John Wesley

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John Wesley was an English Anglican clergyman, theologian, and revivalist whose ministry gave rise to Methodism, one of the largest of the movements born from the eighteenth-century evangelical revival. Ordained in the Church of England and a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, he never formally left that church in his lifetime, yet the societies he organised and the lay preachers he commissioned became, after his death, a separate communion spread across the English-speaking world.

He came from a clerical family at Epworth in Lincolnshire, the son of a rector, and was schooled at Oxford in the early 1720s. There he and his brother Charles, the hymn-writer, gathered with a small circle — George Whitefield among them — whose strict timetable of prayer, study, fasting, and prison visiting earned the mocking nickname “Methodists,” a label the movement later adopted. A mission to the new colony of Georgia in the mid-1730s ended in disappointment, and the voyage out, sharing a ship with German Moravians whose composure in a storm unsettled him, left a mark. Methodist tradition fixes the turn at a meeting on Aldersgate Street in London in May 1738, where Wesley recorded feeling his heart “strangely warmed” and a sudden assurance of his own salvation. Whether this was a single conversion or one moment in a longer change has been debated by biographers; he himself returned to the date as a landmark.

What followed was half a century of travel. Barred from many parish pulpits, he took to preaching in the open air — in fields, at pit-heads, to crowds of labourers the established church largely ignored — and by some estimates rode hundreds of thousands of miles on horseback across Britain and Ireland. He built a connexion of societies, classes, and circuits served by itinerant lay preachers, a structure that outlasted him and travelled well. Doctrinally he held to an Arminian account of salvation, against the strict predestination of his sometime ally Whitefield: grace was offered to all, and could be refused. His most distinctive teaching, Christian perfection or entire sanctification, held that a believer might in this life be so filled with love of God and neighbour as to be freed from deliberate sin — a claim his critics found implausible and his followers prized.

Late in life, with no bishop willing to ordain ministers for the American societies after independence, Wesley ordained them himself, a step that effectively acknowledged the breach with Anglican order even as he denied intending one. He died in 1791, leaving journals, sermons, and a vast body of letters. Methodism became a worldwide family of churches; the holiness movement, and later Pentecostalism, drew on his account of sanctification. His brother’s hymns carried the same theology in a form congregations could sing, and through them Wesley’s emphases reached far beyond those who ever read his prose.

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