What Are the 7 Spiritual Disciplines? — Wesley’s Working List
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You have probably already read a list. There is a Foster list, a Willard list, a Whitney list, and a dozen evangelical blog versions — most of them giving you seven or twelve practices, lightly defined, with an encouragement at the end to pick three and try them this month. You read the list. You started the three. Some weeks the practices held. Most weeks they did not, because what the list did not tell you was the deeper question underneath the question — what are the disciplines actually for, and what does a life that has been re-shaped by them feel like from the inside.
This is the contemplative version of the question — what are the 7 spiritual disciplines. It is a slow walk through the working list as John Wesley, in A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, would have recognised it, with the disciplines treated not as a productivity stack but as the long, patient instruments the older church used to let love become the shape of the soul. (Bible Study Workbook for Women is the 140-day companion this article sits inside — built for the woman who wants the disciplines walked at one short page per evening rather than mastered in a weekend.)
Wesley is the right teacher for this question because the Methodist tradition he founded was, in its first generation, the most disciplined movement in English-speaking Christianity — small groups meeting weekly, accounts given of how the day was spent, fasting twice a week, scripture read at fixed hours, prayer practised in the open air and behind closed doors. The disciplines were not a self-improvement programme. They were the working scaffolding of a community trying to let what Wesley called Christian perfection — the love of God reshaping the whole interior — become a slowly visible thing in ordinary lives.
The list below is the one the early Methodists actually kept. Seven practices. Each one is older than Wesley by centuries; he did not invent them, he simply named them honestly and ordered them in the way the lived experience of his movement had taught him to.
What the disciplines are not
Before the list — a clearing of the ground.
The disciplines are not a means of earning anything from God. The older spiritual writers were unanimous on this, and Wesley among them: nothing you do in any practice purchases grace, accelerates sanctification, or wins favour. The grace is freely given. The disciplines are not the price; they are the posture in which the freely-given grace is more readily received.
The disciplines are also not an interior personality test. Some readers come to a list of seven practices and immediately rank themselves — I am good at prayer, weak on fasting, I should work harder on solitude. That ranking is the wrong instinct. The disciplines are not a scorecard. They are a set of slow movements that, walked over years, lower the soul into a depth at which love can do its quieter work.
And the disciplines are not the practices of unusual people. Wesley wrote A Plain Account of Christian Perfection for ordinary believers — shopkeepers, miners, kitchen workers, mothers with five children, men who had been drunk the year before and were now learning to pray. The list was not for the spiritual elite. It was for the woman who had a small life and wanted that small life held by God. Which is the same woman, in different clothes, reading the question on a screen tonight.
1. Prayer
The first discipline, and the one the rest depend on, is prayer. Not the eloquent kind. Wesley’s tradition was unembarrassed about extempore prayer — the prayer of an ordinary heart spoken in ordinary words — and equally unembarrassed about the older liturgical prayers of the church, which carry a soul through the days the ordinary words run out.
The discipline of prayer is not a technique. It is the daily return to the company of God, by whatever door is open that morning. Sometimes it is a written prayer read aloud. Sometimes it is silence in a chair. Sometimes it is one sentence — Lord, help — spoken between two errands. The shape varies. The constancy is the discipline.
Wesley insisted that this prayer was the natural climate of a heart that had begun to love God in any real way. He wrote a quatrain, in the back pages of the Plain Account, that names what the praying soul is slowly being drawn toward:
“Thou art the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.” He is therefore happy in God; yea, always happy, as having in him a well of water springing up unto everlasting life, and over-flowing his soul with peace and joy.
— John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection
Notice what Wesley does not say. He does not say the praying soul is dramatic, or constantly elevated, or rapt. He says happy in God — quietly, durably, in the long ordinary stretch. The well is interior. The prayer keeps the well open. (For one specific scripture-anchored shape this discipline takes when the mind is loud, how to pray when you’re under spiritual attack walks the night-time version of the practice.)
2. Scripture, read slowly and on a rhythm
The second discipline is scripture, but not the modern read-the-whole-Bible-in-a-year version. Wesley read scripture daily, at fixed hours, in small portions, slowly. The aim was not coverage. The aim was being shaped.
There is a difference between scripture as information and scripture as formation. Information is read once, comprehended, ticked off. Formation is read slowly, returned to, mulled, lived with, half-memorised because of repetition rather than effort. The 7 spiritual disciplines treat scripture as formation. Wesley would have called this searching the scriptures — a phrase he used in his sermons to distinguish the slow reading from the fast one.
The discipline shows up in your week as a small, dated thing. Twenty minutes. Same chair. One short passage, read twice, sat with for a moment, written down in a line. Over a year, those twenty minutes are six full days of cumulative scripture-time, walked at the pace at which the words have a chance to enter. (Practical methods for this kind of formation reading — Examen-style examination of conscience, journaling the verse — are in our how to pray the Examen walk-through; the Examen is one of the cleanest hinges between scripture and prayer.)
3. Holy communion
The third discipline is one most modern lists quietly skip — the regular receiving of the Lord’s supper. Wesley took communion as often as he could; the early Methodists were notable, in a Protestant age that had reduced communion to a quarterly thing, for receiving it weekly or even more.
The discipline is not theological argument. It is the slow practice of a body that gets fed by the body of Christ on a regular rhythm. Communion is the discipline the soul does not have to bring eloquence to. You come forward, you receive, you go back to your seat. The act itself is the practice. Over a year, that repeated coming-forward shapes the imagination in ways no sermon does — He gives Himself to me; I receive; I am fed.
If you are reading this and you have not received communion in a long time, the discipline is the next service you attend. Not a project. Just the next service. The discipline begins when you come forward.
4. Fasting
The fourth discipline is the one the modern church is most embarrassed by. Wesley fasted twice a week — Wednesdays and Fridays — through most of his adult life. It was not a weight-loss tool. It was not a spiritual flex. It was the simple, ancient practice of skipping a meal or two and letting the hunger become a small bell that called the mind back to God.
The discipline of fasting works because the body is honest. The mind can lie to itself about being centred on God. The stomach cannot. When you skip a meal for prayer, the hunger arrives somewhere around eleven in the morning, and the hunger becomes a small reminder, every hour, that you are doing this for a reason. The reminder is the discipline. The hunger is the bell.
You do not have to start at twice a week. Start at once a fortnight. Skip lunch. Take a walk in the time you would have spent eating. Let the hour be a small prayer. Build from there if the practice settles. (Lent fasting ideas beyond giving up chocolate is the seasonal cousin of this weekly practice — fifteen ways to fast that go beyond the symbolic.)
