As a kid, I had a friend whose parents went next door for a few minutes after the kids fell asleep.  One of the kids woke up and searched the house to find his parents missing.  He began screaming and woke us his brother.  When the parents came home, they found their children crying on the living room floor because…I kid you not…they thought the rapture had happened and they were left behind without their parents.

Rapture is the idea that Christ will return suddenly to steal away true believers while the rest of the world endures a pretty literal panning out of the book of Revelation.  Nobody in the history of Christianity believed in a rapture like this until the mid 1800’s.

The Wesley’s eventually came to teach that the perfect holiness of God’s coming reign is breaking in into the world now through people coming to Christ and growing in the Holy Spirit.  Christ will come again to reign in full victory, and we can taste it now as we see God changing lives and moving in the world.