Who Was John Wesley? The Founder of Methodism and His Message

Biography Church History Revival Holiness

John Wesley was an English clergyman who lived from 1703 to 1791 and led the revival that became the Methodist movement. He was a priest of the Church of England all his life, but he spent more than fifty years preaching in fields, market squares and meeting rooms across Britain and Ireland, mostly to people who never went to church. He gathered those who were awakened into small groups, trained lay preachers to help him, and wrote and edited a whole library for them to read. Today tens of millions of Methodists, Wesleyans and holiness Christians trace their roots to him.

Here's a fuller look at his life, what he preached, and which of his books to start with.

A rectory childhood at Epworth

Wesley was born at Epworth in Lincolnshire, where his father, Samuel Wesley, was the parish rector. His mother, Susanna, raised a large family with a firm, orderly faith and taught her children herself. His younger brother Charles would become the great hymn writer of the revival.

When John was five, the rectory burned down at night, and he was pulled from an upstairs window just before the roof fell in. His family came to believe God had spared him for a purpose, and he believed it too.

Oxford and the Holy Club

He studied at Charterhouse School in London and then at Christ Church, Oxford. He was ordained in the Church of England and became a fellow of Lincoln College. At Oxford he and Charles met with a few friends to pray, study the Greek New Testament, take Communion often, and visit prisoners and the poor. Other students laughed at their strict rules and called them the Holy Club, or "Methodists." The name stuck.

Those were earnest years, and they set the aim of his whole life. He later wrote that from about 1730 he began to be "a man of one book," the Bible. His preface to his sermons gives the same longing in his own words:

I want to know one thing, the way to heaven: how to land safe on that happy shore. God himself has condescended to teach the way; for this very end he came from heaven. He hath written it down in a book. O give me that book! At any price, give me the book of God!
The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, Vol. 1, The Preface

Georgia, and a heart strangely warmed

In 1735 John and Charles sailed to the new colony of Georgia as missionaries. On the way over, a terrible storm broke the ship's mast. Wesley was afraid to die, and he noticed that a group of German Moravian believers sang hymns calmly through it all. His ministry in Savannah went badly, and he came home in early 1738 discouraged and unsure he had saving faith at all.

Back in London, a Moravian named Peter Böhler urged him to trust Christ alone. On the evening of May 24, 1738, Wesley went unwillingly to a small meeting in Aldersgate Street. Someone was reading aloud from a preface to Paul's Epistle to the Romans, and as he listened he felt his heart "strangely warmed." He knew that Christ had taken away his sins. Methodists still remember that night.

Wesley was honest that his years of strict religion before then had not been enough. In his sermon on the almost Christian he said of himself:

Yet my own conscience beareth me witness in the Holy Ghost, that all this time I was but almost a Christian.
The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, Vol. 1, Sermon II: The Almost Christian

Field preaching and the Methodist societies

In 1739 George Whitefield, an old friend from the Holy Club, asked Wesley to come to Bristol and preach in the open air to the coal miners there. Wesley thought it almost a sin to preach outside a church building, but he went, and thousands came to hear him. From then on he preached wherever people would listen.

He didn't leave converts on their own. He organized them into societies, and the societies into classes of about a dozen people who met each week with a leader to pray and to tell how they were doing with God. He wrote the General Rules for them, appointed traveling lay preachers, and from 1744 met his preachers each year in a conference. His Plain Account of the People Called Methodists and the minutes of those early conferences are in volume 15 of his Works.

For the rest of his life he rode on horseback from town to town, often preaching several times a day, starting at five in the morning. By common estimates he traveled about 250,000 miles and preached more than 40,000 sermons. He faced mobs, stones and slander, and he answered his critics in long, patient letters and appeals.

He still wanted Methodists to stay in the Church of England, and most did in his lifetime. After the American Revolution, though, the Methodists in America had no one to give them the sacraments, and in 1784 Wesley set apart Thomas Coke to oversee the work there. The Methodist church in America grew from that decision.

What Wesley taught

Wesley said he wrote "plain truth for plain people," and his teaching can be put plainly.

Salvation is by grace through faith. Everything starts with God's undeserved favor:

Grace is the source, faith the condition, of salvation.
The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, Vol. 1, Sermon I: Salvation by Faith

Believers can know they are forgiven. He called this the witness of the Spirit, an inward assurance God gives His children:

The testimony of the Spirit is an inward impression on the souls of believers, whereby the Spirit of God directly testifies to their spirit, that they are children of God.
The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, Vol. 1, Sermon XI: The Witness of the Spirit

God means to make us holy. The new birth begins a life that God wants to fill with love. Wesley called the goal Christian perfection, and he was careful to say it did not mean being free from mistakes or temptations. It meant love ruling the heart:

It is love excluding sin: love filling the heart, taking up the whole capacity of the soul.
The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, Vol. 3, Sermon XLIII: The Scripture Way of Salvation

Faith shows up in ordinary life. Wesley preached about money, speech, dress and care for the poor. His rule for money is still quoted: "Gain all you can," "Save all you can," and then:

Having first gained all you can, and secondly saved all you can, then give all you can.
The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, Vol. 4, Sermon L: The Use of Money

He also pleaded for love among Christians who disagree, in his sermon "Catholic Spirit," where he asks only whether another believer's heart is right with God.

A man who read and edited for his people

Wesley believed reading was a means of grace, so he printed cheap editions of the best Christian books he knew. Several volumes of his collected Works are made up of these extracts rather than his own writing: William Law's Serious Call, Thomas à Kempis, Henry Scougal, Jonathan Edwards's life of David Brainerd, and the lives and journals of early Methodists. They show what fed the revival.

He died in London on March 2, 1791, at eighty-seven. Near the end he is remembered as saying, "The best of all is, God is with us."

Why he's still read

People still read Wesley because he joins things that often come apart: a clear gospel of free grace and an urgent call to holy living, warm feeling and careful discipline, private prayer and care for the poor. His sermons are short, direct and full of Scripture. He wrote to be understood by farmers and miners, and he still is.

Where to start

TheWay Library has nineteen of his books, all free to read. Start with Forty-Four Sermons, the standard sermons that Methodist preachers were expected to know. Read "The Almost Christian," "The Scripture Way of Salvation" and "The Use of Money" first. If you'd like a cleaner text of the same sermons, the first volumes of The Works of the Rev. John Wesley give them in the edition of his own day.

For his teaching on holiness, read Christian Perfection, which ends with his Plain Account of Christian Perfection. For his pastoral heart, read Select Letters, Chiefly on Personal Religion.

Our guide to John Wesley's books explains what is in each volume, including which ones hold his extracts of other writers, and our collection of John Wesley quotes gathers his best lines with their sources. You'll find all his books on the John Wesley author page.