John Wesley

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John Wesley

1703-1791

Founder of methodism

Birth and Early Life. Samuel and Susanna Wesley had nineteen children, ten of whom survived to adulthood. John Wesley, their second son, was born in the small town of Epworth in Lincolnshire, England. John’s great-grandfather, grandfather, and father were all clergy in the Church of England, as were his older brother, Samuel Jr., and younger brother, Charles. While John was still a toddler, his mother taught him to read, and soon he developed a great love for two books, the Bible and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. At eleven he was enrolled in Charterhouse, an exclusive boys’ school then located in London, which prepared him for entry into Christ Church College, Oxford. An avid reader, Wesley graduated in 1724, having studied the classics, science, theology, and history and having become proficient in reading the New Testament in the original Greek. He was elected a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1826 and was awarded a master’s degree the following year. After he was ordained an Anglican priest in 1728, Wesley returned the following year to Oxford, where he taught for several years. During this time he helped to organize a small group of students who committed themselves to the spiritual disciplines of prayer, Bible study, fasting, receiving the sacrament of Holy Communion, and performing acts of kindness, including caring for the poor and visiting prisoners. Critics gave this little group several sarcastic names, including “Bible moths,” “the Holy Club,” and “the Methodists” (because they practiced a peculiar “method” of piety). The third term of derision stuck, and the movement with which Wesley was associated was called Methodism.

A Spiritual Pilgrimage. In 1735 Wesley and his brother Charles volunteered to go to America as missionaries. Wesley later said that he left for America with three goals in mind: to convert the Native Americans to Christianity, to minister to the English-speaking Anglicans in Georgia, and to gain an assurance of his own salvation. Two years later he returned to England, having failed, in his estimation, to have achieved any of his goals. During this time he had come into contact with a group of Moravians, a German pietistic sect that taught a simple personal faith within a morally disciplined fellowship. Wesley had been particularly impressed with the courage members of this group demonstrated during a storm at sea, an inner peace that rested on a sense of an assurance of their eternal safety. Back in England, the spiritually depressed Wesley sought the counsel of a Moravian friend, Peter Möhler, who convinced him to continue to preach assurance until he experienced this faith himself.

The Aldersgate Experience. On 24 May 1738 Wesley attended a religious meeting in Aldersgate Street, London. At about a quarter before nine, while someone was reading Martin Luther’s preface to his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Wesley felt his heart “strangely warmed.” According to his later writings, this “Aldersgate experience” did not insulate him from temptation, doubt, and despair, but it did convince him that holiness was not obtained by human striving but by trusting in the grace of God in Christ. This religious experience shaped all his later life and work.

Itinerant Preaching. After George Whitefield, a fellow evangelical Anglican minister, convinced him to preach to coal miners out of doors near Bristol in April 1739, Wesley decided “The world is my parish” and began a life of itinerant preaching, holding indoor and open-air services in homes, marketplaces, entrances to mines, and chapels, as well as in local Anglican parish churches. During the next half century, Wesley traveled widely in England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. He felt called by God to organize the people he converted during his preaching tours into fellowship groups known as Methodist societies, but he did not start out with the intention of forming a separate church. By 1784, however, the American Methodists had become an independent denomination, and British Methodists were well on their way to independent status by the time of his death on 2 March 1791.

Publications. A prodigious writer and editor, Wesley produced some thirty volumes of theological, ecclesiastical, social, political, and even medical commentaries. His most important works include 132 published sermons (1730-1791), his Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament (1755), and his hymn books, which include some hymns by him and some six thousand by Charles Wesley.