The Methodist and Wesleyan Churches

On 7 February 1736 the Moravian August Spangenberg put the question of Romans 8:16 to Wesley. Wesley's Journal records that on 24 May 1738 “an assurance was given me, that he had taken away my sins, even mine.”

Three further texts carry his teaching on perfect love.

Wesley's own Journal, which he published himself, is the movement's record of its birth. At Bristol on Saturday 31 March 1739 he met George Whitefield, who was to set him an example of preaching in the fields on the Sunday.

Wesley wrote that he “could scarce reconcile my-self at first to this strange way of preaching in the fields.”

The hostile press answered in print. In 1749 an anonymous book, The Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists Compar'd, which the Internet Archive catalogues under George Lavington's name, attacked “a set of pretended Reformers among us, call'd Methodists.”

Wesley's preachers met in conference, and his Plain Account prints the minutes of their meetings of 1745 and 1759.

On 10 September 1784 Wesley wrote from Bristol to Coke, Asbury and the Methodists in North America. He had appointed Coke and Asbury “to be joint Superintendents” and Whatcoat and Vasey “to act as Elders.”

He gave his reason: “Lord King's account of the primitive church convinced me many years ago, that Bishops and Presbyters are the same order.”

Richard Allen, who became the first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, wrote of the founding in his book of 1833. He called the Baltimore conference of December 1784 “the beginning of the Episcopal Church amongst the Methodists.”

Read Wesley and the Methodist Revival →

Wesley's A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, last revised in 1777 by its editor's note and read in Jackson's edition of 1872, gives his teaching in his own words. He and his brother held “That Christian perfection is that love of God and our neighbour, which implies deliverance from all sin.”

They taught that it is “received merely by faith” and “given instantaneously, in one moment.” Wesley also wrote, “sinless perfection is a phrase I never use.”

Read Christian Perfection →

Wesley sent the American Methodists The Sunday Service, printed in London in 1784. It carries twenty-four Articles of Religion, from “Of Faith in the Holy Trinity” to “Of a Christian Man's Oath,” and none of their headings treats predestination.

Article XII says that “after we have received the Holy Ghost, we may depart from grace given, and fall into sin.”

It adds that “by the grace of God” we may “rise again, and amend our lives.”

Wesley wrote the same in his Plain Account: “They who are sanctified, yet may fall and perish.”

MannaFest holds eternal security as its own position, and its study of eternal security sets out that reading from John 10:28 to 29.

Read Eternal Security →

Joe Iovino's history of the bodies behind The United Methodist Church, published by that church, records the failure. It tells how James O. Andrew became a bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church and says that “Andrew owned slaves, despite the Methodist Episcopal Church's antislavery stance since its founding.”

The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, separated from the northern church in 1844.

Earlier, in a year between 1787 and 1794 that the sources dispute, a trustee of St. George's in Philadelphia pulled Absalom Jones off his knees at prayer, and the Black members “all went out of the church in a body,” as Allen tells it. Allen also judged that after the bishops came in 1784 “religion has been declining in the church ever since.”

Read The African Methodist Episcopal Church →

The same history carries the southern church of 1844 into The Methodist Church of 1939 and into The United Methodist Church of April 1968.