Bible - CH 35

CHAPTER 35

 A BRAND FROM THE BURNING

 Wesley and Methodism

 Toward the end of January 1736, the good ship Simmonds, bound for Savannah, Georgia, sailed into a series of violent Atlantic storms. The wind roared; the ship cracked and quivered; the waves lashed the deck.

 A young, slightly built Anglican minister on board was frozen in fear. John Wesley had preached the gospel of eternal salvation to others, but he was afraid to die. He was deeply awed, however, by a company of Moravian Brethren from Herrnhut who were onboard. As the sea broke over the deck of the vessel, splitting the mainsail in pieces, the Moravians calmly sang their psalms to God.

 Afterward, Wesley asked one of the Germans if he was frightened.

 “No,” he replied.

 “Weren’t your women and children afraid?” Wesley asked.

 “No,” said the Moravian, “our women and children are not afraid to die.”

 “This,” Wesley wrote in his Journal, “was the most glorious day I have ever seen.”

 At that glorious moment, Wesley was a most unlikely candidate to lead a spiritual awakening soon to shake England to its moorings. He had a form of godliness, but he had yet to find its power.

THE EVANGELICAL AWAKENING

 The Age of Reason saw a dramatic spiritual renewal in Western Christianity called the Evangelical Awakening. The movement was interlaced by personal ties of the leaders, but three regions were significantly changed: Germany by the rise of Pietism, the British Isles by the preaching of the Methodists, and the American colonies by the impact of the Great Awakening.

 The Methodist revival in England not only explains the origin of the various Methodist denominations (numbering almost 80 million people in the world today), it also throws light on the movement we call evangelical Christianity. Who were these evangelicals, and how did they gain major significance in Christian history?

 Those singing Moravians who sailed to Georgia with Wesley represent one important wing of evangelicalism. They were Pietists. The main body of evangelicals, however, came from Great Britain and her colonies.

 The 1730s in America, Scotland, Wales, and England saw a sudden explosion of apostolic concern to preach the gospel to the unconverted. Jonathan Edwards in Northampton, Massachusetts; Ebenezer and Ralph Erskine in Scotland; Howell Harris in Wales; and George Whitefield in England all preceded John Wesley in the Evangelical Awakening.

 Most of the basic beliefs of these evangelicals could be found in Puritanism: the sinfulness of man, the atoning death of Christ, the unmerited grace of God, the salvation of the true believer. But Puritanism was more concerned with politics and trying to create the holy commonwealth, the true Bible society, in England and America.

 The evangelicals were not detached from politics as the Pietists were, but their controlling passion was to convert the lost. They were less concerned about the reform of churches and more intent on the preaching of the gospel to all — nominal Christians, scoffers, and heathen. John Wesley did not have that passion in Georgia, but when he found it, all England knew it.

 In the early decades of the eighteenth century, England was a most unlikely place for a nationwide revival of vital faith. Among the rich and well educated, the Enlightenment had shoved religion from the center of life to its periphery.

 In the established church — the Anglican Church — and in the Nonconformist denominations such as the Baptists and Congregationalists, the zeal of the Puritans seemed to be a thing of the past. England had known her fill of urgent holy causes. The order of the day was moderation in all things.

 An English sermon, said Voltaire, was a “solid but sometimes dry dissertation that a man reads to the people without gesture and without particular exaltation of the voice.” Ministers blandly ignored the traditional Christian doctrine of people’s sinfulness. Instead, people approached God with gentle reverence and cheerfulness. Joseph Addison’s famous hymn published in his periodical, The Spectator , is typical of this new attitude:

 The Spacious Firmament on high

 With all the blue Ethereal Sky,

 And spangled Heav’ns, a Shining Frame,

 Their great Original proclaim:

 Th’ unwearied Sun, from Day to Day

 Does his Creator’s Power display,

 And publishes to every Land

 The Work of an Almighty Hand.

 Signs of reason’s deadening influence on the churches appeared in a large group within the Church of England called the Latitudinarians. The eloquent John Tillotson, the archbishop of Canterbury (1691 – 94), was among them. He vigorously denounced what he called religious enthusiasm. This included any emotional expression encouraged by fervent preachers. He and his fellow Latitudinarians stressed instead proper behavior. Men and women should reform their conduct; they should be generous, humane, and tolerant, and avoid bigotry and fanaticism.

THE LITTLE GIANT

 John Wesley (1703 – 91) came from a home steeped in decency and order. It combined strains of Anglican and Nonconformist piety. His father, the Reverend Samuel Wesley, was a learned and devout high - churchman ministering at Epworth in Lincolnshire. John’s mother, Susanna, was the daughter of a Nonconformist minister in London. She was a remarkable woman who bore nineteen children. John was the fifteenth. She taught them “to fear the rod and cry softly.” Every week she made time for religious instruction for each child separately. To do so, she had to be methodical! John looked to her for guidance to the day of her death.

 When John was six the rectory at Epworth burned down; he was left alone amid the flames, but he appeared at a second - story window and was rescued by a neighbor standing on the shoulders of another. Thereafter John called himself “a brand plucked from the burning.” He never doubted God’s providential hand on his life.

 At seventeen he was off to Oxford University, where he studied first at Christ Church and later at Lincoln College. He found little at Oxford to stimulate his mind or his soul, but he read widely and was especially impressed by the early church fathers and the great devotional classics. The early Greek fathers taught him that the goal of the Christian life is perfection, a process of disciplined love rather than a religious state.

ButtonText_image (Lithograph of the rescue of six-year-old John Wesley from the burning rectory at Epworth) Lithograph of the rescue of six - year - old John Wesley from the burning rectory at Epworth

PROFILES of Faith

 Susannah Wesley (1669 – 1742) was the daughter of a pastor who was forced out of his church and home for his Nonconformist faith in a time of high tension over the establishment of church and state. Her husband became an Anglican priest in a congregation that refused to pay his salary, then sent him to debtor’s prison. She bore nineteen children, including John and Charles, but only nine lived more than two years. She personally taught each of her children from home, breaking for frequent prayer times throughout the day. Locals set fire to their crops, barns, and home, and six - year - old John nearly died in the blaze. When her husband died after serving the church for thirty - nine years, the church evicted her from the parsonage. Her letters reveal the bold, determined thinking that influenced her sons and their movement.

 From Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living , Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ , and William Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life , Wesley learned that the Christian life is the consecration of the whole person in love to God and neighbor. These authors, he said, “convinced me of the absolute impossibility of being half a Christian. I determined, through His grace, to be all devoted to God.” So he catalogued his weaknesses and established his rules to overcome them.

 In 1726 Wesley was elected a fellow of Lincoln College. This not only gave him academic standing at the university but assured him a steady income. Two years later he was ordained to the Anglican ministry and returned to Epworth for a time to serve as his father’s assistant.

 When he resumed his duties at Oxford, he found that his brother Charles, alarmed at the spread of deism at the university, had assembled a little band of students determined to take their religion seriously. John proved to be just the leader they needed. Under his direction they drew up a plan of study and rule of life that stressed prayer, Bible reading, and frequent attendance at Holy Communion.

 The little group soon attracted attention and some derision from the lax undergraduates. “Enthusiasm” at Oxford? Holy Club, they called them, and Bible moths, Methodists, and Reforming Club. The Methodist label is the one that stuck.

 The members of the little society were ardent but restless souls. They found fresh enthusiasm when a townsman or new student joined them, such as the bright and brash undergraduate from Pembroke College, George Whitefield. But they were constantly in search of ways to make their lives conform to the practice of early Christians. They gave to the poor and visited the imprisoned. But John was quick to confess that he lacked the inward peace of a true Christian. God must have something more in mind.

 Then came the invitation to Georgia. A friend, Dr. John Burton, suggested that both John and Charles could serve God in the new colony led by General James Oglethorpe. Charles could be the general’s secretary and John a chaplain to the colony. John welcomed a chance to preach to the Native Americans, so the brothers boarded the Simmonds in October with idealism and missionary zeal, unaware of the storms at sea and in the soul just ahead.

 The whole episode in Georgia was a fiasco. John discovered that the noble American savages were “gluttons, thieves, liars and murderers.” And the white colonists deeply resented his rigid high - church ways, his refusal to conduct the funeral of a Nonconformist, and his prohibition of the ladies’ fancy dresses and gold jewelry in church.

 John’s frustrations were compounded by his pitiful infatuation with Sophy Hopkey, the eighteen - year - old niece of Savannah’s chief magistrate. Wesley confessed his love but was so mixed up emotionally and spiritually that he didn’t know his own mind. Sophy finally resolved the affair by eloping with John’s rival. The jilted lover then barred her from Holy Communion, and her incensed husband sued John for defaming Sophy’s character. The trial dragged out, and after six months of harassment, Wesley fled the colony in disgust.

 On his way home he had a chance to ponder the whole experience. “I went to America,” he wrote, “to convert the Indians, but, oh, who shall convert me?”

THE HOLY HEARTWARMING

 He landed back in England on February 1, 1738, sadly discredited and painfully uncertain of his faith and his future. For a dozen years he had been toiling up the path to perfection, striving by the best models he knew to attain true blessedness. And the Georgia mission only revealed his spiritual bankruptcy.

 He found one positive experience in the Georgia episode, his contact with the Moravians. He was determined to learn their secret of spiritual power. In London he met Peter Bohler, a young Moravian preacher who impressed on Wesley his need of a new birth, a strong personal faith in Christ that would enable him to overcome sin and attain true holiness. Justification by faith, said Bohler, is not merely a doctrine. It is a personal experience of God’s forgiveness. But how, asked Wesley, can faith be given in a moment of time?

 He discovered the answer for himself on May 24, 1738. “In the evening,” he wrote, “I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans . About a quarter to 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 that I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine , and saved me from the law of sin and death.”

 Thus Wesley found the assurance that he had lacked, a sense of purpose that would sustain him for half a century of unparalleled energy. He had discovered his life’s message. He needed now to find his method.

 Later that summer Wesley visited the Moravians in their Saxon homeland. He wanted to see firsthand the power of the piety he had witnessed aboard ship and in Georgia. His impressions of Herrnhut were mixed. On the one hand he met many remarkable people who exemplified “the full assurance of Christian faith.” On the other hand he was quick to spot the signs of self - righteousness among them. He was especially repelled by the cult of personality that had grown up around their leader, Count von Zinzendorf. “Isn’t the Count all in all?” Wesley asked.

 Thus Wesley and the Moravians soon parted ways. He owed much to them, especially their message of justification by faith and their system of small groups for spiritual growth. But Wesley could not see himself as a Moravian.

 Wesley returned to London and resumed his preaching in the churches. His zeal was undiminished, but his results were no more satisfying than before. An inner sense of reality and outward impact were still missing. Then, almost by chance, while walking from London to Oxford, he began to read Jonathan Edwards’s account of the recent conversions in Northampton, Massachusetts. It struck Wesley with terrific force. In this instance, the Great Awakening in New England had a direct influence on the Wesleyan revival in the mother country. In a matter of weeks, Wesley was caught up in a similar movement of the Spirit. It started when he received a surprising invitation from a member of the Holy Club.

 George Whitefield, nine years younger than John Wesley, had followed him to Georgia in 1738 but returned in the fall of that year to be ordained. Not satisfied with the opportunities given him in pulpits and eager to reach the masses of people, he began in February 1739 to preach in the open fields near Bristol to coal miners who seldom dared or cared to enter a church. His voice was clear and strong, and his fervent oratory so moved these hardened and weary men that he could see “the white gutters made by their tears” streaming down their black cheeks as they listened near the coal pits.

 Whitefield’s preaching was unforgettable. Using startling images he could make his listeners feel the pain of sin and the terror of hell. Then with tears in his voice, he could describe the love of Christ until his audience cried with him for forgiveness. “I would give a hundred guineas,” said actor David Garrick, “if I could only say Oh! like Mr. Whitefield.”

 When the hardened miners of Bristol pled for God’s mercy in such great numbers, Whitefield urged Wesley to follow his lead into the open fields. John knew he was no match for Whitefield’s oratory. He spoke as an Oxford scholar and a gentleman. But he hesitated chiefly because he had never dreamed of preaching under the sky. “Having been all my life so tenacious of every point relating to decency and order,” he wrote, “I should have thought the saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been done in a church.”

TO THE FIELDS, TO THE WORLD

 In spite of his brother Charles’s opposition, John reluctantly decided to go to Bristol — more like a martyr than a joyous messenger. As it turned out, the “brand from the burning” was carried across the threshold of his true mission in life. He preached to more than three thousand in the open air, and the reaction of these common folk was amazing. Conversions, as real as those in New England, took place on every hand. The Methodist revival had begun.

 The effects on Wesley were equally remarkable. Up to this point he was filled with anxiety, insecurity, and futility. After Bristol he was a firebrand for God.

 Peter Bohler had exhorted him to “preach faith till you have it and then because you have it, you will preach faith.” At Aldersgate he had passed from virtual to personal faith, from hoping to having. Edwards and Whitefield had shown him that the Word rightly preached bears visible fruit. And now, before his eyes, was a harvest of such fruit. He had preached faith until others had it, and now his own was confirmed by theirs!

 After that spring of 1739 in Bristol, Wesley set out to carry the gospel to the poor wherever they were willing to listen. In June he wrote, “I look upon all the world as my parish; I judge it my bounden duty, to declare unto all that are willing to hear, the glad tidings of salvation.”

 He preached in jails to prisoners, in inns to wayfarers, on vessels crossing to Ireland. At a natural amphitheater in Cornwall, he preached to thirty thousand at once, and when he was refused admission to the Epworth Church, he preached to hundreds in the churchyard while standing on his father’s tombstone. In his diary for June 28, 1774, Wesley claims that his minimum travel per year was 4,500 miles. That means he must have traveled in his lifetime 250,000 miles, ten times around the world, mostly on horseback! As he traveled he soon learned to give the horse plenty of rein so that he could read a book or prepare a sermon on his way to the next town.

 In Wesley’s early years of itinerating, the crowds were not always friendly. Rocks and stones or other missiles would come flying at him. Sometimes he was mobbed and beaten by gangs incited by a hostile squire or parson. But Wesley feared no one. By an unusual personal magnetism, he often awed turbulent crowds, and in time the violence subsided. Before his death, statuettes made of china and mementoes of his likeness were produced in large numbers to satisfy public demand.

 In 1751 Wesley married Molly Vazeille, the widow of a London merchant, who nursed him back to health after a fall on the ice. He was not an easy man to live with. For two years she tried to travel with him on his hectic rounds, but her health and nerves broke, and she went home without him. As late as 1777, Wesley was considering the possibilities of a reconciliation, but when Molly died in 1781, he was unaware of her death and did not attend the funeral. She had simply married a man who was wed to his mission.

 In his tireless preaching, Wesley stressed what we now call Arminian beliefs; he was the only prominent leader of the Great Awakening who did. The name came from Jacob Arminius (1560 – 1609), a Dutch professor who tried to modify the Calvinism of his time. Wesley felt no special debt to Arminius, but he did staunchly oppose Calvin’s doctrine of predestination. He thought the belief made God seem arbitrary and partial to certain people and neglectful of others. He insisted that God willed the salvation of all and that people had enough freedom of will to choose or refuse divine grace.

 This conviction brought his friendship with Whitefield close to the breaking point. Whitefield defended the doctrine of predestination because it underscored God’s sovereign authority. He felt Wesley’s Arminianism dulled the all - important sense of sin’s depth and compromised the vital concept of an almighty God.

 Both men sought to advance the work of the awakening, so they agreed to differ in mutual respect. In Wesley’s sermon at Whitefield’s funeral in 1770, he spoke of the evangelist’s “most generous and tender friendship.” But the controversy did lead to two camps among the Methodists — Arminian societies following Wesley and Calvinist societies following Whitefield.

THE METHODIST METHOD

 Whitefield had no real taste for organization, but Wesley was an administrative genius. Following his trail, Methodist societies appeared all over England, Ireland, and Wales. These were not yet congregations in our sense of the term. Most of the believers were members of the Anglican Church, and Wesley urged them to attend their parish churches for worship and Holy Communion. He was still the devout churchman from the Epworth rectory. But his converts found the center of their Christian experience in the Methodist societies where they openly confessed their sins and shortcomings to one another, submitted to the discipline and guidance of their leader, and joined in prayer and song.

 Charles Wesley, who had experienced God’s forgiving grace three days before John, wrote more than seven thousand hymns and gospel songs for these Methodist meetings. Perhaps his best loved were “Jesus, Lover of My Soul” and “How Can It Be?” These were sung in societies all over Britain and America. Some historians believe Charles’s hymns are the revival’s greatest legacy.

 Following the Moravian example, John divided his societies into smaller groups of twelve or so members called classes. The term was from the Latin classis , meaning “division,” and had no overtones of schools. Wesley originally used them to encourage financial support, a penny a week for the work. But he soon realized that the collector might also serve as the spiritual guide of the sheep and that members of the classes could encourage one another in their Christian experience. The result was the class meeting for testimonies, prayer, and spiritual encouragement, a highly successful feature of the Methodist awakening.

 As the work grew, Wesley decided to employ lay leaders from the societies and classes as preachers and personal assistants. He carefully avoided calling them ministers, and he refused them any authority to administer the sacraments. They were, he said, his personal helpers directly responsible to him in their work, as he was responsible to the Anglican Church.

 By 1744 he found it impossible to maintain personal contact with all these preachers. With a few ordained colleagues and still fewer lay preachers, he created the Annual Conference. This gathering helped to shape the policy and doctrine of the movement, but always as Wesley decided.

 He deployed his assistants as a sort of militia, moving them frequently from one assignment to another but insisting on their common task: evangelism and Christian nurture: “We look upon ourselves, not as the authors or ringleaders of a particular sect or party — it is the farthest thing from our thoughts — but as messengers of God, to those who are Christians in name but heathens in heart and life, to call them back to that from which they are fallen, to real, genuine Christianity.”

 Thus by 1748 “the people called Methodists” — like the Pietists in Germany — were a church within the church. For the next forty years, Wesley resisted all pressures from his own followers and all charges from Anglican bishops that suggested separation from the Church of England. “I live and die,” he said, “a member of the Church of England.”

 Toward the end of his days, however, the needs of the Methodists in America led him to significant steps toward separation. Long before the American cries of “liberty,” Wesley had sent Francis Asbury to the colonies, and the work had grown. In 1773 the first American Methodist conference was held in Philadelphia, but the societies needed ordained leaders. Wesley’s appeals to the bishop of London proved fruitless, so he took matters into his own hands.

 Wesley decided to appoint two of his lay preachers, Richard Whatcoat and Thomas Vasey, for the American ministry and to commission Dr. Thomas Coke as superintendent of the American Methodists. This was an important breach in Anglican policy. The Methodist Church in America became a new, distinct denomination when the Christmas Conference meeting at Baltimore in 1784 selected Coke and Francis Asbury as superintendents.

 Wesley continued preaching almost to the end of his days. He died in London on March 2, 1791, approaching eighty - eight years of age. When the burning brand finally went out, he left behind seventy - nine thousand followers in England and forty thousand in North America. If we judge greatness by influence, he was among the greats of his times.

 After his death the English Methodists followed their American brethren into separation from the Anglican Church. But Wesley’s impact and the revival he represents carried far beyond the Methodist Church. It renewed the religious life of England and her colonies. It elevated the life of the poor. It stimulated missions overseas and the social concerns of evangelicals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Chapter 35: A Brand from the Burning - Wesley and Methodism

Intro

• John Wesley's journey sparked the rise of Methodism and contributed significantly to the Evangelical Awakening.

The Journey to Georgia

• Date: Late January 1736.

• Ship: Simmonds, sailing to Savannah, Georgia.

• Event: The ship encountered violent Atlantic storms.

• Key Moment: John Wesley, a young Anglican minister, was terrified as he witnessed the calmness of Moravian Brethren singing psalms, contrasting his own fear of death.

• Reflection: This experience marked an important moment in Wesley's spiritual journey, realizing that he had yet to discover true spiritual power despite preaching salvation.

The Evangelical Awakening

• The Age of Reason led to a significant spiritual revival in Western Christianity.

• Regions Affected:

  • Germany (Pietism)

  • British Isles (Methodism)

  • American Colonies (Great Awakening)

• Wesley's Influence: The Methodist revival explains the origin of over 80 million Methodists today and contributes to understanding evangelical Christianity.

• Evangelical Principles: Shared beliefs with Puritanism but focused more on evangelism than on political reform.

• Key Figures Preceding Wesley:

  • Jonathan Edwards (Massachusetts)

  • Ebenezer and Ralph Erskine (Scotland)

  • Howell Harris (Wales)

  • George Whitefield (England)

Context of Revival in England

• The 1730s witnessed a rise of concern for preaching the gospel to the unconverted in England, Scotland, and Wales.

• Challenges: The established churches favored moderation; there was a widespread dismissal of traditional doctrines of sinfulness and the transformative power of faith.

• Notable Quote: Voltaire described English sermons as dry, lacking emotional engagement, emphasizing moderateness instead.

John Wesley's Background

• Birth: 1703 into a family valuing both Anglican and Nonconformist traditions.

• Childhood: Survived a house fire at six, referring to himself as “a brand plucked from the burning.”

• Education: Attended Oxford University, influenced by the early church fathers and devotional classics.

Early Influences

• Developed a view of the Christian life focused on perfection and disciplined love.

• In 1726, elected as a fellow at Lincoln College, followed by ordination into the Anglican ministry in 1728.

• Formed the "Holy Club" in response to deism, which attracted scorn and established the Methodist name.

Mission to Georgia and Spiritual Quest

• John and Charles Wesley traveled to Georgia as chaplains, with the intention to preach to Native Americans.

• Encountered cultural and personal complications, including a failed love affair and disillusionment with American settlers.

• Reflected on his failures: “I went to convert the Indians, but who shall convert me?”

The Holy Heartwarming

• Returned to England in 1738, reflecting on spiritual bankruptcy despite years of striving for perfection.

• Encountered Moravians and learned about the need for a personal faith.

• May 24, 1738: Experienced a transformative moment at Aldersgate Street where he felt his heart "strangely warmed" and found assurance in his faith.

The Awakening Movement

• Impact of the Moravians: Impressed Wesley with their piety and sense of assurance in their faith.

• Revived his zeal for preaching as he began experiencing genuine conversions while preaching outdoors, starting in Bristol in 1739.

Development of Methodism

• Introduced new methods based on small groups (classes) for accountability and spiritual encouragement, modeled after the Moravians.

• Wesley formed the Annual Conference to oversee Methodist societies, ensuring they remained faithful to evangelism and nurturing.

Beliefs and Practices

• Stressed the importance of Arminianism, opposing Calvinist predestination, asserting that salvation is available to all.

• His revival methods emphasized personal faith over doctrinal disputes, fostering both conversions and deep community.

Separation and Legacy

• Despite strong ties to the Anglican Church, Wesley established a distinct Methodist identity, particularly in America through ordaining leaders when the Church of England did not.

• Died in 1791, leaving behind a significant evangelical movement that transformed religious life and social norms in England and beyond.

Conclusion

• Wesley's impact extended beyond Methodism, influencing missions overseas and social concerns in subsequent centuries as well as renewing religious life in England.