At four o’clock, John took another deep breath and launched into his first ever sermon delivered outdoors. He chose to preach on the text from Luke’s Gospel: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.”
As John spoke, more and more people gathered to hear him, until the crowd numbered about three thousand. John preached on, feeling bolder as he went. When the sermon was over, he dismissed the crowd with a prayer and walked back to his lodgings.
That night he sat alone in his room, wondering how he had done. He knew he was not as dynamic a preacher as George Whitefield, but he had preached the gospel as best he knew how. Would it be enough? And would he have the courage to do it again?
The answer to these questions came the following day. John awoke singing a hymn and feeling that he was exactly on course with God’s will for his life. He decided that later in the afternoon he would follow in George Whitefield’s footsteps and go and preach at Hannam Mount, another coal-mining area just outside Bristol. But first, John was scheduled to speak at the Nicholas Street Methodist Society at 7:00 AM.
Even at that early hour, over one thousand people showed up to hear him preach. And that afternoon, when John finally made it to Hannam Mount, fifteen hundred miners stopped and listened to him preach. Later that night John walked on to Kingswood and Rose Green, where huge crowds gathered to hear him preach.
By the time he got to bed that night, John estimated that he had preached to over five thousand people! These were not just any people—they were people who had never attended a regular Anglican service and probably would not be welcomed there if they did.
More meetings followed, and strange events began taking place at them. Some of those who came to hear him would shriek and writhe in agony during the sermon as they came under conviction of their sins. Others laughed hilariously or spoke in “other tongues,” or unknown languages, and could not stop. John recorded many of the happenings matter-of-factly in his journal.
April 21. At Weaver’s Hall a young man suddenly was seized with violent trembling all over and in a few moments sank to the ground. We ceased not calling upon God till He raised him up full of peace and joy.
May 21. In the evening I was interrupted at Nicholas Street almost as soon as I had begun to speak by the cries of one who was pricked at heart and strongly groaned for pardon and peace.… Another person dropped down, close to one who was a strong assertor of the contrary doctrine. While he stood astonished at the sight, a little boy near him was seized in the same manner. A young man who stood up behind fixed his eyes on him and sank down himself as one dead, but soon began to roar out and beat himself against the ground, so six men could scarcely hold him.
June 22. In the society one before me dropped down as dead, and presently a second and a third. Five others sank down in half an hour; most of whom were in violent agonies. In their trouble we called upon the Lord and He gave us an answer of peace.
Although such phenomena could be found in Anglican theology, such things were not a part of regular church practice, and as a result they drew a lot of criticism.
John was beyond caring, however. With George Whitefield’s help he had uncovered his life’s work—and he knew it. Millions of unchurched men, women, and children were waiting to hear the gospel, but no one in England had made an effort to bring it to them. John fully intended to be the one to preach the good news of Jesus Christ to them.
When his brother Samuel wrote complaining about some of the strange emotional outbursts that were accompanying his meetings, John wrote back, “God commands me to do good unto all men, to instruct the ignorant, reform the wicked, confirm the virtuous.… Men command me not to do it in another man’s parish. That is, in effect, not to do it at all.… My extraordinary call is witnessed by the works of God.… I look upon the world as my parish.”
Although the Methodists remained a group within the Church of England, the members of the group wanted to spend more time meeting together to pray and share each other’s spiritual burdens. The two main Methodist groups in Bristol got together and decided to purchase their own meetinghouse. They called it simply “Our Room,” and when they could not find the money they needed to pay off the building, John stepped in to help them out with the payments and renamed the place “The New Room.”
A problem arose at the Fetter Lane Society in London. The members of this society had always leaned heavily toward Moravian teaching, as had John; but a preacher from Alsace, Philipp Henry Molther, arrived in London and began preaching at the meetings at Fetter Lane. Back when John had been experiencing doubts about his own salvation, Peter Böhler had admonished him to “preach until you have faith,” but Molther gave the members of the Fetter Lane group the opposite advice. He called his new doctrine “stillness.” And it meant exactly that. The Fetter Lane Methodists were told not to do anything at all unless they were one hundred percent sure that they were saved. This meant not going to church or fasting or praying or reading Scripture or attempting any good works.
When John returned to Fetter Lane after one of his visits to Bristol, he was horrified by what he found. Nine out of ten of the Fetter Lane followers were gone, staying away from society meetings for fear of breaking the “stillness” rule. All the charity work of the group had come to a halt, and almost no one was going to church to take Communion. Shocked, John determined to do something about the situation.
Doing something about the situation did not prove to be easy, however. Molther was a persuasive speaker, and many members of the Fetter Lane Society refused to listen to John as he pleaded with them, held special meetings among them, and wrote open letters to Molther. By July 1739 John felt that the cause was lost. He asked to speak one more time to the members of the Fetter Lane Society. Unable to reason with them yet again, he said, “I have warned you, hereof again and again and besought you to turn back to the law and testimony. I have borne with you long, hoping you would turn. But as I find you more and more confused in the error of your ways nothing remains but I shall give you up to God.”
When John stood up to leave the meeting hall for the last time, twenty-five men and forty-eight women left with him. John knew that these people were his true followers and that he would have to find a new spiritual home for them.
Back in November 1738, John had preached twice at the site of the old Royal Foundry in Upper Moorfields, London. The foundry had once made cannons for the British military, but after an explosion in 1716, the site had been abandoned, and the workshop was relocated to Woolwich. Crowds numbering nearly six thousand had come to each of the services John preached at the site, and after one of the services, two influential men had encouraged John to purchase the old foundry as a site for a Methodist meeting hall.
Given the current circumstances, John decided that it was time to follow through with this plan. He arranged to lease the property, and soon those from the Fetter Lane Society and other Methodist societies in London were hard at work converting the run-down building on the site into a chapel and meeting rooms. When they were done, they would have a chapel that could seat fifteen hundred people, with men on one side and women on the other. The renovated building would also have another meeting room that could seat three hundred, and upstairs was a small apartment for John to live in.
By the fall of 1739, John was busier than ever, dividing his time between Bristol and the Methodist societies in London.
The winter that descended over England that year was one of the most severe in years. The Thames River froze solid, bone-chilling wind blew in from the North Sea, and cold rain saturated everything. Regardless of the weather, John toiled on, preaching outdoors. Often he found himself preaching in the dark, as night settled over the country at four-thirty in the afternoon during the winter. But neither the cold nor the dark seemed to keep people away. At one of John’s meetings in Bradford, despite a torrential downpour, ten thousand people gathered outdoors to hear John preach.
During this time, Charles Wesley began to write hymns to be sung at these meetings. The purpose of the hymns was to get the Methodist point of view across. The catchy tunes and carefully crafted lyrics hopefully would stick in the minds of those who sang them or heard them sung and people would think about the meaning of the words throughout the day.
November 1739 brought with it bad news. Samuel Wesley died at the age of forty-nine. He had fallen ill during the night and died the following morning. John was shocked at the suddenness of his older brother’s death and was distressed that Samuel had died believing that he and Charles were an embarrassment to the church. It was a bitter time, but John was determined to press on.
And press on John did. He experienced during this time a number of great high points, among them preaching to a crowd of fifteen thousand people and seeing many people healed and spiritually renewed through his ministry.
With the renovations at the old foundry now complete, John moved into his new upstairs apartment. He brought his mother, Susanna, who had become more open to his beliefs, to live with him there. John felt optimistic again. The Methodists now had permanent bases in Bristol and London. Now, John told himself, it was time to branch out to other cities across England.
Chapter 11
An Expanding Work
John and his followers were overly optimistic in thinking that things would go smoothly for them once they had their own meeting place in London. By the beginning of 1740, John’s world was in an uproar. A disagreement between him and George Whitefield, recently returned from Georgia, had overflowed into a major theological clash. The two men disagreed over the age-old issue of whether God predestines, or chooses in advance, certain people to be saved or whether each person is free to make his or her own choice. For a while the two men agreed to disagree over the issue. But eventually John felt he had to stand up for what he believed. He wrote to George, saying, “There is blasphemy clearly contained in the horrible decree of preordination [or predestination]. And here I fix my foot. And on this I take issue with every assertion to it. You represent God as worse than the devil. But you say that you will prove it by scripture. Hold! It cannot do.”
Charles Wesley also entered the fray, using his newly developed skills as a hymn writer to drive home his brother’s position. In fact, Charles’s hymns had become a popular tool for spreading John’s belief that God had sent Jesus Christ to die for all people and that, because of this, no one was beyond the reach of Christ’s salvation and love. In a time when most men and women could not read, the hymns were a powerful way to pass on ideas and seal them in the singer’s memory.
And shall I, Lord, confine Thy love
As not to others free?
And may not every sinner prove
The grace that found out me?
Doom them an endless death to die
From which they could not flee
O Lord, Thine inmost bowels cry
Against this dire decree!
As the disagreement between John and George dragged on, the Bishop of London, Edmund Gibson, became furious that two Anglican ministers were stirring up dissent over such a complicated matter of theology. He ordered both John and George to appear before him, but neither man would do so. Both men claimed that they acted under authority from a power higher than a mere bishop and would not put themselves under the bishop’s authority.
