John Wesley: His Death and Legacy

Greetings,

      Founder of the Methodist movement, priest of the Church of England, keen scholar, brilliant organizer, social reformer, and tireless preacher of the gospel, John Wesley (b. 1703) was the fifteenth of the nineteen children born to Susanna and Samuel.  His providential rescue from a fire at the Epworth rectory in 1709 led his deeply religious mother to take even more seriously the task of forming in him the religious and personal habits which made his later work so effective.  He was schooled at Charterhouse in London and Christ Church College, Oxford and became a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford.  There he began with Charles the now famous “Holy Club” known for its strict devotion and ministries of compassion.  The works of William Law, Bishop Taylor, and Thomas à Kempis deeply shaped his understanding of Christianity as a call to a practical holiness.

      In 1736, he accompanied Oglethorpe to Georgia as a missionary where his reforming zeal met with dismal failure.  Finding himself in a disastrous relationship and under legal attack, he left the colony under cover of night dejected and religiously confused.  He returned to England convinced that he had “the faith of a servant not of a son.”  But encouraged by Moravian Peter Böhler to “preach faith until he had it,” Wesley soon had his famous Aldersgate heart-warming experience on May 24, 1738.  That summer he visited the Moravians of Hernnhut and was impressed by their fellowship, their organization into “bands,” and their love feasts.

      Returning to England and being turned out of numerous parish pulpits, he took up George Whitefield’s practice of field-preaching.  The crowds responded, some with enthusiastic outbursts, others with threats of violence, but he eventually won many hearers, especially among England’s working classes.  He formed his converts into societies for “experimental religion” whose only requirement was the desire “to flee from the wrath to come.”  Smaller classes were developed for more intense training in the faith.  To extend his work, Wesley began to send out highly disciplined lay preachers.  Gathering them for yearly conferences, he firmly supervised Methodism’s phenomenal growth.  In his many writings, Wesley created a highly original theological synthesis both Western and Eastern, sacramental and revivalistic, Arminian in emphasizing on free grace and radical in its demand for holiness.

      John died on March 2 in 1791 in his house next to the City Road Chapel in London and is buried behind the Chapel.  In his life he preached more than 40,000 times, published about 500 books, sermons, tracts, and pamphlets, and covered more than 250,000 miles on horseback.    

      While Wesley actually earned a lot of money from the sale of his many popular books, because of his extremely charitable nature he died poor, leaving as the result of his life's work 135,000 members and 541 itinerant preachers under the name "Methodist". The pft repeated line is that "when John Wesley was carried to his grave, he left behind him a good library of books, a well-worn clergyman's gown," and the Methodist Church.

      I would refer you to previous comments tracing the history of Wesley’s theology from St. Paul through Sts. Cyril and Methodius to the Moravians and then on to us.

Yours & His,

DED