Susanna Wesley

Life

Susanna was born in London on January 20, 1669, the daughter of the Dissenting minister Samuel Annesley. Dissenters were Protestants who did not conform to the Church of England. She is said to have been the youngest of her father's twenty-four or twenty-five children. She is reported to have received an education that included Greek, Latin, and French, among other languages. In 1681, at the age of twelve, she left her father's religious tradition of her own accord and joined the Church of England.

In 1688 she married Samuel Wesley, a clergyman of the Church of England. The couple lived at South Ormsby in Lincolnshire before moving to the parish of Epworth. She bore nineteen children, but only ten reached adulthood. John was the fifteenth child and Charles the eighteenth. Susanna did not recognize William III as the lawful king and would not say "Amen" to prayers offered for him. Over this matter her husband left home in 1701, though the two were later reconciled. Her husband died in 1735. Susanna died in London on July 23, 1742, with her son John and her daughters at her side. She was buried at Bunhill Fields, a burial ground for Dissenters.

Ministry and Work

Education of Her Children

She taught her children at home herself and emphasized an orderly daily routine. She is said to have set aside time each evening to meet with each child individually to talk about matters of faith and personal concerns. In 1732, when John asked her about the upbringing of children, she set out her principles in a letter to him. Several of her letters to her children also survive.

Kitchen Meetings

During the winter of 1711–1712, her husband stayed in London to attend the Convocation of the Church of England. Dissatisfied with the preaching of the curate who had charge of the parish in his absence, Susanna held Sunday evening prayer meetings in the rectory kitchen with her children and servants. As neighbors began to join, attendance is said to have exceeded two hundred. When the curate complained, her husband urged her to stop the meetings. In a letter of February 1712, Susanna explained why she had begun the meetings and replied that she would continue them unless he gave her an explicit command to stop. Sources differ on how long the meetings continued.

These meetings are cited as one of the roots of the class meeting (a small group in which believers met regularly) and the system of lay preachers in the Methodist movement.

Influence on the Korean Church

In Korean, her name is also transliterated as 수산나 or 수잔나. In the Korean Methodist Church and other denominations in the Wesleyan theological tradition, she is introduced as part of the background to the development of John Wesley's faith. Denominational newspapers and the writings of theologians also discuss her approach to child-rearing. In addition, "Susanna's methods of child-rearing" have been compiled into numbered lists that circulate widely on church bulletin boards and in resources for family worship and family ministry.

Assessment

The Methodist Church in Britain commemorates her on July 23, the anniversary of her death. Although she never preached or founded a church, she is called the "Mother of Methodism" because of her influence on her two sons.

Several qualifications apply, however. Some take the view that it cannot be determined with certainty how directly the kitchen meetings influenced Methodist small groups. Some writers point out that the Wesley household was not as strict and rigid as it is often portrayed. Popular Korean writings sometimes call her "the world's first woman preacher," but this description is difficult to verify historically.