John Wesley
On the evening of the 24th of May 1738, John Wesley went very unwillingly to a religious society on Aldersgate Street in London. Someone there was reading aloud Martin Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, Wesley felt his heart, in his own words, strangely warmed. He felt he did trust in Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance came that his sins were taken away. He died on the 2nd of March 1791, an English cleric who had become a principal leader of a revival movement inside the Church of England called Methodism. By the end of his life he was described as the best-loved man in England. But the man who heard his heart warmed in 1738 had spent decades barred from parish pulpits, attacked by mobs, and denounced as a fanatic. How does a priest who refused to leave his church end up founding a movement that today numbers 75 million adherents across more than 130 countries? The answer runs through a burning rectory, a failed mission in Georgia, a brickyard sermon, and a quarrel over grace that split brother from friend.
On the 9th of February 1709, some time after eleven at night, the roof of the rectory at Epworth caught fire. John Wesley, five years old, was left stranded on an upper floor as the stairs burned and the roof threatened to collapse. A parishioner standing on another man's shoulders lifted the boy out of a window. This childhood deliverance became part of the Wesley legend, taken as a sign of a special destiny. Epworth sits 23 miles north-west of Lincoln, and Wesley was the 15th child of Samuel Wesley, rector there from 1696, and his wife Susanna. Susanna herself was the 25th child of the dissenting minister Samuel Annesley, and she bore 19 children, nine of whom lived beyond infancy. Inside that household the discipline was relentless. Every child, girls included, learned to read at five, was expected to master Latin and Greek, and to learn portions of the New Testament by heart. Susanna examined each child before the midday meal and before evening prayers, and interviewed them one by one each week for spiritual instruction. The Wesley family also reported a haunting of Epworth Rectory between 1716 and 1717, with strange noises and apparitions they attributed to a ghost they called Old Jeffery. In 1714, at age 11, Wesley was sent to the Charterhouse School in London, carrying that methodical home training with him.
University wits at Oxford coined the name as a title of derision. While John Wesley was away serving as a curate, his younger brother Charles had matriculated at Christ Church and formed a small club with two fellow students for study and devout Christian living. When John returned in November 1729, he became its leader, and the group grew in number and in commitment. They met daily from six until nine for prayer, psalms, and reading the Greek New Testament. They took Communion every Sunday, though the church required it only three times a year, and fasted on Wednesdays and Fridays until three in the afternoon. In 1730 they began visiting prisoners in gaol, preaching, educating, and relieving gaoled debtors and caring for the sick. Given the low ebb of spirituality at Oxford, the group provoked a hostile reaction and were branded religious enthusiasts, meaning fanatics. The fury intensified after the breakdown and death of a group member, William Morgan. Accused of hastening Morgan's death by rigorous fasting, Wesley replied in a widely circulated letter that Morgan had left off fasting a year and a half before. In that same letter he referred to the name Methodist, with which, he wrote, some of their neighbours were pleased to compliment them. An anonymous pamphlet of 1732, The Oxford Methodists, fixed the label. Wesley's piety extended to a private accounting. A list of General Questions he drew up in 1730 grew by 1734 into an elaborate grid where he logged his activities hour by hour and ranked his temper of devotion on a scale of 1 to 9.
On the 14th of October 1735, Wesley and his brother Charles sailed on The Simmonds from Gravesend in Kent for Savannah in the Province of Georgia. James Oglethorpe, who had founded the colony in 1733, wanted Wesley as minister of the newly formed Savannah parish. On the voyage the Wesleys first met Moravian settlers, whose deep faith rooted in pietism made a lasting mark. When a storm broke the mast off the ship, the English panicked while the Moravians calmly sang hymns and prayed. Wesley concluded that they possessed an inner strength he lacked. He arrived in February 1736 and approached the mission as a High churchman hoping to revive primitive Christianity. Though his primary goal was to evangelise Native Americans, a shortage of clergy largely confined his work to European settlers in Savannah. The mission ended badly after Wesley fell in love with a young woman named Sophia Hopkey. He hesitated to marry her, partly drawn to the early Christian practice of clerical celibacy, and after she married William Williamson, Wesley denied her Communion when she failed to signal in advance her intention to take it. Legal proceedings followed, and on the 22nd of December 1737 Wesley fled the colony and returned to England. One lasting fruit survived the disappointment. His Collection of Psalms and Hymns was the first Anglican hymnal published in America, and it included five hymns he translated from German.
On the 2nd of April 1739, at a brickyard near St Philip's Marsh, Wesley preached in the open air for the first time. He had resisted the idea. As he wrote, he had been all his life so tenacious of decency and order that he should have thought saving souls almost a sin if it were not done in a church. His Oxford friend, the evangelist George Whitefield, had set the example, preaching outdoors to miners at Kingswood in February 1739 when the churches of Bristol were closed to him. Once Wesley overcame his scruples, the fields opened a vast new audience. He found open-air services reached men and women who would never enter a church, and he preached to upwards of thousands, more than once using his father's tombstone at Epworth as a pulpit. He kept this up for fifty years, entering churches when invited and standing in fields, halls, cottages, and chapels when they would not receive him. Late in 1739 he broke with the Moravians in London, believing they had fallen into the heresy of quietism, and formed his followers into a separate body. Thus, he wrote, without any previous plan, began the Methodist Society in England. From 1739 onward, clergy and magistrates persecuted the Methodists, attacking them in sermons and print while mobs attacked them in person. That same year, unable to do the work alone, Wesley began to approve local lay preachers, evaluating unordained men to preach and do pastoral work. This expansion of lay preachers became one of the keys to Methodism's growth.
When disorder arose among members, Wesley issued tickets bearing each member's name in his own hand, renewed every three months. Those deemed unworthy simply received no new ticket and dropped away without disturbance. The class-meeting system grew in 1742 from a practical idea about debt, when it was proposed that one member in twelve collect offerings regularly from the eleven allotted to him. As societies multiplied, Wesley could no longer keep personal contact, so in 1743 he drew up a set of General Rules for the United Societies, the nucleus of the Methodist Discipline still basic to modern Methodism. Societies were grouped into circuits, with travelling preachers appointed for two-year terms, and classes of about a dozen members met weekly under a leader. Above them, annual conferences coordinated doctrine and discipline. The first Methodist conference met in London in 1744, when John and Charles Wesley, four other clergy, and four lay preachers gathered for consultation. Wesley housed his societies in chapels, beginning at the New Room in Bristol, then The Foundery in London. The Foundery had once cast brass guns and mortars for the Royal Ordnance and had sat vacant for 23 years after an explosion on the 10th of May 1716. Wesley believed a preacher worked best when moved between circuits every year or two, so he established the itinerancy and insisted his preachers submit to its rules. His reach extended far north, visiting Manchester at least fifteen times between 1733 and 1790, and in 1781 opening the chapel on Oldham Street. He first travelled to Ireland in 1747, where Methodist numbers grew to over 15,000 by 1795.
In 1739 Wesley preached a sermon called Freedom of Grace, attacking the Calvinist understanding of predestination as blasphemous because it represented God as worse than the devil. The sermon set him against his old ally George Whitefield, who inclined to Calvinism. Whitefield asked him not to repeat or publish it, wanting no dispute, but Wesley published it anyway, and the two men separated their practice in 1741. Wesley's system became known as Wesleyan Arminianism, built with his fellow preacher John William Fletcher. He rejected the idea that some persons were elected by God for salvation and others for damnation, holding instead that prevenient grace made all people capable of coming to faith. In 1778 he began The Arminian Magazine, not to convince Calvinists, he said, but to preserve Methodists, teaching that God willeth all men to be saved. The dispute over grace shaped Wesley's whole theology. He emphasised the witness of the Spirit, which he defined as an inward impression on the soul whereby the Spirit of God testifies that believers are the children of God. He prized entire sanctification above all, calling it in 1790 the grand depositum which God had lodged with the people called Methodists. He taught that a Christian could be made perfect in love, avoiding the phrase sinless perfection because of its ambiguity. Whitefield and Wesley remained personally fond despite the rift. Asked once if he expected to see Wesley in heaven, Whitefield replied that he feared not, for Wesley would be so near the eternal throne, and they at such a distance, that they would hardly get sight of him.
Wesley denounced slavery as the sum of all villainies. In 1774 he addressed the slave trade in a polemical tract titled Thoughts Upon Slavery, writing that liberty is the right of every human creature as soon as he breathes the vital air, and that no human law can deprive him of it. He became a mentor to William Wilberforce, who was influential in abolishing slavery in the British Empire. It was thanks to Wesley's abolitionist message that a young African American, Richard Allen, converted to Christianity in 1777 and later, in 1816, founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Wesley also opened Methodism to women preachers. In 1761 he informally allowed Sarah Crosby, one of his converts and a class leader, to preach after a crowd of over 200 people came to a class she was meant to teach. In the summer of 1771 Mary Bosanquet wrote to Wesley defending her and Crosby's preaching at her orphanage, Cross Hall, in what is considered the first full defence of women's preaching in Methodism. Wesley accepted her argument and formally began allowing women to preach that year. His ordinations widened the breach with the Church of England he refused to leave. In 1784, with American Methodists left without sacraments after the American War of Independence, he ordained Thomas Coke as superintendent for the United States by the laying on of hands. His brother Charles was alarmed and begged him to stop before he had quite broken down the bridge. Wesley replied that he must and would save as many souls as he could while alive, without being careful about what may possibly be when he died.
Stephen Tomkins writes that Wesley rode 250,000 miles, gave away 30,000 pounds, and preached more than 40,000 sermons. He generally travelled on horseback, preaching two or three times a day, opening chapels, commissioning preachers, prescribing for the sick, and helping to pioneer the use of electric shock to treat illness. He practised a vegetarian diet and later abstained from wine, writing that since giving up flesh meals and wine he had been delivered from all physical ills. He was an admirer of music. After hearing Handel's Messiah in Bristol Cathedral in 1758, he recorded in his journal that he doubted the congregation was ever so serious at a sermon. His personal life was less serene. Though he favoured celibacy, he married unhappily in 1751, at the age of 48, to a widow named Mary Vazeille, and the couple had no children. By 1758 she had left him, returning and leaving again several times before their final separation. Of that departure Wesley wrote simply that he did not forsake her, did not dismiss her, and would not recall her. His health declined sharply at the end. On the 28th of June 1790 he wrote that for above eighty-six years he had found none of the infirmities of old age, until the previous August brought an almost sudden change. He gave his last sermon on the 23rd of February 1791 in Leatherhead. As he lay dying he grasped his friends' hands and said repeatedly, Farewell, farewell, and at the end raised his feeble voice to repeat, The best of all is, God is with us. He was entombed at his chapel on City Road in London, the chapel he had built in 1778, which still holds a thriving congregation today.
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Common questions
Who was John Wesley and what did he found?
John Wesley was an English cleric, theologian, and evangelist who became a principal leader of a revival movement within the Church of England known as Methodism. The societies he founded became the dominant form of the independent Methodist movement, which today numbers 75 million adherents in more than 130 countries.
What happened during John Wesley's Aldersgate experience?
On the evening of the 24th of May 1738, John Wesley attended a religious society on Aldersgate Street in London where someone read Martin Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine he felt his heart strangely warmed and gained an assurance that his sins were taken away. The date is commemorated in Methodist churches as Aldersgate Day.
Why did John Wesley fail in Savannah, Georgia?
John Wesley sailed to Savannah in 1735 at the request of James Oglethorpe but his High Church ministry proved controversial. He fell in love with Sophia Hopkey, and after she married William Williamson he denied her Communion, leading to legal proceedings. On the 22nd of December 1737 Wesley fled the colony and returned to England.
What did John Wesley believe about grace and Calvinism?
John Wesley rejected the Calvinist understanding of predestination, holding instead that prevenient grace made all people capable of being saved by faith. His system became known as Wesleyan Arminianism, and in 1739 he attacked predestination as blasphemous in a sermon called Freedom of Grace. In 1778 he began The Arminian Magazine to preserve Methodists.
How did John Wesley support abolition and women preachers?
John Wesley denounced slavery as the sum of all villainies and wrote the tract Thoughts Upon Slavery in 1774, later mentoring abolitionist William Wilberforce. He also opened Methodism to women preachers, informally allowing Sarah Crosby to preach in 1761 and formally permitting women to preach in 1771 after Mary Bosanquet defended the practice.
How did John Wesley die and what was his legacy?
John Wesley died on the 2nd of March 1791 at the age of 87, repeating the words The best of all is, God is with us. He was entombed at his chapel on City Road in London. He left behind 135,000 members and 541 itinerant preachers, and is said to have ridden 250,000 miles and preached more than 40,000 sermons.
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