The Conversion of the Wesleys

On the evening of 24 May 1738, a 34-year-old ordained Church of England priest who had been trying for twelve years to be a real Christian walked reluctantly into a small religious society meeting at a private house on Aldersgate Street, London. Someone was reading aloud from Martin Luther’s Preface to Romans. At about 8:45 p.m. — he noted the time exactly — John Wesley felt his heart, in his famous phrase, “strangely warmed.” He came out of that meeting with something he had never had: a settled personal assurance that Jesus Christ had saved him, that his own anxious religious striving was over. Three days earlier his younger brother Charles had had a parallel experience while sick in bed. A revival movement was about to be born.

Within a year, John Wesley was preaching in open fields to crowds of 20,000 coal miners in Bristol. Within three years, he and Charles had organized their converts into disciplined “societies,” subdivided into “classes” of a dozen people each who met weekly for mutual accountability. Within a decade, the movement had lay preachers riding circuits across England. Within two generations, Methodism would become the largest Protestant denomination in America.

In the 53 years between his conversion and his death, John Wesley rode about 250,000 miles on horseback and preached approximately 40,000 sermons. Charles wrote about 6,500 hymns, dozens of which — “And Can It Be,” “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing,” “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” — are still sung in Christian congregations today. Their mother Susanna Wesley, bearing nineteen children in a Lincolnshire rectory, had shaped both of them. Methodism was born in 1738 on Aldersgate Street and in a sickbed nearby — but its roots run back to the Epworth rectory where those brothers were raised.

The doctrine of the witness of the Spirit — that assurance of salvation is a normal Christian experience given by the Holy Spirit to the believer’s heart — became a signature Wesleyan emphasis. Paul’s two verses here are the root.

Her father’s house. Susanna Annesley was the twenty-fifth and youngest child of Dr. Samuel Annesley (1620–1696), one of the most respected Puritan nonconformist ministers in England. Annesley had been the rector of St. Giles Cripplegate in London until he was ejected with two thousand other Puritan clergy in the Great Ejection of 24 August 1662, when the Act of Uniformity required every minister to swear allegiance to the newly restored Anglican Prayer Book. Annesley refused and lost his parish; he spent the rest of his life pastoring a Dissenting congregation in Spitalfields. His home was a gathering place for the leading Puritan theologians of the Restoration period. The great Nonconformist preacher John Howe was a family friend; Richard Baxter corresponded with the household; Daniel Defoe (of Robinson Crusoe) married one of Susanna’s older sisters.

An education almost no woman of her age received. Dr. Annesley gave his youngest daughter an education worthy of a Puritan son headed to the ministry. She read fluent Latin, Greek, and French by her mid-teens. She studied logic and rhetoric. She read systematic theology at a professional level and formed her own opinions on every major religious question. Decades later, her own children would receive essentially the same curriculum, with the same rigor.

Choosing the Church of England at thirteen. Around 1682, at age thirteen, Susanna sat down and methodically worked through the controversies between her father’s nonconformist world and the established Church of England. She read both sides. She wrote out her reasoning. And she decided, against her entire upbringing, to conform to the Church of England — the church that had expelled her father. It was a self-reasoned teenage conscience of a kind almost unimaginable for the period. She told her father her decision; he respected it and did not try to change her mind. The moment is a clue to her character: a woman who, once she had worked something through, could not be moved off it.

Marriage to Samuel Wesley, 1688. She met Samuel Wesley, a young divinity student who had made the same conversion from Annesley’s nonconformity to Anglicanism. They married in 1688; she was nineteen, he twenty-six. They were both children of the Puritan world who had chosen a different path, and both were shaped by that choice for the rest of their lives.

Nineteen children, ten survived. Over the next twenty-one years Susanna bore nineteen children. Ten survived infancy: Samuel Jr., Emilia, Susanna (“Sukey”), Mary (“Molly”), Mehetabel (“Hetty”), Anne (“Nancy”), John (“Jacky”), Benjamin, Charles, and Kezia (“Kezzy”). Nine — named or unnamed, several of them twins — she buried before their second birthdays. Her letters mention the dead children matter-of-factly, which is how any mother of her century had to survive. Every one of her surviving ten she deliberately, relentlessly, prayerfully formed.

The rectory school (from c. 1697). Beginning when the family moved to Epworth in 1697, Susanna ran a six-hour school in her rectory six days a week for every one of her children, beginning on their fifth birthday:

Decades later, in a letter (24 July 1732) responding to John’s request for an account of her method, Susanna wrote out the principles at length. The letter is one of the most-studied documents in the history of Christian parenting. Its core maxim: “The first thing to be done is to conquer their will, and bring them to an obedient temper. To inform the understanding is a work of time… but the subjecting the will is a thing which must be done at once; and the sooner the better.” Modern ears flinch at the language; her method in practice was consistent, explicable, and intensely loving, and the children it produced — especially John and Charles — remembered her as their closest friend rather than their warden.

The marital separation (1701–1702). Susanna and Samuel were not an easy couple. The famous quarrel of 1701 has entered Methodist folklore: during family prayers Samuel prayed “for his Majesty King William” — William III, who had taken the throne in 1688 by displacing James II. Susanna, a Jacobite who still considered James the rightful king, refused to say “Amen.” Samuel demanded to know why. She explained. He walked out. He did not return home for almost a year. Only the death of William III in March 1702 and the accession of Queen Anne — whose legitimacy both could recognize — brought Samuel back. Fifteen months after his return, on 17 June 1703, John Wesley was born. He was, in a sense, a child of conscience and a child of reconciliation.

The kitchen services (1711–1712). In the late autumn of 1711, while Samuel was in London for many months at a Convocation meeting, Susanna began holding Sunday evening family devotions in the rectory kitchen. She read a published sermon (most often from Samuel’s own library); she led prayers; she catechised the children. The servants attended. Gradually word spread across the Epworth parish. Within weeks neighbors began asking to attend. Within months, nearly 200 Epworth villagers were crowding into the rectory kitchen on Sunday evenings — twice the congregation Samuel typically preached to on Sunday mornings at the parish church.

The assistant curate at Epworth, a Mr. Inman, wrote to Samuel in London complaining. Samuel wrote to Susanna asking her to stop. Her reply — preserved verbatim by her sons — is one of the great pieces of lay theological correspondence in English Christian history:

Samuel Wesley did not issue the positive command. The kitchen services continued. A rural Lincolnshire parish had its first lay, female-led Sunday evening congregation — drawing twice the numbers of the regular parish service — in 1711, two generations before Methodism was even named. The woman running it was the rector’s wife. When John Wesley later commissioned lay preachers of both sexes in the teeth of Anglican disapproval, he was doing nothing his mother had not already done when he was eight years old.

Her rule for sin. Later in life, in a letter to John during his Oxford years (1 June 1725), Susanna gave him what is still one of the best one-sentence tests any Protestant mother has ever written for her son:

Her writings. Beyond her vast correspondence (several hundred letters survive), Susanna wrote three major works, all intended for her own household:

None was published in her lifetime. All three eventually appeared after her death. Modern critical editions (Charles Wallace Jr., Susanna Wesley: The Complete Writings, 1997) have made her full corpus available for the first time.

Her own “strangely warmed” moment. In 1739, one year after John’s Aldersgate, the seventy-year-old Susanna was living with her son in London at the Foundery and receiving communion from her son-in-law Westley Hall. Hall spoke the words of administration — “the body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee” — and Susanna experienced the direct witness of the Spirit John had been preaching as a normal Christian experience. She told her son afterward: “Till a very few days ago I never heard that any person could know his sins were forgiven. I know now that they have been forgiven, for Christ’s sake.” After seventy years of devout Christian life, she had received the Wesleyan assurance she had been preparing him for. In the end, she received it from him.

Her death. Susanna died on 23 July 1742 at the Foundery, London, age 73. Her last words to her children gathered at her bedside: “Children, as soon as I am released, sing a psalm of praise to God.” They did. She is buried in Bunhill Fields, the London Nonconformist burial ground — her father’s world after all — directly across City Road from the Foundery, and a stone’s throw from the grave of John Bunyan. John preached at her burial on 1 August 1742 before an immense crowd. A witness recorded: “It was one of the most solemn assemblies I ever saw or expect to see on this side of eternity.”

Why she is the mother of Methodism. It is not a sentimental title. Every distinctive of the movement her sons would lead was already present in Susanna’s rectory:

John Wesley’s own assessment, in a letter of 1779: “I should be glad to have as clear an idea of her as I have of [any theologian]… for whom she held such a masculine understanding in disguise.” It was the best compliment an 18th-century son could pay; modern readers will want to revise the gendered language while keeping the substance. Susanna Wesley was one of the great lay theologians of the Anglican Church. She never preached in a pulpit. She did not need to.

John Wesley was ordained deacon in 1725, elected Fellow of Lincoln College (Oxford) in 1726, and ordained priest in 1728. Through his twenties he grew more and more anxious about the state of his own soul. He read William Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1729) and Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ and was moved by both toward rigorous personal discipline but not toward peace.

1729 — The Holy Club. At Oxford, Charles (now at Christ Church) gathered a small group of serious students who met several evenings a week for prayer, Bible study, and fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays. When John returned to Oxford in November 1729 he assumed leadership of the group. Its members regularly visited Oxford’s prisons and workhouses. Other students mocked them — “the Holy Club,” “the Bible Moths,” “the Sacramentarians,” “the Methodists” — the last because of the methodical way they organized their spiritual practices. The nickname stuck. The name of the eventual movement was coined as an Oxford insult.

Holy Club members included George Whitefield (arriving 1732), Benjamin Ingham, John Clayton, John Gambold, and James Hervey. Whitefield was converted in 1735 in Oxford (by Charles Wesley’s lending him Scougal’s The Life of God in the Soul of Man), three years before John’s Aldersgate experience. Several of Whitefield’s later American crowds (Lesson 20 Part 5) had been shaped in that small circle.

In 1735, General James Oglethorpe, founder of the new American colony of Georgia, needed a chaplain for the English settlers and a missionary to the Native American Creek and Yamacraw peoples. The Wesleys signed on. John, age 32, and Charles, age 28, sailed from Gravesend in October 1735 on the Simmonds.

Back in London in February 1738, devastated and searching, John Wesley met a young Moravian missionary named Peter Böhler (1712–1775). Böhler, on his way to the American colony of Georgia himself, was waiting in London for his ship. The two men spent many evenings together in conversation.

Böhler pressed Wesley on two points that the Moravian movement (the community gathered at Herrnhut by Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf from 1722) had made central:

John objected that he had seen no proof of such instantaneous experiences of assurance. Böhler produced English Moravian witnesses. John, a trained logician, found he could not refute them.

Wesley followed the advice. He began preaching justification by faith in Anglican churches across London even while personally still seeking it. The effect was immediate: he was banned from pulpit after pulpit for the radical message.

Charles first. Charles Wesley experienced his own conversion first. Bedridden with pleurisy, he was visited on Pentecost Sunday, 21 May 1738, by a Moravian named John Bray. Charles wrote that Bray’s words led him into a deep struggle, and that he finally, in the evening of that day, found peace through trust in the merits of Christ. His entry reads simply: “I now found myself at peace with God, and rejoiced in hope of loving Christ.”

John, three days later. On Wednesday evening 24 May 1738, John went — reluctantly, by his own admission — to the weekly meeting of the religious society at the house of one James Hutton, on Aldersgate Street, near the London city wall. Someone was reading aloud from the preface Luther had written to his commentary on Romans. Wesley’s Journal entry for the night is one of the most quoted paragraphs in English Christian history:

A qualification. Some Wesley historians — including, eventually, Wesley himself — would debate whether Aldersgate was the moment of John’s actual conversion to saving faith, or the moment when his already-present faith received the assurance that had been lacking. The 34-year-old Wesley in 1738 thought he had not been a Christian before. The elderly Wesley of the 1770s quietly removed from the Journal some of his harsher retrospective claims about his pre-Aldersgate state. The simplest account is Wesley’s own: a decisive, dateable moment of Spirit-given assurance reached through Romans read in Luther’s translation in a Moravian-influenced religious society. It was the turning point.

Later that same evening John walked to Charles’s sickbed. They sang a hymn Charles had already written for his own conversion. The Wesley brothers, conjoined in spirit and hymnody, were ready for what God would do next.

The year after Aldersgate is the year Methodism was born as a movement. Three things happened:

On the afternoon of Monday 2 April 1739, about 4 p.m., Wesley overcame his Anglican propriety and preached his first open-air sermon, from a small rise at the brickyard in Bristol, to a crowd of about 3,000. His text was Luke 4:18, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.” By the end of summer he was regularly preaching to crowds of 10,000–20,000.

Wesley’s organizational genius matched his evangelical energy. Methodism’s disciplined structure is what made it the most effective Protestant discipleship movement of the modern world.

The friendship that launched the Methodist revival nearly destroyed it. In April 1739, John Wesley preached a sermon called “Free Grace” at Bristol — an uncompromising attack on Calvinist predestination. Charles Wesley published a hymn (“Universal Redemption”) defending universal atonement against limited atonement. George Whitefield, traveling in America, read the news and was horrified.

The resulting dispute split the revival into two branches that have persisted to this day:

Personal reconciliation, doctrinal disagreement. In public the two parties quarreled hard and long. In private, Wesley and Whitefield reconciled by 1742. Whitefield deliberately subordinated his theological disagreement to his deep personal love for Wesley. He once said of Wesley, in response to someone asking whether they would see him in heaven: “No, we shall not. He will be so near the throne of Christ and I so far off that I shall hardly be able to see him.” When Whitefield died at Newburyport in 1770, he had specifically asked Wesley to preach his funeral sermon. Wesley did so.

The core Charles Wesley hymns still sung today:

Charles’s death. Charles married Sarah (“Sally”) Gwynne in 1749; their marriage, unlike John’s, was happy. He increasingly parted ways with John over lay preaching and the eventual separation of Methodism from the Church of England. Charles died on 29 March 1788, having asked to be buried in the Anglican churchyard at Marylebone, not in John’s Methodist burial ground. The brothers’ personal love was undiminished by their disagreements about ecclesial order.

Methodism crossed the Atlantic in the hands of lay immigrants, not ordained priests. By 1770 there were small Methodist societies in New York, Philadelphia, and Maryland. John Wesley sent Francis Asbury (1745–1816) to America in 1771 — at 26, a gifted preacher-administrator who would remain in America for the rest of his life and become, with Thomas Coke, the founder of American Methodism.

John Wesley died on 2 March 1791 at his house on City Road, London, age 87. He had preached his last sermon six days earlier. Friends and family gathered in his bedroom sang hymns with him as he died. His last words: “The best of all is, God is with us.” He repeated the phrase twice, feebly, and then again: “The best of all is, God is with us.”

At his death the Methodist societies in England numbered about 72,000 members; in America, about 57,000. Twenty-five years later, American Methodism had grown to nearly 250,000. A century after his death, about 30 million people were directly Methodist; today the worldwide Methodist and Wesleyan-Holiness family numbers approximately 80 million — over 12 million in the United Methodist Church alone, with vast populations in the Global South.

If Calvin and Luther founded denominations, the Wesleys founded a movement. Its influence on American Protestantism — in revivalism, discipleship structure, global missions, hymnody, the Holiness and Pentecostal traditions, and the social-reform instincts of British and American evangelicalism — has been, by any measure, one of the most consequential stories of the modern church.

Noll titles his chapter on the Wesleys A New Piety: The Conversion of the Wesleys (1738). He identifies three reasons this is a turning point: