Methodism

• 1. Introduction

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  Methodism began on the 24th of May 1738, when John Wesley stood in a Moravian service in Aldersgate and felt his heart, in his own words, "strangely warmed." He recorded in his journal: "I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death." That single moment in a London meeting room set in motion a movement that now claims roughly 50 million adherents across every populated continent. How did a small prayer club at Oxford become one of the largest branches of Protestant Christianity? What was the theology that drove its preachers into fields, collieries, and churchyards? And why did a movement born within the Church of England end up breaking from it entirely?

• 2. The Holy Club

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  John Wesley was born in 1703, and his brother Charles in 1707. The two men founded what their Oxford peers mockingly called the "Holy Club" at the University of Oxford, where John held a fellowship and later lectured at Lincoln College. Members met every week, received Communion weekly, fasted regularly, abstained from most forms of amusement and luxury, and made frequent visits to the sick, the poor, and prisoners. Fellow students gave them the label "Methodist" for the methodical way they carried out their faith, and the name stuck. In 1735, at the invitation of General James Oglethorpe, founder of the Georgia Colony, John and Charles set out for America to minister to colonists and to serve as missionaries to Native Americans. The mission failed. Returning to England, both brothers recognized a gap between their outward discipline and genuine Christian faith, and they turned to Peter Boehler and other members of the Moravian Church for guidance. Charles reported a similar experience of assurance a few days before his brother's Aldersgate moment. Scholar Daniel L. Burnett later wrote that without the Aldersgate experience, "the names of Wesley and Methodism would likely be nothing more than obscure footnotes in the pages of church history." George Whitefield, who had also been a prominent member of the Holy Club at Oxford, rejoined the Wesley brothers after his own Georgia mission and became renowned for open-air preaching to crowds of thousands.

• 3. Doctrine and the Arminian Divide

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  John Wesley came under the influence of the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius, who lived from 1560 to 1609 and had rejected the Calvinist teaching that God predestined a fixed number of souls to salvation while others perished eternally. Wesley adopted this position, teaching that salvation was available to all who chose to respond. George Whitefield, alongside Howell Harris and Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, took the opposite Calvinist view. These theological differences placed serious strain on what had been a close friendship between Wesley and Whitefield. Whitefield repeatedly asked Wesley not to let doctrine sever their bond, and in time their friendship was restored, though many of Whitefield's followers saw the reconciliation as a doctrinal compromise. Wesley argued that Christians could experience a second blessing called entire sanctification, a state of pure love in which sin was expelled from the heart. He called this doctrine "the grand depositum" of the Methodist faith and taught that God had raised up the Methodists specifically to propagate it. Wesley defined sin precisely as "a voluntary transgression of a known law of God," distinguishing it from involuntary human infirmities such as ignorance, forgetfulness, or poor communication. Methodist evangelist Phoebe Palmer later summarized the stakes of that doctrine in a phrase that became widely cited: "justification would have ended with me had I refused to be holy."

• 4. Opposition and Separation

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  Critics arrived quickly. Theophilus Evans, an early opponent, wrote that it was "the natural Tendency of their Behaviour, in Voice and Gesture and horrid Expressions, to make People mad." The artist William Hogarth attacked Methodists in one of his prints as "enthusiasts" full of "Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism." Hostility was not limited to words. Wesley was nearly murdered by a mob at Wednesbury in 1743. Despite this, the movement thrived, and many of its converts were precisely those whom the established Church had neglected: prisoners, social outcasts, and the working classes in the developing mill towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire, where preachers stressed that working people stood equal to the aristocracy in the eyes of God. George Whitefield's preference for extemporaneous prayer over the fixed forms of the Book of Common Prayer widened the gap with Anglican clergy. The decisive break came in 1784, when Wesley, facing a shortage of ordained priests in the American colonies after the Revolutionary War, ordained preachers himself to administer the sacraments. The Church of England held that only bishops could ordain, so Wesley's act precipitated the formal split between American Methodists and the established Church. By the time of Wesley's death, more than 500 Methodist preachers were active in the British colonies and the new United States. Total membership in Britain stood at 56,000 in 1791, grew to 360,000 by 1836, and reached 1,463,000 by the national census of 1851.

• 5. Music, Worship, and Lifestyle

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  Charles Wesley was central to the movement's musical identity, writing much of the hymnody that gave Methodism its distinctive sound. Enthusiastic congregational singing became a vehicle through which Wesleyan theology spread; as Martin V. Clarke documented, the hymns were "a primary vehicle for expressing Methodism's emphasis on salvation for all, social holiness, and personal commitment." Worship in early Methodist services followed a recognizable pattern: preliminaries such as singing, prayers, and testimonies; a central message; and then an altar call inviting listeners to experience the new birth. The Lovefeast, practiced quarterly, allowed believers to share testimonies, a practice Wesley taught as an apostolic ordinance. Watchnight services on New Year's Eve became another fixture, often including the recitation of Wesley's Covenant Prayer, which is still used with minor modifications today. John Wesley's Directions Given to Band Societies, issued on the 25th of December 1744, mandated fasting and abstinence from meat on all Fridays of the year. Early Methodists also wore plain dress, and Wesley expressed a wish to see Methodist congregations dressed as simply as Quaker ones. Methodist circuit riders were known for mortifying the flesh, rising before dawn for solitary prayer and remaining on their knees for hours without food or drink. Over time, mainline Methodism relaxed many of these practices, though the current prohibition of gambling remains in force and teetotalism and fasting are still encouraged.

• 6. Women, Class Meetings, and Social Gospel

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  Early Methodism created a notable space for women in church leadership. The role of the woman preacher emerged from the idea that the home should be a place of community care, and Methodist women formed networks that extended the role of mothering to care for the vulnerable. Women were encouraged to share their testimonies publicly. After 1790, however, as Methodist churches became more structured, the centrality of women in leadership sharply diminished. The class meeting was another distinctive institution. Converts were organized into small, intimate groups where they confessed sins to one another and built each other up in the faith. Henry Boehm reported that at a camp meeting in Dover in 1805, 1,100 persons received what Methodists called the New Birth and 600 believers were entirely sanctified at a single gathering. The Social Gospel found expression in concrete institutions: hospitals, orphanages, soup kitchens, and schools, all grounded in what Methodists described as works of mercy that "flow from the love of God and neighbor." The Wesleyan Education Committee, which operated from 1838 to 1902, documented the Methodist Church's sustained involvement in educating children, beginning with Sunday Schools and expanding in 1836 to weekday schools after the British Methodist Conference gave its blessing. In Britain, Primitive Methodists took a leading role in the temperance movement through the 19th and early 20th centuries, linking sobriety directly to the doctrine of sanctification and perfection.

• 7. A Worldwide Movement

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  Methodism spread across the British Empire and, largely through Whitefield's preaching during the First Great Awakening, into colonial America. In the Caribbean, the movement arrived in 1760 when Nathaniel Gilbert, planter and Speaker of the Antiguan House of Assembly, returned to his sugar estate after reading a treatise by John Wesley. By 1783, the first Methodist chapel in Antigua had been built, its wooden structure seating some 2,000 people. In West Africa, the Wesleyan Methodist Church reached what is now Ghana with the arrival of Joseph Rhodes Dunwell to the Gold Coast in 1835; between 1838 and 1857, Thomas Birch Freeman carried Methodism from the coastal areas all the way to Kumasi in the Asante hinterland. The Nigerian Methodist Church, which today counts around two million members in 2,000 congregations, traces its origins to a single Wesleyan missionary who arrived in 1842. In Russia, Methodists began work among Swedish immigrants in Saint Petersburg in 1881 and extended to the Vladivostok region by 1910; in June 2009, the church marked the 120th year since its arrival in Czarist Russia by opening a new centre in Saint Petersburg. Today the great majority of Methodists worldwide belong to denominations affiliated with the World Methodist Council, an international body representing 80 Methodist, Wesleyan, and related denominations. Though Methodism is declining in Great Britain and North America, it is growing at a rapid pace in places such as South Korea, a pattern that would likely have struck the Oxford students who coined the name "Methodist" as one of the stranger turns their small club could have taken.