John Wesley — MannaFest

Short bio

John Wesley was born on June 17, 1703, at Epworth in Lincolnshire, the fifteenth of nineteen children born to Samuel Wesley, the rector, and Susanna, who taught the household herself and gave each child one hour alone with her every week. In February 1709 the rectory burned. Five-year-old John was left upstairs; neighbors made a human ladder and pulled him out of an upper window moments before the roof fell in. Susanna called him "a brand plucked out of the burning," and he used the phrase about himself for the rest of his life. He went to Charterhouse and then to Christ Church, Oxford, was ordained, and became a fellow of Lincoln College. At Oxford he and his brother Charles gathered a handful of students who took communion weekly, fasted twice a week, visited the prisoners at the Castle, and lived by a written schedule. Other students mocked them as the Holy Club, and as Methodists. The nickname stuck. In 1735 the brothers sailed for the new colony of Georgia as missionaries. It went badly. John's ministry at Savannah collapsed in a scandal over a woman he had courted and then refused communion, and he sailed home in 1738 writing in his journal, "I went to America to convert the Indians; but O! who shall convert me?" One thing from the voyage stayed with him: a company of Moravian Germans singing psalms through a storm that terrified everyone else on board. On the evening of May 24, 1738, at a meeting in Aldersgate Street, London, he heard someone reading Luther's preface to Romans. He wrote: "About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation." Within a year the pulpits were closing to him. George Whitefield persuaded him to preach outdoors to the coal miners at Kingswood near Bristol in April 1739. Wesley thought field preaching almost sinful — he called himself so tenacious of every point relating to decency and order that he could scarcely bear it — and then did it for fifty years. He rode roughly a quarter of a million miles on horseback through England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and preached more than forty thousand sermons, often at five in the morning so working people could hear before their shift. He organized converts into societies, classes of about a dozen, and bands, with lay preachers to keep them going. He edited a fifty-volume Christian Library, published *Primitive Physick* for the poor who could not afford a doctor, and in 1755 issued his *Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament* — still a doctrinal standard of Methodism. He preached Christian perfection: that God can so fill a believer with love that sin no longer reigns. He fought slavery to the end. His last letter, written six days before his death, urged William Wilberforce to keep going against what he called that execrable villainy which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature. His marriage to Mary Vazeille in 1751 was unhappy, and she eventually left him. He kept riding. He died in London on March 2, 1791, at eighty-seven. Among his last words: "The best of all is, God is with us." By then the movement he never meant to found had tens of thousands of members in Britain and was spreading fast across America. Sources: John Wesley, *The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley* and *Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament*; Luke Tyerman, *The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley*; Richard Heitzenrater, *Wesley and the People Called Methodists*; Philip Schaff, *History of the Christian Church*.

Notable works

1 listed

Title	Year	Description
Notes on the Bible	1754	1,168 chapters / 66 books — NT complete, OT selective:

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