Methodist Movement

Background

In early eighteenth-century England, the Church of England was the national church. John Wesley was born the son of an Anglican priest. He was ordained a priest in 1728 and returned to the University of Oxford in 1729, where he came to lead a small devotional group that his younger brother, Charles Wesley, had formed. The group was known as the "Holy Club." Its members kept a regular discipline of Bible study, prayer, and Holy Communion, and they assisted prisoners and the poor. Because of this, people around them gave them the nickname "Methodists," meaning sticklers for rules, and the nickname became the name of Methodism. George Whitefield, who later became renowned as a revival preacher, also took part in the group.

Development

• 1735–1738: The Wesley brothers carried out missionary work in the colony of Georgia in North America.
• May 24, 1738: John Wesley attended a meeting of Moravian Brethren believers on Aldersgate Street in London. While listening to a reading of Martin Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans, he felt his heart warmed. He is said to have received at that time an assurance of salvation through Christ. This event is known as the Aldersgate experience.
• 1739: At Whitefield's urging, Wesley went to Bristol, near a coal-mining district. On April 2 he preached his first open-air sermon there, to about three thousand people in an open field. As church pulpits became harder to obtain, he preached in fields and streets, declaring, "I look upon all the world as my parish." That same year he built a meetinghouse in Bristol called the "New Room," which is known as the oldest Methodist chapel.
• 1742: The first class meetings were organized in Bristol. A class meeting was a small group of about a dozen people who met weekly to examine one another's spiritual condition. Lay class leaders led the meetings, and Wesley also appointed lay preachers to travel throughout the country preaching.
• 1744: Wesley gathered his preachers and held the first Conference.
• Anglican clergy criticized the movement as "enthusiasm" (a faith given to excessive emotion). In some places mobs disrupted the meetings. Whitefield and Wesley are known to have differed over the question of predestination.
• Methodism began in North America in 1766, and from 1769 Wesley sent itinerant preachers there.
• March 2, 1791: Wesley died in London. He remained a priest of the Church of England until his death.

Results and Influence

• After Wesley's death, the Methodists in Britain are known to have separated from the Church of England and formed a distinct denomination.
• Wesley emphasized prevenient grace (the grace of God that reaches people even before they believe) and sanctification (a life of growing in holiness). This teaching is called Wesleyan theology. Wesleyan theology gave rise to the later Holiness movement, and denominations such as the Holiness churches and the Salvation Army are rooted in this stream.
• Wesley operated a lending fund, helped the unemployed find work, and cared for widows and the elderly, leaving a tradition of putting faith into practice within society.
• In 1885 the Methodist church in the United States sent missionaries such as Henry Appenzeller and William Scranton to Korea. This marked the beginning of the history of Methodism in Korea, which continues today in bodies such as the Korean Methodist Church. Methodist churches in Korea still use the class meeting as the foundation of their church organization.

Assessment

• Methodist and Wesleyan-tradition churches regard the movement as a revival that united personal conversion with social action. The revival in Britain is treated, together with the contemporaneous Great Awakening in America, as part of the eighteenth-century Evangelical Revival.
• Anglican clergy of the time criticized it as enthusiasm that disregarded parish order.
• Calvinist critics acknowledge the movement's contribution to revival, but they have raised theological objections to Wesley's soteriology, with its Arminian character, and to his doctrine of Christian perfection.