Wesley, John

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John Wesley

1703–1791

Anglican clergyman

Upbringing and Education.

John Wesley was born the son of an Anglican priest who had once been a member of a non-conforming sect. The fifteenth of nineteen children, his family's household was heroically run on slim resources by his mother, Susanna, a figure that John was later to immortalize as a paragon of Christian piety. In 1720, he entered Oxford and when he completed his degree several years later, he decided to pursue a career in the church. After assisting his father in his parish, he eventually was ordained in 1728. In these years he also had a fellowship at Oxford, and in 1729, he returned there to fulfill the requirements of that grant. John, his brother Charles, and several others formed the "Holy Club," a group that soon was mocked by other members of the Oxford community as "Methodists." John soon assumed the lead in the "Holy Club" and under his direction it steadily grew. Its members followed a pious regimen that included frequent partaking of communion as well as fasting, disciplines that had long fallen out of favor in Protestant England. Soon, the group also began to undertake social work, visiting prisoners in the local jail and aiding them in their efforts at rehabilitation. Eventually, they added ministries to the poor in the surrounding region and founded a school that aimed to teach the poor to read.

Ministry in North America.

In 1735, John Wesley was asked to undertake a mission to the colonists and Indians of North America under the auspices of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, an Anglican missionary society. It was while he was on board the ship to Georgia that he made the acquaintance of a group of pious Moravians and was impressed by their demeanor and selflessness. His own efforts in the colonies, though, proved largely disastrous. At the time, Wesley's own religious convictions included a heavy dose of Anglican formalism, and his uncompromising ways irritated the locals. The unsuccessful courtship of a local woman proved his undoing, and by 1737, Wesley had returned to England. In London, he soon fell under the influence of the Moravians, who encouraged him to read Martin Luther and other classics from their tradition. He soon began attending the meetings of the Aldersgate Society, a group of Pietists that included many Moravians, but which fell under the supervision of the Church of England. At one of these meetings in 1738, he underwent a profound conversion experience, an experience prompted by Luther's commentary on the New Testament book of Romans. He became convinced of the reality of his faith and later reported that his heart was "strangely warmed" by the experience.

Faith Alone.

In the months and years that followed Wesley's conversion he dedicated himself to preaching the gospel of "faith alone," the initial Reformation insight of Martin Luther that had produced revolutionary religious changes in the sixteenth-century world. He traveled widely throughout England, visiting many religious groups and laboring to deepen their piety. One technique that he widely deployed was the adoption of the Moravian system of "bands," these were small groups of Christians of the same sex and station in life who might counsel and encourage one another in the pursuit of perfection. At first, Wesley tried to work through the established channels of the Church of England, but resistance to his efforts proved to be so great that he began to set up his own network of Methodist societies, taking the name of derision that had once been used against him at Oxford as an emblem of pride. To promote these societies, Wesley had to travel far and wide and he became one of the most successful itinerant preachers in the history of Christianity. Hundreds, even thousands, sometimes flocked to hear his sermons, and since he was largely barred from preaching in Anglican churches, he spoke in fields, streets, indeed anywhere where an audience might be assembled, giving rise to the development known as "field preaching." During his long life it is estimated that he may have traveled more than a quarter of a million miles and preached as many as 40,000 sermons. Both he and his brother Charles were also avid hymn writers, and while John's output did not match his brother's almost 8,000 hymns, he was nevertheless prolific. Wesley's example inspired many imitators, and numerous lay people took up the charge of preaching the gospel. In this way the English Methodist societies helped to establish one of the central aims that the Pietist movements had shared since the early eighteenth century: the desire to promote a true priesthood of all believers. Wesley's lay missionaries found their way to the North American colonies, and where he himself had been largely unsuccessful there, his Methodist Societies attracted huge numbers of Americans. During the American Revolution many of his preachers returned to England, and at the conclusion of the hostilities, Wesley faced many demands for ministers from his societies in the new United States. The bishop of London refused to ordain Methodist ministers to serve there, and so Wesley ordained the ministers himself. Such an action was not strictly legal according to the laws of the Church of England, but Wesley responded to criticism by pointing out that the Methodist Societies had always been independent of the Church of England.

From Methodist Societies to the Methodist Church.

In the final years of Wesley's life the increasing division between the Methodist Societies and the Church of England grew even more evident. John Wesley, however, remained faithful in his mission as a priest of the Anglican church until his death in 1791. In the years immediately following, though, the Methodist Societies separated from the Church of England to form the Methodist church. From this vantage point, they continued to grow in the nineteenth century. Today there are some 300,000 Methodists in the United Kingdom, but worldwide the Methodist church numbers almost 70 million members and is thus almost as large as the Anglican Communion out of which it grew. In the United States the Methodist church is more than ten times larger than the Episcopal church, the descendant of the colonial Church of England. The sheer scale of Methodism success as a Pietist movement thus is ample proof of John Wesley's unique Christian vision for a church that might incorporate the message of salvation by faith, personal spirituality, and mechanisms for lay involvement.