The little boy was called Jackie or Jack in the family. He had an elder brother, another Samuel, who went to Westminster School in London, and five elder sisters. His younger brother Charles and two more sisters were born later.
The children were all taught at home, six hours of lessons a day, by their mother, who did not believe in sparing the rod. Years afterwards she wrote that indulging a child makes religion impracticable and salvation unattainable, and so damns the child body and soul for ever. On the day after his fifth birthday she taught him his letters and started him reading the opening verses of Genesis. In Samuel was imprisoned for debt for some months in Lincoln Castle. In , when Jackie was five, the recently rebuilt rectory burned down again.
When the alarm was raised, Samuel got his pregnant wife and their eldest daughter out and then rushed upstairs to the nursery, where he and the nursemaid seized baby Charles and hurried the other children downstairs and outside.
In the confusion no one noticed that Jackie was still obliviously asleep in bed. When Samuel realised what had happened, he tried to go back up, but the blazing stairs would not bear his weight. Jackie had now woken up and climbed on a chest of drawers to open the latch on the window. Three men rowed him across the river to South Carolina, then hiked for several days through dense woods to reach Port Royal, South Carolina. A ship named the same as his father, Samuel, was about to take John home.
The dreams John had for himself when he sailed to Georgia had died, and soon he was seasick and depressed as they left port. Once again at sea a fierce storm blew and waves crashed against the ship and John feared for his life. Doubting reassurance of his eternal home in heaven, he wrote:. Christmas and New Year passed aboard ship as John dreaded landing in England. What would he tell his family and friends? What would he do for a living? Not wanting to face friends at Oxford, John headed for London and stayed with his friend, James Hutton.
Statue of John Wesley. John was convinced a believer must prove their faith through good works. Soon after, as John shared the Gospel with a man in prison who was scheduled to be hanged the next day, John realized the truth of the salvation message. John wrote in his journal:. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation: And an assurance was given me, that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.
Less than one month after his conversion, John fled to Herrnhut, in Saxony, Germany to the home of Count Zinzendorf and the Moravians after much persecution by English believers and enduring banishment from preaching at churches in and around London. By the end of the year John was allowed to preach in only three or four Church of England pulpits. The Methodists still looked to him as founder and unofficial leader, but John remained unsure of what God had planned for him and the future of the Methodist movement.
As he had done with Sophia, the love of his life, John chose to draw lots in late March, when he was invited to preach to coal miners at Kingswood on the outskirts of Bristol. John did not want to go, though George Whitefield, his friend and fellow preacher, wrote to him of speaking in open-air meetings to as many as 20, people at one time.
Little did John realize that George was about to announce his decision to head for the Georgia colony to build an orphanage and publicly hand his preaching duties over to John. On April 1, George Whitefield preached his last sermon in the fields. On that same day, in the afternoon, John Wesley preached his first sermon in the open air to about 3, people.
As a result of his growing love for the poor and his success evangelizing in the open fields, Wesley agreed to purchase and remodel an old foundry on City Road near Moorfields in London. It was Wesley who organized believers to encourage fellowship and spiritual growth.
Various Small Groups that aid spiritual growth and provide prayer and accountability are still active in churches today. While John preached, his brother, Charles, developed hymn writing skills helping many men and women who could not read to hide the truth of the Word of God in their hearts.
His songs gave them the ability to express their belief in Christ in worship. As poverty increased in England, poor people banded together to steal, fight and harass others, particularly the Methodists.
Anti-Methodists riots endured several years, eventually resulting in the martyrdom of William Seward, a traveling preacher. John and others were deeply impacted by the loss. Despite the danger, however, Wesley and his band of twenty lay preachers lived lives of true discipleship and continued to preach the Good News saving souls by the thousands.
Wherever he went, John tried to birth social programs to help the poor find meaningful employment, help orphans find a home, and give congregations godly purposes for living that benefit the less fortunate.
After his mother, Susanna, died on July 23, , John mourned the loss of his confidante and spiritual advisor and poured himself into his work. Facing opposition from many Church of England clergymen and their congregations, Wesley began a life of extreme persecution. He was stoned twice, pelted with manure, harassed when preaching at outside meetings, and even threatened with death. Sometimes church bells were rung nonstop to try to drown out his voice as he preached.
Despite persecution, however, Wesley continued to preach, trusting God to protect and provide all that he needed. In November, John proved his devotion for all followers of Christ, no matter the gender, when he appointed Grace Murray, a young widow in Newcastle, to take charge of the Methodist orphan house in his absence.
Likely because of his mother and his college experience, Wesley viewed women as equals in many ways and encouraged them to grow in knowledge and faith.
In John started a fund to give short-term loans to poor Methodists. The loans were for one pound per person with a three-month payback period. In the first eighteen months, two hundred twenty-five people took advantage of the program. John encouraged everyone to reach out and help the poor. Though John and his brother, Charles, had sworn off marriage agreeing that a man can serve God better as a single man, Charles met a woman he considered a candidate for wife when he was forty years old.
Sally Gwynne was twenty-three at the time and did not impress John when Charles introduced them. John was so unimpressed, in fact, that he drew up a list of candidates he felt were more suitable for Charles before he departed for a trip north. Portrait of John Wesley.
Little did John know that he would soon be nursed back to health from a migraine by Grace Murray, the attractive widow he left in charge of the Newcastle orphan house, and would begin to think of marriage himself.
Sadly, John was not open with his own feelings for Grace and was soon competing for her affections with John Bennet, another Methodist preacher. Finally in early John met Molly Vezeille, a forty-one-year-old widow with four grown children who nursed John back to health after he fell on a patch of ice and sprained his ankle. On February 19, they married, but barely one month later, John left to resume his life of active ministry.
In his absence he wrote Molly many letters, but she soon grew tired of the loneliness. Attempting to strengthen their marriage the following year, she left on a four-month trip to northern England and the Midlands with John, but after six weeks returned home to nurse her ill son.
In November, John contracted an infection in his lungs from preaching in freezing outdoor temperatures and was convinced he was going to die. Though he had experienced many victories and blessings of God, John seemed incapable of appreciating the thousands of souls who were saved, the poor ministered to, and the orphans loved and cared for as a result of his work.
God had accomplished so much through him, yet John wrote the following epitaph for his tombstone:. In April, Molly made a second effort to accompany her husband on an extensive tour of the Midlands and northern England; but the travel proved to be too difficult for her.
When she reached the point of extreme disappointment, Molly took the money she inherited from her first husband and returned to an independent life. Though John continued to travel and preach, he never intended to be the founder of a new denomination outside of the Church of England.
His four reasons stated that Methodists should always be free to 1 preach outdoors, 2 pray without using the Book of Common Prayer, 3 form and manage their own societies, and 4 allow laymen to preach. John further stated that if the Church of England tried to restrict any or all of the above activities, Methodists might need to leave and form their own denomination.
John finally understood the active life of the grace of God; that it is given not only through the death of Jesus but is also the power that leads believers to God and purifies their hearts and minds throughout their lives. Despite his advanced age, John rode about three thousand miles per year on horseback, preached over eight hundred sermons, and encouraged the one hundred preachers under his care. Moreover, he became involved in an unsuccessful love affair, the aftermath of which brought him the unwanted publicity of a court case.
In Wesley returned to England. Wesley's stay in Georgia was, however, not without benefit. Both on his trip over and during his two-year stay, he was deeply influenced by Moravian missionaries, whose sense of spiritual confidence and commitment to practical piety impressed him. In England, Wesley continued to keep in close touch with the Moravians. At one of their meetings—in Aldersgate Street, London, on May 24, —he experienced conversion while listening to a reading of Martin Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans.
Through this personal commitment Wesley, though he later broke with the Moravians, became imbued with the desire to take this message to the rest of England. Finding the bishops unsympathetic or indifferent and most clergymen hostile to the point of closing their churches to him, Wesley, following the example of such preachers as George Whitefield, began an itinerant ministry that lasted more than 50 years.
Forced to preach outside the churches, he became adept at open-air preaching and, as a result, began to reach many, especially in the cities, about whom the Church of England had shown little concern. A small man he was 5 feet 6 inches in height and weighed about pounds , Wesley always had to perch on a chair or platform when he preached. He averaged 15 sermons a week, and as his Journal indicates, he preached more than 40, sermons in his career, traveling the length and breadth of England—altogether more than , miles—many times during an age when roads were often only muddy ruts.
A contemporary described him as "the last word … in neatness and dress" and "his eye was 'the brightest and most piercing that can be conceived. Preaching was not easy; crowds were often hostile, and once a bull was let loose in an audience he was addressing. Wesley, however, quickly learned the art of speaking and, despite opposition, his sermons began to have a marked effect.
Many were converted immediately, frequently exhibiting physical signs, such as fits or trances. From the beginning Wesley viewed his movement as one within the Church of England and not in opposition to it. As he gained converts around England, however, these men and women grouped themselves together in societies that Wesley envisioned as playing the same role in Anglicanism as the monastic orders do in the Roman Catholic Church.
He took a continual and rather authoritarian part in the life of these societies, visiting them periodically, settling disputes, and expelling the recalcitrant. Yearly conferences of the whole movement presented him with the opportunity to establish policy.
Under his leadership each society was broken down into a "class, " which dealt with matters of finance, and a "band, " which set standards of personal morality.
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