John Wesley

John Wesley (Epworth, 17 June 1703 – London, 2 March 1791) was an English Anglican cleric and theologian who became the central figure of a revival movement within the Church of England that came to be known as Methodism. He lived in eighteenth-century Britain, a society marked by deep inequality, poverty, and little pastoral care for ordinary people. His significance lies in the fact that, together with his brother Charles, he turned open-air and itinerant preaching into a way of reaching those the established Church did not.

He was the fifteenth of nineteen children born to Samuel and Susanna Wesley, of whom only nine survived infancy. His father was a clergyman, and his mother, a woman of remarkable intelligence and deep piety, taught her children the Scriptures and imposed a strict discipline. A fire at the family rectory in 1709, from which he was rescued through a window as a small boy, left a lasting mark and later became part of the legend surrounding him. He studied at Charterhouse and at Christ Church, Oxford, and in 1726 was elected a fellow of Lincoln College. There he led the so-called Holy Club, a group of students who met to pray, study the Greek New Testament, fast, and visit prisoners. The nickname "Methodists" was first a mocking label for the group's methodical habits.

After his ordination as a priest in 1728 he had a brief parish ministry and, in 1735, sailed with Charles to the colony of Georgia in America to serve settlers in Savannah. The mission was a pastoral failure, and it was partly his contact with the Moravians, whose calm in the face of danger during the crossing impressed him, that shaped his later outlook. On 24 May 1738 he experienced what he himself described as an evangelical conversion, an inner change that guided the rest of his life. He then left the Moravian society and began his own ministry, travelling across Britain and Ireland to preach outdoors and to organise small groups of believers who held one another accountable.

His thought, known as Wesleyan theology, combined Arminian doctrine, which rejects the Calvinist view of predestination, with the idea of Christian perfection. Wesley held that believers could, in this life, reach a state in which the love of God reigned in their hearts, a holiness that was inward as well as outward. He considered the means of grace, such as the sacraments, prayer, and the reading of Scripture, as aids to this process, while insisting that transformation came through faith. He was not a systematic theologian in the academic sense, but his sermons and writings shaped the doctrine of Methodist churches.

His legacy is wide-ranging. Under his direction, Methodists took part in the social causes of their day, including the abolition of slavery and support for women preachers, whom he allowed to act as unordained evangelists. Although in his early years he was barred from many parish pulpits and his followers faced persecution, by the end of his life he was widely respected. The societies he founded gave rise to the independent Methodist movement, which spread throughout the English-speaking world.