Life of John Wesley

John Wesley studied classic literature in Oxford, learned seven languages, and in 1725 decided to take religious orders like his father. In 1726 he was a lecturer at a theological school in Oxford, where he lectured in the Greek translation of the New Testament, in Greek, on a weekly basis. Then he returned to his native country, where he assisted his father in the local parish for two years.

He then decided to return to Oxford and formed a small group of devotions with his brother Charles. The group met six evenings a week: they would study the scriptures, fasten often, receive communion every week, do works of charity, visit the sick, the poor and the prisoners. They also refrained from luxury and entertainment.
In particular, they preferred to reflect on Christian works that gave practical indications for everyday life, such as “The Imitation of Christ” by Thomas of Kempis,and the “Holy Living and The Holy Dying” by Jeremy Taylor.

They were so accurate and strikt in their commitment that they were jokingly called Methodists, and it was exactly with this name that their movement took hold and initially developed in England. With the intention of becoming a missionary among the Native Americans, in 1735 John Wesley went to Georgia (USA) with his brother and during the crossing he came into contact with a group of Moravian Brothers who struck him for the strength of their faith. The American adventure was unsatisfactory and in 1737 he returned to England.

In the following spring he had a mystical experience during which he felt that Christ had taken on his sins and saved him. Increasingly convinced of his ideas, Wesley became unpopular with the representatives of the Anglican churches, as he argued that salvation could not come through the sacraments, but only through repentance and faith.

.In Bristol, on April 2, 1739, he decided to preach outdoors for the first time. Its purpose was to lead as many people as possible to holiness and hope. Starting in 1742 he began preaching throughout the British Isles for nine months a year, often outdoors, sometimes attracting thousands of people. It is estimated that over his lifetime he gave more than 40,000 sermons and rode more than 350,000 kilometers (Wesley 2007).

Although he did not raise his voice and used very simple words, his sermons were events that drew attention, shook people’s awareness and aroused physical manifestations in the listeners. People would fall unconscious or burst into terrified tears. Some were seized by convulsions or tremors, went into a trance or had a vision. Cries of pain could be heard from the crowd, followed by exclamations of joy and thanksgiving (Parkes 1992).

As the faithful grew, he organized the first local Methodist societies, wh9ich were in turn divided into classes and other smaller groups, creating a very solid and well-structured network of itinerant preachers. He was a very prolific writer: he distributed material to his followers to urge people to abandon their dissolute life and despair, so that they could access holiness and hope.

In 1750 he published a work in fifty volumes, which he called the Christian Library, containing quotations and summaries of religious works (Wesley 1749). He also wrote hymn books, published his sermons, letters, and diaries to encourage the believers. In 1750 he published a volume of explanatory notes on the New Testament (Wesley 1866). The many times rewritten “Simple Account of Christian Perfection” (Wesley 2007) reports his doctrine in the form of dialogues with his brother Charles.

In practical terms, he preached that one must love God with all one’s heart and serve him with all one’s strengths. He was convinced that salvation was available to all and that obtaining it depended on the free will of each one. This quest for perfection in earthly life led him to take an interest also in medicine and prevention. In 1747 he wrote a book in which he collected medical remedies (Wesley 1747) for the poor, containing advice for a healthy life and recipes for the cure of diseases. The book was reprinted twenty-three times during the author’s life and remained in vogue until after 1880 (Maddox 2007). All Methodist pastors had to take charge of the welfare of their faithful, of both body and soul.

After turning eighty, he reinforced the structure of his church: he delegated authority to a “conference” of one hundred preachers who were to meet each year and ordered some lay preachers in charge of spreading the word of God in America. He addressed his last letter to an English parliamentarian, encouraging him to persevere in the effort to abolish the British slave trade. He died on 2 March 1791 (Wesley 2007).