These days, the Rev. Roger Clayton (D.Min. ’21) often finds himself repeating the six words that John Wesley selected nearly 300 years ago: “How is it with your soul?”
Wesley began his Class Meetings, the original small groups of the early Methodist church, with that question. Now, Clayton is using the same approach to nurture disciples at Needville United Methodist Church, a rural church south of Houston, where he currently serves as pastor. Inspired by Wesley’s Class Meetings, each small group gathering begins with sharing about the state of participants’ souls.
“They talk openly and honestly about what’s going on in their lives,” Clayton said. “There’s nothing the class doesn’t touch. There’s nothing they don’t all talk about. And it all stays in that room.”
These small groups at Needville were recently featured in an article on the Texas Annual Conference website, “A Time for Honest Conversation.” Susan Roehs at The Disciple Maker blog has written about the program as well, in a post called “The Class Meeting for Modern Times.” And much of the groundwork for those small groups was laid at Perkins as Clayton earned his Doctor of Ministry degree.
Call to Ministry
Clayton’s call to ministry came during his college years at The University of Texas at Austin, where he was a political science major with plans to become an attorney.
“Being a pastor was not part of my original plan,” he said. “I grew up in a United Methodist church. I loved church and knew it would always be a big part of my life.” But professionally, his focus was the law, with hopes of ultimately becoming a judge.
That changed during the summer between his junior and senior years. The Rev. Burt Palmer, the pastor at his home church, Bear Creek United Methodist, invited Clayton to intern that summer. Clayton said yes, thinking the internship would be a good way to earn some money while giving him time to study for the Law School Admission Test (LSAT).
“Within the first couple of weeks I fell in love with being inside the church,” he said. “I told Burt that I was feeling a calling, and he took me under his wing. I spent the summer shadowing him, on hospital visits, at meetings, everything that’s part of a pastor’s job.”
By the end of the summer, Clayton dropped his LSAT courses and decided to begin the path toward ordination in the United Methodist Church.
Earning a Master of Divinity at Drew Theological School was next. There, while interning at the United Methodist Archives and History Center, Clayton became intrigued with Wesley’s Class Meetings.
“We had all this history at our fingertips in the archives, and we were trained on how to work with it and handle it,” he said. “Most of my job involved menial tasks, but I also got to walk through the stacks. I actually got to handle some of the original letters that Wesley wrote and to touch Asbury’s saddlebags.”
Reading the diaries of John Wesley and other original pastors of the Methodist movement intrigued Clayton.
“I witnessed how transformative Methodism really was in that time,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking about what it could do in the modern-day church. Mostly I was just curious.”
That began to change after graduation, when Clayton became associate pastor at Livingston United Methodist in southeast Texas, in charge of small group ministry. He observed that traditional Sunday school classes and Bible study programs weren’t bringing in new members or transforming hearts.
“Sunday school classes were a way of building more Pharisees than disciples,” he said. “That’s not necessarily a negative thing. But I realized that the small group was a way to build deep and lasting relationships through accountability. That’s the goal of practical discipleship.”
Doctoral Dissertation
The chance to explore Class Meetings more deeply came when Clayton enrolled in the D. Min. program at Perkins. One of his first classes was “Ecclesiology, Community and Models of Leadership” with Dr. Mark Stamm; that rekindled his love of the Class Meeting. He decided to focus his dissertation on Class Meetings and presented an outline to Dr. Ted Campbell.
“I’ll never forget the first time I talked with him about it,” he said. “I had been feeling very defeated. I wasn’t sure I had anything new to say. But Dr. Campbell was encouraging and showed me two areas where he felt I was on to something new.” That included Clayton’s ideas of exploring similarities between Wesley’s Class Meetings and secular small group programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, and Valor, a small group program for members of the military.
“If it can work in the secular world and produce incredible results, with narcotics abusers getting better and military folks being able to comprehend how to better live their lives, we can definitely bring that back into the church to help us make better disciples,” he said.
Ultimately, Clayton wrote his dissertation on “The Modern Wesley Class Meeting: Bringing Accountability, Practical Faith and Personal Connection into Established Local Congregations.”
Clayton also praised Dr. Billy Abraham, who was the second reader for Clayton’s dissertation. (“I had many conversations with him and loved talking with him”) as well as the D. Min. program director, Dr. James Lee, who stepped in after Abraham passed away.
“In all of my higher education experiences, I don’t think I’ve met a director as open to students as Dr. Lee,” he said. “He was always so approachable and knowledgeable, and he was so helpful in the process.”
Today, Clayton is putting his dissertation into practice at Needville UMC. He’s seeing church members becoming more connected, growing in their faith and becoming more committed as disciples as a result of that community.
“The class, which has been meeting for almost two years now, has added to its original number and has helped me to create the next round of classes by giving testimony in a Sunday morning church service,” he said.
Clayton is hopeful about the potential for small groups — today’s incarnation of Wesley’s powerful Class Meetings — in increasingly disconnected and polarized communities.
“I see neighbors who don’t know each other and communities inside of large churches who don’t know 50 percent or more of their congregations,” he said. “But I believe we can rebuild the community, and it starts with small groups.”