The doctrinal standards are protected by restrictive rules that make them very difficult to alter: the Articles of Religion that Wesley abridged from the Anglican articles, the Confession of Faith inherited from the Evangelical United Brethren at the 1968 union, and Wesley standard sermons and his Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament. Alongside them the church teaches a Wesleyan account of grace, prevenient, justifying and sanctifying, with the expectation of growth in holiness that Wesley called Christian perfection.
The church also describes how it reasons, in a scheme usually named the Wesleyan quadrilateral, a term coined in the twentieth century by Albert Outler rather than used by Wesley. Scripture is primary, and tradition, reason and experience are the other three sources brought to bear on it. Critics inside Methodism have argued that the phrasing makes the four look equal, and Outler himself said later that the term had been misunderstood.
The Social Principles, first adopted in their modern form in 1972, address war, economics, the environment and human sexuality, and it was language added in that year on the last of these that opened the conflict which ran through every General Conference afterwards. A special session in 2019 strengthened the traditional position and provided a route for congregations to disaffiliate. The General Conference of 2024, meeting after those departures, removed the prohibitions on ordaining and marrying gay people and approved a regionalization plan sent to the annual conferences for ratification.