I can attest to that, at least anecdotally, in Methodism too. I was shocked when a small group I was leading a few years ago in a study of Met. Kallistos Ware's The Orthodox Way expressed confusion with part of the book where Ware mentions that the Holy Spirit is a person, not an inanimate force. One of the group members texted his dad, a pastor, and asked him if it was true, and the response he got was "in a way, yes." I later asked family members about this incident and they were similarly unfamiliar with that fact.
The pastor who said that what Metropolitan Kallistos Ware was right “in a way” that the Holy Spirit was a person and not an inanimate force should have been deposed for qualifying it, since this directly contradicts the Trinitarian faith of John and Charles Wesley. But I myself met a United Methodist pastor who was openly Arian (he disagreed with the word homoousios in the Nicene Creed, which is per se Arianism, since the alternatives, heteroousios and homoiousios, are both forms of Arianism that Christians were persecuted for rejecting, by the Roman Empire, during the mid 4th century, from just prior to the reign of Emperor Constantius, until the reign of Emperor Theodosius, when Arianism rather than Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire (except of course under the neo-Platonist Julian “The Apostate”, whose name bothers me because Arianism was already apostasy as I see it, and actually in some respects conditions actually improved for orthodox Christians under his reign, although to be clear, he was a dangerous, sinister and tragic figure, a man swallowed up by the occult and then killed in battle if I recall, driven to destruction by a belief in the most intellectually developed revival of Paganism).
Also we had within the UMC Reverend Jeremy Smith, who runs the deeply disturbing blog “Hacking Christianity,” and who once posted a false article claiming that John Wesley thought creeds were “weaksauce” (sic), which is an utter falsehood considering Wesley specifically included the Apostles’ Creed as a mandatory part of all divine services in the Sunday Service Book for the Methodists of North America, which was his personal recension of the Book of Common Prayer of the CHurch of England, of which he was a priest, and what is more, he is on record as stating that the liturgy of the Church of England, which unlike Methodism still normally uses the creed (Anglican churches in general, including the Episcopal Church, still normally recite the Nicene Creed or the Apostles Creed , depending on the service, whereas this has become exceedingly rare in UMC parishes in my experience), was the finest in the world, for its rational piety.
By the way, I do love traditional Methodism and I am profoundly upset this morning over what happened over the weekend while I was celebrating Pascha, to the denomination in which I was baptized (the UMC). I feel like the UMC abandoned me. I had no choice but to become Orthodox and I have now been a member of the Orthodox Church for over a decade.
