Clergy/Leaders’ Mail-list No. 3-122 (General Information)

The 300th anniversary of John Wesley’s birth has been commemorated during June 2003. The following is an edited version of a commentary compiled by Rev John M Connan for use at Wesley Uniting Church, East Doncaster, Victoria, Australia, during the worship service on 22 June 2003. (Sources are indicated at the end of the article.)

JOHN WESLEY (17 June, 1703 – 2 March 1791) [Part 1/2]

A brand snatched from the burning ———————————

Epworth is a village in the Lincolnshire Fens of England. In the seventeenth century the marshes were drained by royal command. The townsfolk never accepted what had happened and were distinctly anti-royalist. They were also ‘drunken, surly and violent.’ To cross them was to court trouble.

When the royalist-inclined Rev. Samuel Wesley came as rector, it was inevitable there would be clashes. He was a man of learning, quiet and studious, somewhat impetuous, with an ‘almost pugnacious piety.’ He was a man of principles and would not keep his opinions to himself. The villagers responded by burning his crops, hobbling his cattle, and even had him confined to the prison of Lincoln Castle for a debt of  £30.

In February 1709, the Rectory was burnt to the ground (at the second attempt) by throwing burning faggots on the thatched roof. In the hasty confusion, John (one of nine children) was left asleep in the attic. He awoke to find everything ablaze. At the age of five, he showed extraordinary presence of mind, dragging a chest to the window and showing himself to the crowd below. Samuel was already in prayer commending his son to God. Two of the crowd saw the lad at the window, and forming a human ladder saved John just as the roof collapsed. Ever after Susannah, his mother, and John himself saw this as an act of God: ‘a brand plucked from the burning.’

John Wesley was a ‘methodist’ from the cradle. From the time of being ‘plucked from the burning’ Susannah gave him special attention and imbued him with the sense that God had great things in store for him.

Home Influences —————

Life in the Epworth Rectory was an island of gentle piety among an impious and rough people. The Bible was the source of family devotion. Though John read very widely and was a high-class scholar throughout his life, from an early age he had been brought up to be – as he later declared – ‘a man of one book.’ He was also brought up to love the Book of Common Prayer. In one of his letters in 1760 John wrote, ‘I do not defend or espouse any other principles, to the best of my knowledge, than those which are plainly contained in the Bible as well as in the Homilies and the Book of Common Prayer.’ John had determined:

By the grace of God, I resolved to seek [faith] unto the end, (1) By absolutely renouncing all dependence, in whole or in part, upon my own works or righteousness; on which I have really grounded my hope of salvation, though I knew it not, from my youth up; (2) by adding to the constant use of the other means of grace, continual prayer for this very real thing, justifying, saving faith, a full reliance on the blood of Christ shed for me; a trust in Him, as my Christ, as my sole justification, sanctification, and redemption.

In 1735, John and his younger brother Charles sailed to the new American colony of Georgia with high hopes. The venture was disastrous for the brothers. Both returned to England completely disillusioned. But the voyage to Georgia had results they could not have foreseen.

Most passengers, including John and Charles, had been terrified during a series of storms. But a small group of Moravian Christians had impressed them with their calm faith. Back in England they made contact with the Moravians and listened with growing interest to their stress on salvation by faith alone. John had even sought Moravian advice on what he should do, and had been told, ‘Preach faith till you have it; and then, because you have it, you will preach faith!’

The brothers had been ordained within the Church of England, but something was lacking and both had been restless.

The Change ———-

On 21 May 1738, Charles found he was filled with an overwhelming sense of God’s love. ‘I now found myself at peace with God, and rejoiced in hope of loving Christ.’ His awakened faith and assurance found expression in a hymn written two days later: Where shall my wondering soul begin?

Early on 24 May, John opened his Bible. His eyes fell on the words, ‘There are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises, even that ye should be partakers of the divine nature.’ Just before he went out he read, ‘Thou art not far from the kingdom of God.’ Later he went to evensong at St Paul’s Cathedral. The anthem, ‘Out of the depths I called unto Thee, O Lord,’ resonated within him. In the evening he went ‘very unwillingly,’ he wrote in his journal, to a meeting in Aldersgate Street. Here, while someone was reading aloud from Luther’s Preface to his commentary on the Letter to the Romans, John felt his heart ‘strangely warmed’ by the love of God. ‘I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given to me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.’

This wasn’t so total a change as might be thought. In his Journal he wrote, ‘After my returning home, I was much buffeted with temptations; but cried out, and they fled away. They returned again and again. I as often lifted up my eyes, and He ‘sent me help from His holy place.’ And herein I found the difference between this and my former state chiefly consisted. I was striving, yea, fighting with all my might under the law, as well as under grace. But then I was sometimes, if not oft, conquered; now. I was always conqueror.’

The very next Sunday his preaching in two London churches was so charged with power that the congregations were disturbed and he was forbidden to preach there again. As the weeks went by, more and more pulpits were closed to him.

Field Preaching —————

When the Wesleys found churches closed to them, a new way of sharing God’s love opened to them.

George Whitefield had been a younger member of the Holy Club at Oxford. He was a fiery and eloquent preacher known on both sides of the Atlantic before the brothers returned from Georgia. In December 1738 he had returned from an American mission. Within a month every London pulpit was barred to him. At Bristol, where he’d been very popular only two years before, things were no better. He began an illegal activity: on 17th February he preached to a few hundred colliers in the open air on Kingswood Common. Three weeks later he was preaching to ten thousand. Whitefield had promised to return to America, but felt he couldn’t leave the multitudes in Bristol without a pastor. He wrote to Wesley. He saw John as the man to lead a revival, to organise, to methodise, what had every appearance of being a vast religious campaign.

Wesley was perplexed. Charles opposed him accepting the call. The Fetter Lane society was divided. John decided to go – though he wrote in his Journal on reaching Bristol, ‘I could scarce reconcile myself at first to this strange way of preaching in the fields, of which [Whitefield set me an example on Sunday; having been all my life (till very recently) so tenacious of every point relating to decency and order, that I should have thought the saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been done in a church.’

The colliers of Bristol were a brutal and irreligious lot. They had never heard the good news of God’s love for them. They knew ‘proper’ people looked down on them. ‘Preaching the Gospel to working men was nearly as bad as trying to educate them; it was bound to make them discontented and to lessen their industrial value.’

At first Wesley attracted fewer hearers than Whitefield. But the results were extraordinary. People dropped to the ground as though felled by a sudden blow. They roared aloud. They went into convulsions. This lasted a few minutes or some hours. When they came to themselves, it was with a happy sense of relief and joy; the weight of sin was lifted and they had come to faith in Christ.

Organised Methodism dates from Wesley’s arrival in Bristol. He saw the need for a system. He founded two societies within weeks, and within six weeks had purchased land for the building of the first Methodist meeting-house.

The Methodist movement was begun. John was the evangelist and organiser, Charles the hymn-writer. In a time when few roads existed over the next 50 years John travelled a quarter of a million miles on horse-back. Charles wrote almost 7,000 hymns.

Opposition and Acceptance ————————-

What had begun at Bristol was repeated in London and then throughout England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. But as the movement grew, so did the opposition. Elsewhere opposition became much more turbulent – and violent.

While in Bristol in 1740 Wesley was disturbed to hear that Thomas Maxfield, a layman, had been preaching at the newly established meeting-place, the Foundery. He hurried back to put a stop to this presumption. First he consulted Susannah. Though she was High Church, her advice was, ‘My son, I charge you before God, beware what you do; for Thomas Maxfield is as much called to preach the Gospel as ever you were!’ Before the year was out Wesley had not only given his approval to Maxfield, but to twenty other ‘local preachers’.

This provided an even greater point of contention. Ordained ministers might preach, but ‘making the poor preach to the poor was making the blind leaders of the blind’. Arguments began. Articles appeared in the magazines. Pamphlets were distributed. Some were beaten on the head with brass pans. In Wales in 1741 one preacher was struck in the eye, and lost his sight. Later he was struck on the head and killed.

Though Wesley himself was stoned in London in 1741, it was in 1742 that general violence began. The houses of Wednesbury Methodists were wrecked, pregnant women abused, men were beaten till close to death. The flinging of stones and mud was an every-day diversion. In October Wesley himself was taken prisoner by a murderous group from Walsall, facing possible death. He remained entirely composed and restrained – and escaped.

In 1743 Charles visited Cornwall and found the mobs there as mindless as those at Wednesbury. Despite this – or because of this – within 20 years Wesleyan Methodism was the vital religious force in Cornwall. By 1750 the persecutions and violence died away, as Methodism became acceptable and John Wesley an honoured figure throughout the British Isles.

[Continued in CLM-3-123]