congregations received approval to leave the United Methodist Church in the four years to the end of 2023, about a quarter of its churches. Many joined the Global Methodist Church, formed, in its own words, to “preserve the doctrinal integrity of the historic Christian faith—especially the authority of Scripture.” PBS NewsHour reported the departures as a response to disagreements “over theology and church policy, including those dealing with LGBTQ+ issues.” At its General Conference in 2024, the UMC removed its ban on ordaining gay clergy, which dated from 1984, and struck down a 1996 rule that had barred clergy from officiating at same-sex unions, while protecting the right of pastors to choose which weddings they perform. The Global Methodist Church keeps the rules prohibiting same-sex marriage. In Britain, the Methodist Conference voted in 2021 to allow same sex marriages “conducted on Methodist premises or by Methodist office-holders.” Both American Methodist churches ordain women; the Global Methodist Church says women “are entitled to serve at all levels” of the church.

What is the difference between Methodists and Presbyterians in Japan?

In Japan the two traditions have shared one church since 1941. Methodism came with American and Canadian missionaries from 1873, and the Japan Methodist Church was formed in 1907; before 1941 it was one of the three largest Protestant denominations in the country. In October 1940, as the government brought in its Religious Organizations Law, a gathering of Christians in Tokyo declared church union. In June 1941 more than thirty Protestant denominations, Methodist and Presbyterian alike, founded the United Church of Christ in Japan, the Kyodan.

The churches of the former Japan Methodist Church stayed in the Kyodan after the war, and in 1954 the Kyodan adopted a Confession of Faith of its own.

The schools still carry the history. Aoyama Gakuin in Tokyo grew from three Methodist mission schools, the first a girls’ school opened in 1874 by Dora E. Schoonmaker of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Kwansei Gakuin in Kobe was founded in 1889 by Walter Russell Lambuth, a missionary of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and Canadian Methodists joined its management in 1910. Meiji Gakuin in Tokyo grew from the English academy that J. C. Hepburn and his wife opened in Yokohama in 1863 and from a theological seminary founded in 1877 by Presbyterian and Reformed churches from the United States and Scotland.

Some churches left the Kyodan after the war, and one did so in sorrow. The Reformed Church in Japan was founded in 1946 by Christians who repented before God of having failed to refuse the wartime church union, cooperation with the war and the rites of State Shinto. In the spring of 1951, 39 churches and preaching stations of the old Presbyterian line left the Kyodan and re-formed the Church of Christ in Japan, keeping its earlier confession and constitution; it is Reformed in faith and Presbyterian in government. The Free Methodists, a denomination separate from the Japan Methodist Church, had also joined the Kyodan in 1941; in 1952 their churches left it and re-formed the Japan Free Methodist Church.

Wherever the two families stand, together or apart, they rest their hope on the same witness: “The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God” (Romans 8:16).

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