John Wesley

English religious leader and writer

• Born: June 17, 1703
• Birthplace: Epworth, Lincolnshire, England
• Died: March 2, 1791
• Place of death: London, England

Wesley founded the Methodist Church and presaged the entire Evangelical movement that followed in England and America.

Early Life

John Wesley was born in a rustic Lincolnshire town. His father, Samuel, was the Anglican minister of the surrounding rural parish. His mother, Susanna, was the daughter of a Dissenter minister. She was schooled in an independent manner at home and was taught to formulate her own answers to life’s questions. As a mother, she developed a stringent code of behavior for her children, for whom she provided an elementary education at home. She was a rigorous disciplinarian who required her children to cry softly and keep busy every waking hour. She succeeded in making an indelible mark on her children. Susanna is thus accorded much credit for the ultimate success of John and his younger brother, Charles. Indeed, Methodism’s emphasis on self-discipline and mutual improvement can be traced to John’s first eleven years of schooling at home.

Wesley’s secondary education at Charterhouse in London, beginning in 1714, was without incident except as a preparation for Oxford. He entered Christ Church College in 1720, and his brother Charles followed a few years later. The Oxford that John and Charles attended in the early 1720’s was a bastion of High Anglicanism, whose faculty members were clergymen intent upon imparting good manners in preference to religious zeal. During his course of study, John Wesley came under the influence of an exceptional thinker, William Law, who railed against the “almost Christians” he saw around him.

Wesley was unusual among students of the day in that he worked hard at his studies and at tutoring. He soon absorbed the religious enthusiasm of medieval ascetics and began to follow a monk-like regimen. In 1729, Charles founded the Holy Club among an ardent group of undergraduates, one of whom, George Whitefield, was destined to become one of England’s greatest orators. It was a small group whose prayers and practices were completely alien to the surrounding environment. John Wesley, who had already taken his degree, was senior to the group. He assumed the leadership role and soon guided them through a very full schedule of prayer, fasting, and good works among the local community. He led by an example of rigorousness and explained what was required for the Holy Club members to save their souls. He urged them to “methodize” their witness for Christianity, to methodize every hour of the day. The two Wesley brothers, Whitefield, and the rest of that small group of religion students were ridiculed by the Oxford student body. Hence, the term “methodist” arose in mockery.

In 1729, John was also elected a fellow of Lincoln College. He was a diligent teacher, but the Christian witness he sought was difficult to find among the Oxford students. By 1730, John and Charles began the practice of visiting prisons and proselytizing prisoners. There, in the corrupt jails of Oxford and its environs, they found a means to broaden the reception of their religious views. Charles became a good friend of the social-reform zealot Colonel James Edward Oglethorpe, who founded the colony of Georgia in 1732 with freed inmates of the British prisons. Charles became his secretary, and John was invited to go as a chaplain to Georgia with Charles and Oglethorpe in 1735. The prospect of shepherding the colonists and, more important, of winning converts among the American Indians, appealed greatly to John. He began a journal in which he wrote faithfully for the next fifty-five years.

On the trip to America, the ship ran into a bad storm and John, like most of the other passengers, cowered and shrieked in panic as the ship lurched and the ocean cascaded within. In the corner of the hold, however, a group of German Moravians stood close together and calmly sang their hymns without betraying any fear of dying. Wesley was deeply impressed by the fortitude of the Moravians and lapsed into a month-long slump of self-criticism and examination. “I was unfit because I was unwilling to die,” he wrote in his journal entry of December 23, 1735.

Among the difficulties that Wesley encountered in Georgia was an unfulfilled love affair with Sophia Hopkey in which Wesley waited too long to propose. When Hopkey married another man, Wesley took revenge by denying Communion to Hopkey on a technicality, thus casting her in a bad light. Hopkey and her family brought suit against Wesley, and a grand jury found for her. Wesley had to sneak out of Georgia soiled by scandal. “Shook the dust off my feet and left Georgia,” he recorded on December 2, 1737.

Wesley’s main problem in dealing with the colonists stemmed from the authoritarian and officious manner in which he treated them. He badgered them as if he were dealing with schoolboys. They responded by rejecting his ministry. As for the American Indians, he lamented in his journal on October 7, 1737, that he never met any who gave the slightest sign of “wanting the Christian word.” During his return voyage to England, Wesley realized that his failure with the American Indians and the colonists was really within. “I went to America to convert Indians,” he recorded in his journal entry of February 24, 1738, “but oh who shall convert me?” “I went to Georgia to convert others,” he wrote the next week, “but myself never converted to God.”

Life’s Work

John Wesley returned to London spiritually shaken. He soon took up with some Moravians. Their emphasis upon a loving God and uncomplicated theology of redemption directly through Jesus Christ had a profound impact upon him. Indeed, Wesley owed his born-again religious experience to them. On May 24, 1738, he noted in his journal that, while attending a service, “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation.” Wesley was then almost thirty-five. He had completed an arduous spiritual journey that in turn would fuel another. Over the next half century, he would travel on horseback a quarter of a million miles. He would write 233 books, edit more than 100 others, and deliver 40,000 lectures across the British Isles.

Wesley’s Methodist movement arose as a great awakening of Christian spirit within a year of his rebirth. His message of Christ’s love and of the democratic nature of salvation was readily grasped by those who heard him. The partners in the early story of his revivalist success—his brother Charles and George Whitefield—shared in the transformation of his message into a movement.

The evangelical piety generated by Wesleyite sermons produced a backlash among the church establishment. The general orthodoxy of the day entertained a religious doctrine of great latitude. The moderate temper of the Anglican creed was designed to cushion and not to shake the social order. Clerics rapidly perceived that Wesley disturbed their universe: He stirred an ugly and unpredictable religious enthusiasm among the lower orders. Consequently, within a year of guest preaching, Wesley experienced difficulties. Anglican ministers would no longer open their pulpits to him or to his followers.

In early spring, 1739, Whitefield urged Wesley to come to Bristol quickly because he was preaching to great numbers in the nearby fields. Wesley hesitated but eventually joined him. With evident self-satisfaction, he noted in his journal on April 2, 1739, at 4:00 p.m., “from a little eminence” outside Bristol, he “preached to about three thousand people.” Salvation could be a child of nature as well. The event marked a major breakthrough for the emerging Methodist movement. By conducting religious meetings in the fields, Wesley reached a sizable portion of the population. At the same time, he reached large numbers of poor people hitherto ignored. Thus, the shape of Wesley’s success as a new light among the common people was cast.

Within a few years, Wesley’s movement attained its unique organizational feature from the same source. In 1742, his followers among the Bristol poor sought to build their own chapel. To do so, they organized themselves into small classes, with each member assessed a penny a week. They selected a class leader to collect and keep the money. The plan succeeded, and they built their chapel. Within two generations more than 350 chapels were constructed in the same manner—generally in places that the Anglican Church did not frequent.

Yet the Bristol people did more than build a chapel. Wesley seized upon their principle of local organization by classes and shortly issued a set of instructions. By these, he fashioned the class meeting and class leader as the basic units of Methodism. Each class was composed of a dozen or so members of the same area. They confessed to one another and reported their misgivings to the flock. The principles of continual soul monitoring and of mutual self-help were pure Wesley, learned at his mother’s knee and practiced upon the small group at Oxford.

Subsequently, the structure was expanded. Controversial lay preachers were created and turned into the backbone of the ever-increasing Methodist mission. After 1746, quarterly meetings with districts and circuits were added, and a phalanx of itinerant preachers was sent out to service them. The broad-based horizontal structure of Methodism at the lower level, however, was not indicative of it as a whole. Actual authority emanated vertically from Wesley. The same autocratic leanings that had characterized his relations with the Holy Club and the Georgia colonists clearly reemerged in Methodism.

On matters regarding Methodist organization, Wesley’s power was supreme. From the beginning, all extra money went to Wesley for administration. All Methodist buildings and property were made over in his name. All questions were settled by him. His opponents charged that he both “proposed and disposed”; they called him “Pope John.” Any real resistance to Wesley’s mode of leadership was ended in 1744, when he called a London conference to clarify the issue. The conference became annual, and, ultimately, after Wesley’s death, it became the movement’s ruling body. During his lifetime, however, Wesley both set the agenda and chose who attended the conference.

In little more than a decade, Wesley turned his movement into the most highly organized voice in England of the 1750’s and after. Yet, while it had a loud socioreligious percussion, the Methodist movement was a voice without political pitch. Wesley’s politics were very cautious. He deprecated the idea of a popular share in governance. Thus, in the most popular political issue of the century, that of “Wilkes and Liberty,” Wesley fully supported King George III and Parliament. He actually supported the early American protests against misrule. When it was clear the colonists wanted more than mere reform, however, Wesley borrowed a thesis from a work of his friend Samuel Johnson and issued his own anticolonist pamphlet.

Wesley seemed to have posed a threat of his own to the eighteenth century establishment, but only for a decade or so when his spiritual leveling was equated with social leveling. The reality of Wesley’s creation was contrary to appearances. He advocated spiritual equality, not social insubordination. If he had created a church within a church, it was no more than that. It was not a church against a church. In time, authority understood Wesley’s benign impact upon the public order. He became a well-known fixture of the eighteenth century landscape—the itinerant preacher on horseback reading his book.

Wesley made few inroads among the upper classes, yet his emphasis on personal discipline had a strong appeal to artisans and tradesmen. His placement of divine inspiration at the center of his belief, as opposed to the pure appeal to reason set forth by the regular Anglican clergy, attracted a large following among the miners of Bristol, Cornwall, Wales, and Newcastle. He was once thought to have brought a great stability to the lower elements of British society. Modern historians generally rebut or greatly qualify this thesis, yet the substance of Wesleyite identification was real. The numbers stand on their own. At the time of Wesley’s death, there were seventy thousand Methodists in England and another sixty thousand in the United States.

Wesley expected Methodists to be good Anglicans. He was fully Anglican himself. He criticized the clergy of the Church of England but not the institution itself. Thus, only the smallest effort by the Anglican establishment was needed to prevent a rupture. The break, as it was, came very late in the day and was caused by the success of the Methodist mission in America. Ordained ministers were needed. The need had arisen as early as 1760. Yet Wesley was unable to persuade the Anglican bishops to ordain ministers for America. Finally, in 1784, after the bishop of London refused his request, Wesley ordained three men on his own. The date was doubly significant. First, the separation was finally necessitated by the achievement of American independence. Second, it occurred only after Methodism had been in existence for better than forty years.

Significance

John Wesley was a man of his age, no more. The debit side of Wesley and his movement is the entirely popular quality of his ideas. His philistinism was often as bad as that to which he pandered. He was indifferent to the fine arts. He was superstitious. Even at the schools he founded he fostered instruction and not education. He had no understanding of children’s needs. He had strong prejudices. For example, after the most serious anti-Catholic rioting in London’s history, Wesley met and “congratulated” George, Lord Gordon, the perpetrator. He was outraged when Gordon was censured by a grand jury: “What a shocking insult upon truth and common sense!”

Yet, Wesley’s legacy is greater than his faults. He cut a spiritual path through the eighteenth century and prepared another one for the next. He gave his brother’s hymns a place of permanent performance. He wrote widely on poverty and administered to the needs of poor people. Thus, he created a movement that took care of its own poor. In fact, it was this latter achievement that attracted posthumous study of his writing by such sensitive luminaries as Hannah More and William Wordsworth.

Wesley advanced the tenets of religious renewal and reform. He cleared the way for the Evangelical movement and church missionary societies of the 1790’s. Wesley stressed equality of religious transformation and therefore led directly to the idea of equality of human transformation. He was an unflagging supporter and inspiration for William Wilberforce’s efforts to end the slave trade, and thus contributed to a more humane future for all.

Bibliography

Ayling, Stanley. John Wesley. New York: Collins, 1979. A readable critical study that is entirely weighted toward the secular view of Wesley.

Baker, Frank. From Wesley to Asbury: Studies in Early American Methodism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1976. A judicious attempt to shine a positive light on Wesley’s Georgia mission and his role in the development of early American Methodism.

Collins, Kenneth J. John Wesley: A Theological Journey. Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 2003. An examination of Wesley’s religious ideas, tracing the development of his theology throughout the course of his career.

Cragg, Gordon R. The Church and the Age of Reason, 1648-1789. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1960. A clearly stated overall assessment of Wesley and his movement within the context of the Hanoverian age and the cult of reason.

Hattersley, Roy. A Brand from the Burning: The Life of John Wesley. London: Little Brown, 2002. A comprehensive biography, recounting the events of Wesley’s life, including his experiences in Georgia and his struggles to establish Methodism as an alternative to the Anglican Church. Describes Wesley’s personal life, including his relationships with women.

Heitzenrater, Richard P. The Elusive Mr. Wesley. 2d rev. ed. Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 2003. Selections from Wesley’s own writings have given rise to errors and stale, stereotyped views of the man. This book is a valuable historiographical appraisal of the biographical literature on Wesley from the eighteenth century to the present. A good place to begin research.

Kent, John. Wesley and the Wesleyans: Religion in Eighteenth-Century Britain. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Challenges the view that Wesley and the Methodists created a much-needed evangelical revival in eighteenth century Britain. Kent argues that Methodism was a “primary religion,” a normal human search to bring supernatural power into individual lives, and not a religious revival. He analyzes the emergence of Wesleyan societies and the role of women in those societies, and provides a more sympathetic view of Hanoverian Anglicanism than is featured in many other books.

Marshall, Dorothy. John Wesley. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1965. An excellent, brief biographical essay that takes great care to explain Wesley within the social reality of eighteenth century England.

Smith, Warren Thomas. John Wesley and Slavery. Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1986. A useful book that incorporates related periodical literature and the original 1774 edition of Wesley’s Thoughts upon Slavery.

Wesley, John. The Works of John Wesley. Vols. 1-4, 7, 9, 11, 18-24. Edited by Albert C. Outler. Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1984-.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Works of John Wesley: Letters. Vols. 25 and 26. Edited by Frank Baker. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Oxford University Press and Abingdon Press have published fifteen of a projected 26-volume Bicentennial Edition of Wesley’s collected works. The volumes edited by Outler include sermons, and also journals and diaries from 1735 through 1791. Baker has edited a two-volume collection of Wesley’s letters.