John was born in June 28th, 1703, in Epworth in England, which is north of London, close to Sheffield, to Samuel and Susanna Wesley. Samuel was a clergyman and a poet, while Susanna was busy giving birth to 19 children. John was number 15. But Susanna is sometimes called the Mother of Methodism, because both John and Charles spoke incredibly highly of Susanna’s character and said that she was a major influence on their lives and faith because of how she lived.
But on the 9th of February, 1709, their house caught on fire and John, who was 5 years old at the time, was trapped on the upper floor. He was rescued out of a window, and this had a big impact on him. He came to see this moment as a providential moment, he had been chosen by God, literally plucked from the fire for a greater purpose.
So when he was old enough he began training to become a priest and 1720 he began his studies at Christ Church in Oxford. The same place that inspired Hogwarts from Harry Potter…not that that’s important right now. Five years later on the 25th of October, he was ordained as a deacon and dreamy of becoming a teacher at the university. He needed to be ordained in order to do so, and then it wasn’t long before he was unanimously elected a fellow of Lincoln College, where he taught Greek, New Testament, and philosophy. Most importantly, this came with a salary, which is always nice.
In 1727, after completing his master’s degree, his academic was put on pause for a couple of years when he returned to Epworth to help his father as a parish curate. He was then ordained as a priest and became interested in mysticism, particularly the work of Thomas a Kempis. In his studies of mysticism, he grew convinced of the importance of discipline and holiness. Thomas a Kempis, for example, stressed the importance of asceticism. But it’s likely this interest in mysticism and discipline that aided Wesley in his organization of Methodism and the writing of the General Rules which became known, simply, as Methodist discipline.
But then in 1729, Wesley returned to Oxford at the request of the rector of Lincoln College. Upon his return, he became the leader of a study group that his brother Charles had formed. This club sought to live devout and holy lives, including regular prayer, praying the psalms, and reading the New Testament. They fasted twice a week and visited prisoners. Under John’s guidance, they became move more devoted and were derided for their enthusiasm. They received the derogatory title ‘Holy Club’. Shortly after, George Whitefield, who would go on to be an influential figure in the Great Awakening in North America, joined the Holy Club. And then in 1732, an anonymous writer called Wesley’s group the Oxford Methodists. The name stuck.
On the 14th of October, 1735, John and his brother Charles left for Savannah, Georia, to visit the American colonies and minister to the people there. John had a particular desire to preach to the indigenous people. They left Whitefield in charge of the Methodists. On the journey to America, he encountered the Moravians and was impressed by their faith, especially how calm they remained during a violent storm which did serious damage to the ship and threatened to sink. It reminded John of the story of Jesus calming the storm.
His time in Savannah did not go the way he had planned. He really wanted to evangelise the indigenous population but they didn’t respond how he had hoped and when he tried to enforce the disciplines of the holy club onto his congregation, they rebelled. While he was there he courted a woman named Sophia Hopkey, but she married another man. Wesley then refused to give her communion. So all round, a bit of a failure.
After two disappointing years in North America, John left the colonies on the 22nd of December, 1737, and returned to England. Charles had already left a year prior.
One of the most significant moment in John’s life occurred on the 24th of May, 1738, when he got in touch with some Moravians in London and attended one of their meetings on Aldersgate Street. This would become known as Wesley’s Aldersgate Experience and the 24th of May is commemorated in Methodist tradition as Aldersgate Day. At this fateful meeting, Wesley listened to someone read a portion of Luther’s commentary on Romans. This is what we wrote of that moment:
About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. 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.
He felt his heart strangely warmed and was convinced that he had been lackeing saving faith. This was Wesley’s ‘Evangelical conversion’ and this moment would shape Wesley’s evangelism, believing everyone should have a similar experience.
Wesley wanted more and so in 1738 he travelled to the Moravian community in Germany, known as Herrnhut, which means Lord’s Protection. He was there for about a year before he came to believe that the Moravians had become too closely associated with what is called ‘quietism’, a movement Wesley viewed as heretical. Quietism was essentially a rather radical asceticism that emphasized passivity. Wesley broke off from the London Moravians, despite having helped establish them in the city.
In February of 1739, George Whitefield, who had been ordained as a deacon but hadn’t been assigned a church, started preaching outside, in the open air, preaching to people who normally wouldn’t enter a church. His preaching was emotional and passionate and would inspire the Great Awakening in America. Still, his open air preaching was controversial, even seditious. It was seen as a rejection of the authority of the church, so this would cause problems later in his life, and on various occasions he was attacked by angry mobs. Some came at him with stones, scissors, pistols, and even their own teeth. One man once climbed a tree and urinated on Whitefield. At other times, dead cats were thrown at him. Yes, dead cats. This is starting to sound like a Monty Python sketch. But I have so many questions. Why was a dead cat readily available to throw at a preacher? Did they bring it with them? Did people just carry feline missiles around with them in case they stumbled across a rogue priest?
Any whom…in 1739, Whitefield left for Georgia to serve as a priest in the church that Wesley had founded. While he was in America, he opened an orphan house. He invited Wesley to preach in the open air while he was in America. He handed leadership of the Methodist church back to John.
John accepted the invitation to preach in the open air, despite having some reservations about the practice. But he had been prevented from preaching within the Church of England because of his enthusiasm and so he continued to preach wherever he could, inside or out, and did so for the rest of his life. He even sometimes used his own father’s grave stone as a pulpit. He supposedly preacher over 40,000 sermons and rode over 250,000 miles in his lifetime. Which is an absolute insane number. If he started preaching at the age of 20 and he lived until he was 87, this means he was preaching approximately one and a half sermons every single day. He was a preaching workhorse. But he was driven by this desire to everyone, everywhere, especially to the sorts of people who either couldn’t access, or didn’t want to access, a local church. He said that he considered the whole world his parish.
From then on, he and the Methodists were persecuted and mocked by clergy, sometimes even attacked by mobs. Nevertheless, they continued to help the poor and continued to preach. This lay the foundation for the stress on lay preachers within Methodism, one of the key reasons for the movement’s rapid growth. Within Wesley’s lifetime, the movement grew from four members to over one hundred thousand. The sort of growth people could only dream of.
Wesley organized the movement into groups, known as societies. These were small groups of about 12 people. This formed the foundational blocks of the Methodist movement. And he had a chapel, known as ‘our New Room in the Horsefair’, built in May 1739, used for meetings, worship, and as a schoolroom. Then later that year, Wesley purchased a foundry which had been used for the construction of brass cannons and repurposed it as a Methodist chapel. Wesley first preached there on the 11th November, 1739, and would be used for the first Methodist conference in 1744. He also started writing the General Rules for the United Societies, to be adopted by all Methodist societies to keep order and maintain unity. This would become the foundation of Methodist ‘discipline’. So at this point we really see this growing Methodist movement really take shape as a definitive movement, but it was still part of the Anglican church. Wesley refused to separate from Anglicanism, even though he was rather estranged from the English Church. He saw what he was doing as more of a reform movement within the church rather than splitting off and doing something new.
John and Charles Wesley met in 1744 with eight other leaders (4 of whom were lay leaders) to discuss administrative and doctrinal issues. This was the first Methodist Conference and would become the Methodist governing body. They continued to meet regularly and over the next few years established the distinctive nature and rules of Methodism. Wesley instituted ‘itinerancy’, whereby preachers would be moved every two years.
Wesley then started questioning whether ministers really needed to be ordained by bishops. Rather, priests had the spiritual authority to ordain others. His brother Charles was horrified by this and thought that this act of reform was a step too far, as it potentially rejected the idea of apostolic succession. In any case, John didn’t act on it, but it would become important later on.
It was also around this time that he, rather surprisingly, published a medical book called Primitive Physic, which is actually one of the best selling medical books of all time. When one thinks of Wesley, or 18th century preachers in general, one does not usually think of medical textbooks. Though, I’m not sure how many of you often think about 18th century preachers. This medical book is filled with home remedies to common ailments and I think it really demonstrates Wesley’s care for the ordinary person.
He became quite ill in 1748 and fell madly in love with the woman who nursed him back to health named Grace Murray. Unfortunately it wasn’t to be. Why they broke up is debated, but Grace ultimately married another. The shadow of this doomed romance loomed over his next marriage. In 1751, John married Mary Vazeille, but their marriage was an unhappy one as Mary had to compete for John’s attention; his focus was primarily on preaching and leading the new Methodist movement. She left him several years later. They had no children. And I tend to think, though this is largely speculation, that John never really got over Grace and dragged poor Mary into a loveless marriage.
On the 30th of September, 1770, George Whitefield died. At Whitefield’s request, Wesley preached at the funeral. The two had more disagreements than agreements, but there was always a mutual respect and friendship. In his eulogy Wesley ruminated, “We may agree to disagree, but, meantime, let us hold fast the essentials.” Wesley here coined the phrase, ‘agree to disagree’ and it’s drawn from one of the core characteristics of Moravianism, whose motto was and still is: “In essentials unity, in non- essentials liberty, in all things charity”. Maybe proto Postmodernists…?
A key issue of debate between the two of them had been over the theological doctrine of predestination. Where Whitefield tended towards Calvinism, Wesley leaned more towards Arminianism. I won’t spend too much time on this theological debate, I’m sure I’ll do an episode or two on these isms, but basically it has to do with predestination and whether or not a human being has the free will to accept God’s grace. In Calvinism, some are elected for salvation and the Holy Spirit acts in that person’s life to open their eyes and be saved…whether they like it or not. Otherwise, a person’s sinfulness clouds their eyes and makes such a response impossible. Arminianism is kind of the opposite, in that everyone is capable of freely responding to God’s grace. There’s way, way more to it than that of course, and personally I lean toward Arminianism, but this was an intense debate that occupied the theological minds of Europe and America since the dawn of the Reformation. Wesley preached on the topic, stating that Calvinism was blasphemous, which ultimately led to Wesley and Whitefield separating and then he began publishing ‘The Arminian Magazine’, declaring his theological similarities with Arminianism.
But another significant difference was over slavery. Wesley was quite outspoken in his anti-slavery views, which at the time was actually quite progressive and radical. He would go on to become a vocal abolitionist, publishing the tract, ‘Thoughts Upon Slavery’ in 1774, where he argued that all humans have the right to liberty. He became a mentor to William Wilberforce. On the other hand, Whitefield himself was a slaveholder. He campaigned against cruel treatment of slaves and regularly preached to slaves, but nevertheless advocated for slavery. Slaved had been outlawed in Georgia and Whitefield believed that this was the direct cause for his orphanage’s financial troubles. So he had slavery reintroduced into Georgia, arguing that he could staff his orphanages and that slavery would bring prosperity to the colony. Which kind of goes without saying, right? Of course you’d make more money if you don’t pay your workers!
Orphanages were of course a needed service and did a lot of good. But if the only way it could be financially viable was if slaves needed, then it’s probably worth a second thought and then a third thought. Georgia would go on to become the second largest slave holding state in the United States and was one of the leaders of the Civil War, specifically stating the movement to abolish slavery as a reason for their secession. As in, they were willing to leave the United States and join with some others – the Confederate States – because they wanted to keep slaves.
I don’t want to demonize Whitefield here, because he’s not all that unique in this regard; Wesley was in fact the one standing out in his condemnation of the practice of slavery. But Wesley himself wasn’t perfect either, he was kind of a terrible husband. The truth is, we’re all inescapably, irreducibly human. This is the story of Christianity, as I’ve pointed out in some previous episodes; every ism and schism is rooted in a human context, fallible, emotional, susceptible to the whims and beliefs of the time. It’s our job to make tomorrow’s world just that little bit better than yesterday’s and our theology just that little bit more accurate as our knowledge of God and of our ourselves and of the world around us continues to grow.
But anyway, let’s get back to the story…
Another thing Wesley did was advocate for women preacher. In 1761, John gave Sarah Crosby permission to preach, the first Methodist woman to do so. And then in 1771 Mary Bosanquet wrote a letter to John to defend her own preaching, a letter which is considered the first treatise on women preachers in Methodism. John accepted the argument and women preachers were formally allowed within Methodism. It would probably be anachronistic to say that Wesley was an egalitarian or a feminist, but he was definitely ahead of the times. But then in 1775, on a trip to Ireland, John became very ill. This illness remained until his death, 16 years later.
Now if you know your world history you would know that there was a major event around this time, and that was the War of Independence. But this caused a problem for some of the Anglicans living in America. Following the War, the newly formed United States of America were cut off from Anglican bishops. This meant that no new ministers could be ordained. So John Wesley, in England, despite not being a bishop, ordained Thomas Coke and dispatched him to America where he could ordain others. So if we remember, this was one of the issues that Wesley was thinking about earlier on, whether ministers could be ordained by priests or whether they needed to be ordained by bishops. At this point, he still did not want the new Methodist movement to split off from the Anglican Church, but practicality made the decision for him, and the Methodist Church became its own thing outright. At the Christmas Conference of the 24th December 1784, Coke ordained several others into the Methodist Episcopal Church.
And then on the 2nd of March, 1791, at the age of 87, John died after suffering a stroke followed by a sharp decline in his health. He died in his bed surrounded by friends and his final words were, “The best of all is, God is with us.”
I think there’s a lot to like about Wesley. He was very influential, not just because the Methodist movement exploded, but he was at the forefront of the Evangelical revival. Much of this would go on to inspire and define the movement that became known as Evangelicalism. Today, Evangelicalism is expressed in a whole lot of different ways, ranging from more conservative theologies to more progressive ones. But at its core, Evangelicalism is often boiled down to four key components: a focus on the cross, a focus on the Bible, a focus on activism, and a focus on a conversion experience. And we see this all reflected in the life of Wesley.
What I particularly like about Wesley is that he’s going out to the people, rather than expecting them to come to him. He’s caring for the person’s whole being, not just their souls, publishing a medical book of home remedies. He’s advocating for women preachers and he’s campaigning for social movements like the abolition of slavery. Yeah, he wasn’t a great husband but he also wasn’t the worst, he was just absent. Like everybody else, he’s human, he has his complications. But I think his is an all round fascinating story.
A. K. Chidgzey 
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