John Wesley was the founder of the Methodist church (though he thought of himself as a disenfranchised Anglican clergyman). He possibly had a greater influence upon England’s social and spiritual life than any other person of the eighteenth century. At Oxford University he was a leader of a group of Christian activists called the ‘Holy Club’, and shortly after graduation he made a brief missionary journey to Georgia. But despite his intentions to serve God as a Christian minister, Wesley felt his life to be devoid of spiritual power. On the voyage to Georgia he met a company of German Moravians and was impressed by their example of faith. Through a Moravian friend in London, Wesley went ‘most unwillingly’ to a meeting in a house on Aldersgate Street on 24 May 1738. Here, he relates in his world-famous Journal, his heart was ‘strangely warmed’ as he listened to a reading from Luther’s preface to Romans. This experience marks the beginning of his career as an evangelist.
Wesley visited the Moravian settlement in Germany and its leader, Count Zinzendorf, and returned to England convinced that God had given him a commission to evangelize Great Britain. At the suggestion of George Whitefield, he took to open-air preaching at the Kingswood mining area near Bristol in April 1739. He continued in this practice until just a few days before he died, travelling some 5,000 miles a year over unpaved roads and facing every kind of hardship and peril, including mob violence. The net result of his work was a mighty wave of conversions—in all levels of society but primarily among the working classes—and the establishment of hundreds of Methodist chapels. The changed lives of the converts made a powerful impact upon British society through a decrease in both crime and drunkenness and the practical application of Christian charity to relieve poverty and suffering.
Although born and raised in Epworth, Lincolnshire, where his father had been rector of the parish church, John Wesley was educated at the Charterhouse School and, later, made London the base for his preaching journeys. It was often his practice to follow a triangle in these journeys, with Bristol on the west and Newcastle in the north as the other two angles. Chapels and a headquarters for training preachers were eventually established in all three cities. For many years Wesley rode horseback from place to place. As he grew older and became one of the best-known public figures in England, he rode in a carriage of varnished wood with painted yellow wheels. It is said that often some fifty horsemen would escort the lumbering vehicle from Hatfield into the City. He was stricken ill while preaching in the open air at Leatherhead and died at his London home next to the chapel on 2 March 1791. Both the chapel and the house are now objects of pilgrimage for Methodists and other Christians from around the world.