John and Charles Wesley

Samuel was a scholarly but financially incompetent Church of England clergyman with royalist affections and high Tory politics. He spent some periods in prison for debt and his pompous views made him unpopular with many of his peasant parishioners. It was Susannah who provided a stable, though religiously strict home for their many children.

Probably because of Samuel's unpopularity the rectory was set on fire in 1709 by an angry mob and though the house was quickly evacuated, someone noticed a small face at an upstairs bedroom window. It was five year old John who had had presence of mind to drag a wooden chest to the window so that he could be seen. A ladder was thrown up and the child rescued minutes before the whole roof fell in with a shower of sparks. Susannah gathered her precious John in her arms with the words,  I must take special care of this child, for God has preserved him for some great end - for he is a brand plucked from the burning.

That great end became clear later on. After attending school at Charterhouse John like his older brother, Samuel and his younger brother Charles, went up to Oxford University. It was Charles who had formed, at the university, a small group of religiously minded young men who had pledged to meet together regularly for prayer, Bible study and general religious devotions. Among the generally worldly and pleasure-loving students, they were known somewhat derisively as the Holy Club, Bible Moths or Methodists. However when John arrived at Christ Church Oxford, he immediately took over leadership of this pious group and enlarged their activities to doing works of charity, helping the poor of Oxford and especially visiting the miserable felons in Oxford town gaol.

After completing their studies both John and Charles accepted the invitation of a certain Captain Oglethorpe to sail out to the colony of Georgia in America for John to be a chaplain to the colonists and Charles as a private secretary with some additional religious duties. Both brothers had followed their father as priests in the Church of England. John particularly saw this trip as an opportunity to try to convert the Red Indians. But things turned out bad for both brothers - after a stormy sea journey they soon found that the settlers were either deported felons or people of a disreputable character who resented the stern religious practices of the Wesley brothers and tried hard to compromise John's character. As for the native Indians they were too dangerous to be approached by any white man unless he had either a bottle of gin or a gun in his hand.

In 1737 the Wesley's returned to England both disillusioned and depressed - it had all been a disaster and a failure, except that on that storm-tossed outward journey John Wesley had been deeply impressed by a party of German Moravian missionaries on board who, during the height of the storm, showed no fear having a complete and serene trust in Jesus Christ to see them safely through the storm. This included women and small children. Wesley, who found himself terrified of perishing, realised that these people had a deep personal religious experience that was foreign to the severe, but conventional, Christianity of the Wesley brothers.

So impressed was John that on his return to London he took letters of introduction to a Moravian group which met in the city. And indeed it was at one of their meetings in a place in Aldersgate Street that John Wesley had a religious experience that turned round his whole life.

To quote Wesley's own words from his journal for the 24^th May, 1738, At the meeting there was someone reading from Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About quarter before nine whilst the speaker was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, that I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, in Christ alone for salvation and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and had saved me from the law of sin and death.

Strangely, brother Charles had had a similar experience a few days before, on his sick bed in his lodgings, and both John and Charles soon met to celebrate their new-found faith, singing together some verses which Charles had composed which began:

It was this dual experience, by the Wesley's, of God's redeeming grace that sparked off a movement of religious revival in eighteenth century England that eventually led to the birth of the Methodist Church.

Both brothers now felt a compulsive urge to share their experience and to preach Christ to others. The general state of the Church of England was almost spiritually moribund with neglected parish churches, virtually deserted by many worldly, pleasure-loving clergy. Any kind of religious zeal or enthusiasm was deeply frowned upon by church leaders, whose theology centred round a cold formal duty to an absentee God. So the immediate mission-field must be for the Wesley's their own beloved Church of England. However they soon found that their brand of enthusiastic evangelism, with its highly personal challenge, was deeply disliked by many, though not all, of their fellow-clergy and soon many city pulpits were being closed to their burning message. It was all very frustrating.

But one of Wesley's friends from their Holy Club days at Oxford was George Whitfield , although a clergyman, he was also a fiery evangelist who having met similar opposition by the conventional churches, was now preaching successfully to large crowds of people in the open air at Bristol. Hearing of John Wesley's difficulties, he invited him to join him in Bristol in field preaching. At first John was reluctant, as he had been brought up to believe that the only appropriate place to preach the gospel was in church. But, being the pragmatist he was, John, as he put it, submitted to become more vile and lifted his voice in the open air to a crowd of coal miners in Bristol on the 31^st March, 1739. He preached to a crowd of 3,000 of the roughest, toughest, most godless coal miners and labourers one could ever meet. The effect was amazing, as scores of these hard men fell to their knees with the tears of penitence and sorrow coursing down their coal begrimed cheeks.

So began for John Wesley, and to a less extent his brother Charles, fifty years of proclaiming the Gospel, both indoors and out, up and down the length and breadth of the British Isles. Thousands of mainly working class artisans and labourers came to know Christ and formed a movement of revival which eventually became known as the Methodist Church.

Of course this was not achieved by the Wesley's themselves - rapidly from their converts they recruited helpers, as they were first called, to share the preaching and to be in pastoral charge of the new local societies of believers. The organisation of these societies was based loosely upon the Holy Club at Oxford and they met for much the same reasons - for prayer, bible study, mutual encouragement and good works. These local groups were later linked together into circuits and eventually the whole network was governed by an annual conference of Wesley's preachers and helpers. Originally the societies met in each other's homes until later preaching houses or chapels began to be built.

From all this one can gather that besides being a powerful preacher John Wesley, particularly, was a gifted and capable organiser and leader of people. The term Methodist, which had been a term of opprobrium at Oxford, John Wesley was proud to adopt to describe the new movement he, under God, was bringing into being. However, both John and Charles Wesley remained, throughout their lives, staunch members of the established Church of England. It was their hope that the Methodist Movement would become an evangelical arm of that Church and the means of restoring its spiritual power in the land. However this was not to be, as the unwillingness of that Church compelled the Methodists to go their own way. More of that in a later article.

Although John Wesley took the lead in their evangelical endeavours Charles Wesley played also a vital part. Charles was a less taut, though more emotional man than his brother - he was also more inclined to domestic matters. He happily married a girl from a devout Welsh family called Sarah Gwynne and reared several children, one of whom, Samuel Sebastion became court musician to George III. Charles is noted for his poetical and musical gifts and penned over 6,500 hymns, many of which are sung today by Christians of all denominations. He retired from the road as an itinerant preacher earlier than John, but still spent much time visiting the societies, living first in Bristol for over twenty years and then finally in London where he died in 1788.

John almost married a highly suitable young woman in Newcastle upon Tyne called Grace Murray but partly through his own indecisiveness and his brother's interference, he lost Grace to another and unfortunately much on the rebound married a middle-aged widow in comfortable circumstances called Mrs. Vazeille. This woman, irritated by John's frequent absences from home and possessed of a viscious jealous streak, became a real shrew and thus denied Wesley much domestic bliss.

John Wesley was a man of many parts - he had an unbounded curiosity as well as a scholarly and logical mind. He wrote educational text-books, compiled a compendium of medical cures which he called A Primitive Physic, experimented with electric shock treatment and set up an orphanage in Newcastle and a school at Kingswood, near Bristol. He was responding to the social and educational challenges of the newly rising industrial revolution of 18^th century England. Strangely Wesley had an antipathy towards rural England, especially towards landed gentry, farmers and agricultural labourers. He concentrated his labours mainly amongst the people who had been drawn into the cities and larger towns because of the industrial revolution - hence his three main centres of evangelical strategy were London, Newcastle and Bristol.

Whilst there was much early physical opposition to the Methodists particularly in the Midlands and Cornwall and some preachers lost their lives in local riots, eventually things settled down and the movement spread and multiplied - in 1780 there were 84 circuits with 52,334 members by 1790 there were 240 circuits with an overall membership of over 70,000. John Wesley died in 1791 at the age of 88 and in fifty years of mainly field preaching he had travelled throughout Great Britain some 225,000 miles (equalling nine times round the earth) and had preached more than 40,000 sermons.

John Wesley claimed  I look upon the World as my Parish and though he never re-visited America after his early abortive enterprise in Georgia, he ordained and sent people like Francis Asbury from Birmingham to establish the work in America and Asbury became one of the first circuit riders to visit the developing American colonies. He too road enormous distances to proclaim the Gospel and establish churches. Eventually Methodism became one of the largest Protestant churches in the United States with a present membership running into millions.

So from an insignificant country rectory and from a heart-warming evangelical experience in a back street meeting of a little-known group of German missionaries, came to birth an evangelical revival which changed the spiritual and moral face of England.

Douglas Graham