John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism

At Oxford John Wesley and a few friends met regularly, took communion every week and visited prisoners; one of them was mocked at his college for belonging to “the Holy Club” (Wesley, Journal, letter on the Oxford society). In October 1735 Wesley sailed for Georgia with his brother Charles Wesley. There were twenty-six Germans on board (Wesley, Journal, 14–21 October 1735), and during a storm that split the mainsail the English passengers screamed while “the Germans calmly sang on” (Wesley, Journal, 25 January 1736).

Back in London, on 7 February 1738, he met Peter Böhler and two companions newly landed from Germany, and from then on lost no chance of talking with them (Wesley, Journal, 7 February 1738). On Whitsunday he heard that his brother “had found rest to his soul” (Wesley, Journal, 19–24 May 1738). On Wednesday 24 May he went “very unwillingly” to a society in Aldersgate Street, where someone was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. “About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which 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”, he wrote (Wesley, Journal, 24 May 1738). He later wrote of having visited the Moravian church (Wesley, Journal, letter printed under June 1739); see the Moravians at Herrnhut.

In March 1739 George Whitefield pressed him to come to Bristol. On Monday 2 April he “submitted to be more vile” and preached from a little rise beside the city to about three thousand people (Wesley, Journal, 15 March – 12 May 1739). That September in London he preached to crowds he reckoned at ten and twenty thousand on the old Christianity which “under the new name of Methodism” was everywhere spoken against (Wesley, Journal, 16 September 1739).

The rules that the two brothers signed in 1743 divide each society into classes of about twelve, whose leader sees every member once a week. The one condition of admission is a desire to flee from the wrath to come and to be saved from sin, shown by doing no harm, by doing good and by attending the ordinances of God, among them public worship and the Lord’s Supper (Wesley, General Rules paragraphs 1–7, pp. 3–9).

Wesley preached, he said, by the authority conveyed to him when the bishop who ordained him laid hands on him, and he met objections from several sides. At Bath a man named Nash told him that his meeting was a conventicle, contrary to Act of Parliament (Wesley, Journal, 5 June 1739). To a friend who asked how he could gather Christians in other men’s parishes he answered: “I look upon all the world as my parish” (Wesley, Journal, letter printed under June 1739). In 1741 Whitefield told him that they preached “two different gospels” (Wesley, Journal, 28 March 1741). An anonymous pamphlet of 1744 charged that the Methodists neither heeded the laws against separate assemblies nor qualified under the Act of Toleration, and called this “an open Defiance of Government” (Observations upon the Methodists (1744) pp. 3–4). See the Toleration Act and Locke’s Letter.