When he returned to the United States from England, Thomas carried with him a letter from John Wesley to the American Methodists which read in part, “As our American brethren are now totally disentangled both from the State and from the English hierarchy, we dare not entangle them again either with the one or the other. They are now at full liberty simply to follow the Scriptures and primitive Church; and we judge it best that they should stand fast in that liberty wherewith God has so strangely made them free.”
John continued his efforts to make the American Methodists free from any connection to the Church of England by rewriting the Book of Common Prayer, calling it The Sunday Service of the Methodists in North America. The new version was shorter and replaced the terms priest and bishop with superintendent and elder. It also omitted fifteen of the thirty-nine articles of faith, along with the list of holy days that were celebrated on the church calendar.
Meanwhile things were moving quickly in North America. Although John had not thought it necessary, the American Methodists decided to vote on the ordination of Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke before accepting it. The vote was unanimous, but the action sent a clear message back to England that while American Methodists would be loyal to John Wesley as their founder, they intended to live in “connection” with him, not in subordination to him.
The following year, at the Christmas conference of 1786, the Methodist leaders in the United States decided to found a school to educate the sons of Methodist preachers and orphans, much like the boarding school John had established at Kingswood. They named the new institution Cokesbury College—a blending of Coke’s and Asbury’s names.
The following year John took a step that hastened the official break between Methodists and the Church of England. In an attempt to safeguard his chapels and preachers, John secured licenses for them as Dissenter meetinghouses. This meant that Methodism was no longer an extension of the Church of England but was a Dissenter denomination. John took this step to stop Methodist meetinghouses from being taken over by the Church of England upon his death.
Just as he had been with the ordination of Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke, Charles Wesley was displeased that his brother had decided to break away from the mother church. The decision led to a rift between the two “giants of Methodism,” one that unfortunately was not healed before Charles died in March 1788. John was traveling in the north of England at the time and did not hear the news of Charles’s death in time to get back for the funeral. Instead of being held in the newly licensed Methodist City Road Chapel (Wesley’s Chapel), Charles Wesley’s funeral service was held at St. Marylebone’s in London, an Anglican church. And eight Anglican ministers carried Charles’s coffin into the churchyard, where Charles was buried in consecrated ground.
Charles Wesley left behind a legacy of 6,500 hymns, many of which John published for him. Three of his most popular hymns were “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” and “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing.”
Knowing that Charles understood the importance and urgency of preaching, John continued with his tour of northern England, arriving in Bolton three weeks after the funeral. There, as a children’s choir prepared to sing one of Charles’s hymns, John stood and read the first verse:
Come, O Thou Traveler unknown,
Whom still I hold, but cannot see:
My company before is gone,
And I am left alone with Thee.
John struggled to read on, but his brother’s words affected him deeply. Quietly he laid aside the hymnal, sat down, put his head in his hands, and wept openly for Charles.
On January 1, 1790, John wrote in his journal, “I am now an old man, decayed from head to foot. My eyes are dim; my right hand shakes much; my mouth is hot and dry every morning; I have a lingering fever almost every day; my motion is weak and slow. However, blessed be God, I do not slack my labor; I can preach and write still.”
John continued to rise at four each morning, and he traveled to Scotland and back before his eighty-seventh birthday on June 17, 1790. By then, however, he thought that his strength “probably will not return in this world. But I feel no pain from head to foot; only it seems nature is exhausted, and, humanly speaking, will sink more and more till the weary springs of life stand still.”
John also made another visit to Epworth, though it was with mixed emotions. The rectory at Epworth no longer rang with the sounds of his lively and talented family; only he and his sister Martha remained alive. Still, there were highlights on the trip. The local Methodists escorted him on foot around the fens from village to village, singing as they went. John preached in the village squares and greeted friends and admirers everywhere he went with the verse, “Little children, love one another.”
Later in 1790 John attended the annual Methodist conference in Bristol. At the gathering, the latest statistics on Methodist membership were read into the official record. In England there were now 71,463 Methodist members; in the United States, 43,260; and in other parts of the world, including Scotland, the Caribbean, and Canada, 5,350. When the business of the conference was over, John, who for the past forty-six years had directed its deliberations, penned his signature to the conference minutes. His hand was wobbly now, but his vision to increase the number of Methodists was as sure as ever.
During the remainder of the year, John traveled and preached in Wales, the Midlands, Lincolnshire, Scotland, and the Isle of Wight. On October 6, 1790, at midday he preached at an open-air service held under an ash tree in the churchyard at Winchelsea, Sussex, so that people at work could hear him as they ate their lunch. The text he chose for his sermon was “The kingdom of heaven is at hand; repent ye, and believe the gospel.”
By 1791, John was confined to London, preaching inside chapels where he was less likely to catch a chill. In his old age, John was still concerned with the state of the Methodist movement, greatly desiring unity among its members. He expressed this in a letter to America dated February 1, in which he wrote, “Lose no opportunity of declaring to all men that the Methodists are one people in all the world, and that it is their full determination so to continue, though mountains rise, and oceans roll, to sever us in vain.”
Although his traveling days were over, John continued to take a lively interest in the world around him. Early in the new year he read the autobiography of an African slave named Gustavas Vassa. John had helped pay the publishing costs for the book, and it gave him great pleasure to finally read it.
In response to what he read in the book, John dictated a letter to William Wilberforce, a Methodist convert and member of Parliament who was championing the cause of opposing England’s participation in slavery anywhere in the world.
February 24, 1791
MY DEAR SIR: Unless the divine Power has raised you up to be as Athanasius, contra roundurn, I see not how you can go through your glorious enterprise in opposing that execrable villainy, which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature. Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils; but if God be for you, who can be against you? Are all of them together stronger than God? O “be not weary in well-doing.” Go on, in the name of God, and in the power of his might, till even American slavery, the vilest that ever saw the sun, shall vanish away before it.
Reading this morning a tract, wrote by a poor African, I was particularly struck by that circumstance—that a man who has a black skin, being wronged or outraged by a white man, can have no redress, it being a law in our colonies that the oath of a black against a white goes for nothing. What villainy is this!
That He who has guided you from your youth up may continue to strengthen you in this and all things, is the prayer of, dear sir, your affectionate servant, JOHN WESLEY.
The late winter of 1791 was severe, and John was often ill with coughs and colds. Each bout of sickness seemed to weaken him a little more, and John sensed that the end was near for him. On the morning of March 1, he called for a pen and ink, but he was not strong enough to write. A Methodist leader, Betsy Ritchie, asked what he wanted to write. With his only surviving sister, Martha, and Charles’s widow, Sally, at his side, John gathered his remaining strength and cried out, “The best of all is, God is with us.”
When Sally moistened his lips, he repeated the thanksgiving that he had always recited after a meal. “We thank thee, O Lord, for these and all thy mercies; bless the Church and the king; and grant us truth and peace, through Jesus Christ our Lord, forever and ever.”
John made it through the night, and on the morning of Wednesday, March 2, 1791, the leading members of the Methodist Church gathered at his bedside. John lifted his arms and imparted a blessing to them. “Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and this heir of glory shall come in!” The words said, at eighty-seven years of age, John Wesley took his last breath. It was an appropriate passing for a Methodist—no complaining, no admission of pain, just joyous anticipation of entering his Savior’s eternal presence.
John’s funeral was planned for Wednesday, March 9, and the day before the service, John’s body was laid in honor in City Road Chapel. Ten thousand mourners passed by his coffin, eager for one last look at their leader.
The organizers of the funeral realized that the chapel would be overrun with mourners and secretly scheduled the service for five o’clock in the morning. The Reverend John Richardson, one of the clergymen who had helped John for nearly thirty years, officiated at the service. When he came to the ceremonial words, “Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother,” with profound feeling he substituted the word father for brother, and as he did so, the gathered throng began to sob.
John Wesley, the spiritual father of so many, was still at last. During his lifetime he had ridden a quarter of a million miles on horseback, stopping along the way to preach over forty thousand sermons. He offered a simple form of Christianity to millions of people who were outside the influence of the churches of the day, and he had governed a movement focused on God’s love and holy living that was soon to spread around the globe.
True to form, John had left meticulous directions on how his estate was to be divided. He left the bulk of his money to the Methodist general fund; forty pounds to his remaining sibling, Martha; and twenty shillings to each of “six poor men” who were to be chosen to carry his coffin. Although he asked that there be no show of mourning, the funeral organizers ignored this request and draped the City Road Chapel in black fabric. When the funeral was over, the fabric was cut up and given to sixty poor women to make themselves dresses. That, at least, John would have approved of.
At the first Methodist conference following John’s death, a letter detailing John’s instructions for the ongoing work of the Methodists was read aloud. In the letter, dated 1785, John warned those who would now assume positions of authority not to use their newfound power to lord it over other Methodist preachers. His final words urged them to carry on uprightly:
I know no other way to prevent any such inconvenience than to leave these, my last words, with you. I beseech you, by the mercies of God, that you never avail yourselves of the Deed of Declaration to assume any superiority over your brethren, but let all things go on among those itinerants who choose to remain together exactly in the same manner as when I was with you, so far as circumstances will permit. In particular, I beseech you, if you ever loved me, and if you now love God and your brethren, to have no respect for persons in stationing the preachers, in choosing children for the Kingswood School, in disposing of the yearly contribution and the preachers’ fund, or any other public money. But do all things with a single eye, as I have done from the beginning. Go on thus, doing all things without prejudice or partiality, and God will be with you even to the end.
