Dead Folk You Should Know: The Wesley Brothers (18th Century)

Someone pointed out that going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than sleeping in a garage makes you a car! A case in point was John Wesley. He was both an Anglican minister and a missionary… before becoming a Christian! Our own Colin Reed helps us appreciate this giant of church history along with his brother, Charles:

Why did the Puritans dislike bishops?

A 20th century bishop wrote, ‘they do not seem to have had any idea what the Gospel is.’ (S. Neill, ‘Anglicanism’). A new form of belief spread to bishops and clergy, based on seeking God through human reason rather than God’s self-revelation in Scripture. When most Puritan ministers left the Church of England, it lost their spiritual fervour. The non-conformist churches (the origin of the Baptists and Congregational Churches) benefitted. So, by the early 1700s, the Church of England was in a sad state.

But, at Oxford University, a small group of students met regularly to study the Bible and pray, and sought to live a moral, disciplined life. Their detractors jokingly called them ‘Methodists’. John and Charles Wesley were among them and later were ordained.

John went as a missionary to America, and on the way back, his life threatened in a storm, he realised he did not have eternal life. Attending a non-Anglican Chapel in London, he heard the Gospel and ‘my heart was strangely warmed’. Charles too was converted, in Oxford.

Banned from preaching in Anglican churches because of their ‘enthusiasm’, the brothers travelled throughout Britain preaching to villagers in the fields, to coal miners as they left the pits; tears streaked miner’s faces as they heard of God’s grace. Once, in Glasgow, Charles preached to 100,000 people!

After the brothers died, their followers became a separate Methodist church. It was the start of a new Evangelical Awakening. Charles had a gift for writing hymns; he gave us some of our most loved; ‘And can it be that I should gain in interest in the Saviour’s blood?’ We thank God for them, and we are reminded that the church must be always being renewed, revived.

May we pray for such revival today!

Grace and peace,
Mark