Wesley and the Methodist movement

From Oxford to Aldersgate Street

Early eighteenth-century England had a national church with a parish everywhere and many devout people in it. But the mining villages and growing towns held thousands whom no parish really reached, and among the educated a cool religion of reason was in fashion. Into that world came John Wesley (1703–1791) and his brother Charles (1707–1788), sons of Samuel Wesley, rector of Epworth, and his wife Susanna.

Around 1729 Charles and a few Oxford friends began meeting to read the Greek New Testament, and John, a fellow of Lincoln College, soon led them. They took Communion often, fasted, and visited prisoners and the poor. Other students mocked them as the ‘Holy Club’ and, for their methodical rule of life, as ‘Methodists’; the jibe became a name.

In 1735 the brothers sailed as missionaries to the colony of Georgia. In a storm at sea, Moravian Christians on board went on singing, children and all, without fear, and John saw a peace he did not have. Georgia ended in disappointment; returning to England early in 1738, he wrote in his journal that he who had gone to America to convert others had never himself been converted to God. In London the Moravian Peter Böhler told him that true faith brings assurance of forgiveness and power over sin, and may be given in a moment.

On 21 May 1738 Charles found that peace. Three days later, on the evening of 24 May, John went reluctantly to a society meeting in Aldersgate Street, London, where someone was reading Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans. As the reader described the change God works in the heart through faith in Christ, Wesley wrote, "I felt my heart strangely warmed." He knew that he trusted in Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given him that Christ had taken away his sins, even his Wesley, Journal, 24 May 1738. The gospel Luther had found in Paul's words, "The righteous will live by faith" (Romans 1:17), had crossed two centuries to reach an English clergyman.

Was Aldersgate his conversion, or the night assurance came to a faith he already had? Scholars differ; Wesley himself later noted in his journal that even before it he had had ‘the faith of a servant’, though not yet that of a son.

Fields, societies and hymns

In the spring of 1739 George Whitefield, a friend from Oxford, was preaching in the open air to the coal miners near Bristol, and he called Wesley to help. Wesley disliked preaching outside a church, but on 2 April 1739 he preached in a field by the city, on the text Jesus read at Nazareth: "He has anointed Me to preach good news to the poor" (Luke 4:18). For half a century he rode through Britain and Ireland, preaching to miners, labourers and the poor, and more than once faced a mob.

Wesley gathered converts into societies, and from 1742 divided each society into classes of about twelve, whose leader met them weekly and asked after each soul. Those who wanted more met in small bands to "confess your sins to each other and pray for each other" (James 5:16). The General Rules of 1743 asked members to do no harm, to do good, and to use the means of grace, such as Scripture, prayer, the Lord's Supper and fasting. Wesley hesitantly accepted lay preachers, and from 1744 met them yearly in Conference.

Wesley lived and died a priest of the Church of England and urged Methodists to attend their parish church and its sacrament: Methodism began as a movement to waken the church from within, not as a rival to it. Charles gave the revival its voice in thousands of hymns, among them "O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing", "Hark! the Herald Angels Sing" and "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling", and Methodists learned their doctrine by singing it.

The scripture way of salvation

Wesley wrote no system of doctrine; he outlined his theology in sermons such as The Scripture Way of Salvation Wesley, The Scripture Way of Salvation. The way begins with prevenient grace, the grace that comes before. Fallen people cannot seek God of themselves, but God, before anyone seeks him, gives every person a first measure of grace that awakens the conscience and makes a response to the gospel possible. Wesley read "the true Light, who gives light to everyone" (John 1:9) as the light people call natural conscience, and added that "this light, if man did not hinder, would shine more and more to the perfect day" Wesley.

Those who respond in faith are justified, and at the same time born again by the Spirit. Wesley distinguished the two: justification is what God does for us through his Son, the forgiveness of sins; the new birth is what God does in us by his Spirit, the beginning of holiness (see the doctrine course's lesson New birth and the indwelling Spirit). Above all he preached assurance: God's children may know that they are forgiven.

The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.

Romans 8:16

The Spirit witnesses, Wesley comments, "with the spirit of every true believer, by a testimony distinct from that of his own spirit, or the testimony of a good conscience" Wesley. This is a witness beyond the conclusions we draw from our own lives. Early on Wesley sometimes spoke as if no one without it could be justified; later he taught assurance as the common privilege of God's children, without condemning those whose assurance was weak.

The teaching that drew the most fire was Christian perfection Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection. Wesley did not mean freedom from mistakes, weakness or temptation, but the two great commandments, love for God with all the heart and for the neighbour as oneself (Matthew 22:37-39), so filling the heart by grace that love rules it: a gift to be sought by faith in this life, which could grow and could be lost. On "perfect love drives out fear" (1 John 4:18) he traced the stages of the Christian life: "A natural man has neither fear nor love; one that is awakened, fear without love; a babe in Christ, love and fear; a father in Christ, love without fear" Wesley. The doctrine course's lesson Holiness and perseverance sets out how the traditions weigh it today.

These comments come from Wesley's Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755), written for plain readers with much help from the German Pietist scholar Johann Albrecht Bengel. With his later Old Testament notes, they are the Explanatory Notes this app reads.

Friends who differed

Wesley and Whitefield, the revival's two great preachers, parted over predestination. Wesley preached at Bristol and then published a sermon, Free Grace, against unconditional election; Whitefield, a convinced Calvinist, answered in an open letter at the end of 1740. By 1741 they had gone separate ways, and the revival flowed on in two streams: Wesley's Methodists, and the Calvinistic Methodists of Whitefield and of Wales.

Wesley stood on texts such as Paul's words that God "wants everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:4). Christ died for all; prevenient grace enables all to respond; God elects in Christ those he foreknows will believe; grace can be refused, and a believer can fall away. Wesley insisted that even our response is a gift of grace, and he feared that an unconditional decree would make God's love partial and cut the nerve of holiness and evangelism. His view goes back to Arminius and the Remonstrants (Protestant orthodoxy and the Puritans).

Whitefield stood on Paul's words that God "chose us in Him before the foundation of the world" (Ephesians 1:4) and that "those He predestined, He also called" (Romans 8:30). Election rests not on foreseen faith but on God's free purpose, and his grace surely brings the elect to faith and keeps them to the end. Calvinists feared that Wesley's account left the final decision to the human will (see the Reformed Faith course's lesson The five heads of Dort). Yet both preached salvation by grace through faith and the new birth to all who would hear. Their friendship was restored: when Whitefield died in Massachusetts in 1770, Wesley, at his request, preached his funeral sermon in London. Faithful evangelicals still hold each view (Can salvation be lost?).

In 1784, with American Methodists left without the sacraments after independence, Wesley ordained Thomas Coke and sent him over, and that Christmas preachers meeting in Baltimore organised the Methodist Episcopal Church. Under Francis Asbury and his circuit riders it became one of the largest Protestant bodies in nineteenth-century America. In Britain the Methodists drew apart from the Church of England after Wesley's death. In 1885 Henry Appenzeller of the (northern) Methodist Episcopal Church brought Methodism to Korea (Nineteenth-century evangelicalism, missions and Korea). The Holiness churches, the Salvation Army and the Church of the Nazarene also trace their roots to Wesley.

Gifts and questions

The movement's gifts are plain. It preached salvation by faith without letting go of holy living, and it gave ordinary believers small groups for mutual care and real work in ministry. Wesley urged Christians to gain all they can, save all they can and give all they can; he opened a free clinic, schools and a loan fund for the poor, wrote against the slave trade, and days before his death wrote to encourage William Wilberforce in the struggle to end it.

Reformed Christians have raised questions. By defining sin, when he spoke of perfection, as a wilful breach of a known law, did Wesley make too little of sins of ignorance and of the corruption that remains in the heart? They point to "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves" (1 John 1:8) and to Paul's cry in Romans 7. They worry, too, that resting assurance on inner experience may drive some to anxious self-examination and lead others to mistake excitement for the Spirit's witness. Wesleyans answer that those made perfect in love still need Christ's atoning blood every moment, and that Wesley himself taught believers to test any inner witness by its fruit in repentance and obedience.

On "We love because He first loved us" (1 John 4:19) Wesley wrote, "This is the sum of all religion, the genuine model of Christianity" Wesley. That is what the movement leaves us: to receive by faith a love that always comes first, and to seek that it rule the whole heart and life. See also How does a Christian grow holy?.

Practice