The Rise of John Wesley (1703–1791) and Charles Wesley (1707–1788)
John Wesley was born on June 17, 1703, in Epworth, England, the fifteenth of nineteen children. His brother Charles was born four years later on December 17, 1707, the eighteenth child of Samuel Wesley, an Anglican minister, and Susanna Wesley, the daughter of a minister. Together, these two remarkable brothers—in concert with George Whitefield—would be used by God to launch a movement of gospel preaching, church planting, pastor recruitment and training, disciple making, and Christian praise and worship that would impact much of the Western world. Yet one of the most fascinating aspects of their early lives is how they set out to convert the lost before they themselves were actually converted.
As I noted earlier, while attending Oxford University, the Wesley brothers led a men’s Bible study and prayer group known as the Holy Club. It was Charles who founded the group and later recruited John to help him lead it. But neither of them actually knew Christ personally, and unfortunately when their friend George Whitefield was powerfully converted in early 1735, the Wesley brothers were so busy, or so distracted, that they didn’t take the time or effort to grasp precisely what had happened to him. They were excited about his enhanced zeal, but they didn’t see how it directly affected them.
The two brilliant and disciplined young men were certainly deeply devoted to serving God, and when they graduated, both were ordained as Anglican ministers like their father. Then they decided to accept an invitation from Georgia governor James Oglethorpe to come to the colony, pastor a church there, and serve as missionaries to the Native Americans. They departed on a ship to the New World on October 14, 1735.
Along the way, the vessel encountered a terrible storm that threatened to sink it. Everyone aboard was terrified—all but a group of Moravian Christians. These Moravian believers didn’t seem bothered by the wind or the waves. Rather, they sang songs and remained calm throughout the entire ordeal. The Wesley brothers were intrigued by such depth of faith. They began to get to know the Moravians and spent long hours discussing with them what they believed and how they practiced their faith. It was a relationship that would deeply mark the two men.
The Wesleys reached Savannah, Georgia, on February 8, 1736, and tried to settle into new routines. Charles became a secretary to Governor Oglethorpe. John began pastoring a congregation and trying to convert a tribe of Native Americans to Christ.
From the beginning, everything seemed to go wrong. Few of the roughneck Georgians seemed interested in the Wesleys’ highly intellectualized teaching or style of worship. The Indians didn’t seem much interested either. As one religious historian noted of Charles, “this well-bred, well-educated, earnest High Churchman was completely out of his element. His experiences, including one Sunday (March 21, 1736) when his sermon was disrupted by gunshots and an irate matron threatened to blow him up as a religious hypocrite, were mostly discouraging. In late July 1736 he resigned his position and by early August was headed back to England.”[367]
John endured for about another year but fared little better. He couldn’t find a way to connect with the people. He couldn’t seem to convince them by his preaching, and he found himself embroiled in theological arguments at every turn. “More trouble followed when he fell in love with Sophia Hopkey, the niece of Georgia’s chief magistrate. When she married another man, Wesley banned her from Holy Communion, damaging her reputation in the community. His successful romantic rival sued him; but Wesley refused to recognize the authority of the court, and the man who would eventually found a major Protestant denomination in America left Georgia in disgrace on December 2, 1737.”[368]
Both young Wesley men were discouraged and confused. What had gone wrong? Why hadn’t they made the impact for which they had prayed and worked so hard? And why had they failed so spectacularly, when God was so radically blessing the work of their friend George Whitefield?
John began to reflect on a conversation he’d had with one of the Moravian believers. “My brother, I must first ask you one or two questions,” the Moravian had said to him. “Have you the witness within yourself? Does the Spirit of God bear witness with your spirit that you are a child of God?”
John had been stunned by the questions and unsure how to answer.
The Moravian had seen this and pressed further. “Do you know Jesus Christ?”
John had replied, “I know he is the Saviour of the world.”
“True,” the man had said, “but do you know that he has saved you?”
Again John hadn’t known what to say. “I hope he has died to save me,” was all he could muster, but he feared his words were in vain.[369]
For the next few months, John wrestled with his questions and his fears. Simultaneously, Charles was going through a similar process. Together they sought out some Moravian Christians who were living and ministering in London. They asked a lot of questions but couldn’t for the life of them understand what they were doing wrong. By May, the struggle in both men was intensifying. Charles became quite ill but kept praying, pleading with God to show him the way. “I waked [one night] hungry and thirsty after God,” he wrote in his journal on May 12, 1738. The next night he wrote, “I waked without Christ; yet still desirous of finding him.” On May 14 he wrote, “I longed to find Christ, that I might show him to all mankind; that I might praise, that I might love him.”[370]
Another week went by. Charles again sought out the Moravians and studied Paul’s epistle to the Galatians with them. And finally, on Sunday, May 21, Charles’s eyes were opened. Until then, his religion had been an intellectual affair. It had not yet penetrated his heart. Now he understood what Christ meant when he said a man must be “born again,” and he prayed to receive Christ as his personal Savior and Lord. “I found myself at peace with God and rejoiced in hope of loving Christ.” And he quickly wrote a hymn, likely “Christ the Friend of Sinners,” expressing the joy of his newfound, life-transforming faith.[371]
John, too, was reading his Bible, discussing it with the Moravians, and spending much time wrestling with God in prayer. And that very month, he began to realize that his religion had been a purely intellectual pursuit and that he himself didn’t actually have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. On May 24, 1738—just three days after his younger brother—he, too, was born again. “In the evening, I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the epistle to the Romans,” John wrote in his journal. “About a quarter before 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 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.”[372]
In the days that followed, both John and Charles read the Bible with new eyes and new insight. They felt a deep sense of joy and inner peace that they had never previously experienced. They were no longer trying to earn God’s love; rather, they found themselves enjoying his favor and thanking him profusely.
At one point, John wrote something quite telling in his journal: “I left my native country in order to teach the Georgian Indians the nature of Christianity. But what have I learned myself in the meantime? Why . . . that I who went to America to convert others was never myself converted to God.”[373]
Now he and his younger brother were genuinely converted and eager to serve the Lord with renewed fervor. Almost immediately, they were contacted by Whitefield, who asked them to come help him preach the gospel in the open air, for he was overwhelmed with the enormous response and desperately needed assistance. At first the Wesleys were appalled by the radical concept of preaching the Word of God outside the walls of a church building. But they couldn’t deny that the Spirit of God was moving powerfully, and they truly wanted to let Christ lead them rather than trying to follow their own strategies. Their lives were about to change forever.
Charles dove into ope
n-air preaching almost immediately. From June 24 through July 8, 1738—barely a month after his conversion—he preached to crowds of ten thousand people. Later he preached the gospel to a crowd of twenty thousand at Kennington Common. He preached whenever and wherever the Lord told him, regardless of the size of the audience. In fact, from 1739 to 1743, Charles tabulated the number of people to whom he had preached, and the figure came to more than 149,000.[374]
And Charles was not even considered the gifted preacher between the brothers—John was. Charles’s real passion—indeed, his genius—was writing hymns and urging people to praise and worship the risen Christ.
John certainly had a passion for preaching and teaching the Word of God as well, but he soon discovered that his real spiritual gifting lay in leadership and administration, and his genius was organization. He didn’t simply want to see the gospel preached and the Word taught. He wanted to organize people into small groups to study the Scriptures and pray for one another. He wanted to recruit and train pastors. He wanted to help these young new pastors plant churches. He wanted to organize conferences to better equip pastors and lay leaders. He wanted to make sure churches had excellent hymnals filled with theologically sound psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs—many written by Charles. And he didn’t simply want to reach England. He wanted to make disciples of all nations, just as the Lord commanded in Matthew 28:18-20.
John wanted to recruit, train, and send missionaries all over the world—and especially to the American colonies—to preach the gospel and plant more churches. These, John believed, were the methods by which the gospel would be spread and the church strengthened and expanded. And thus was set into motion the beginnings of what would become known in England and America as the Methodist church.
The Impact of the Wesley Brothers
It is difficult to overstate how powerfully God used the Wesley brothers to fan into flame the great spiritual awakenings under way on both sides of the Atlantic, but especially in America. For while the brothers invested most of their time in England, their most lasting impact was in America, as they sent well-trained pastors and missionaries to establish Christ-centered Methodist churches from north to south.
Having perceived themselves as failures with their Holy Club on one side of the pond, and then failures as missionaries in the New World, the Wesleys were clearly determined to make up for lost time. They beseeched the Lord to give them faith, courage, and clarity of purpose and to allow them to truly make a significant difference for Christ at home and abroad. And the Lord certainly heard and answered their prayers.
Charles established a remarkable legacy. In addition to much preaching and teaching of his own, he published some six thousand hymns in his lifetime and wrote nearly four thousand more that weren’t published while he was alive. Among his compositions are great classics of the faith such as “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing,” “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing,” “And Can It Be?,” “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” “Rejoice, the Lord Is King,” and “Christ, Whose Glory Fills the Skies.” Truly, Charles helped believers throughout America (as well as England and Europe) learn solid, biblical theology while also learning to praise and worship the Lord in song.
John’s impact was no less profound. “In an era when Britain enjoyed virtually no reliable roads,” one historian noted, “John Wesley traveled constantly to spread the good news of grace in Christ. After [his conversion] in 1738, his preaching tours took him about a quarter of a million miles (mostly on horseback), and he delivered forty thousand sermons (that is, an average of more than two a day). . . . Only in his seventies did Wesley abandon his horse for a carriage. Only in his mid-eighties did Wesley give up preaching before dawn.”[375]
John Wesley wasn’t only faithful to the Lord’s calling to preach and teach, however. He was also faithful in making disciples and establishing trained and gifted shepherds to continue the work long after he was gone. By the time he died in 1791, he had helped recruit and train 294 preachers in Britain and established the Methodist church in England with 71,668 members. He had also helped recruit and train 198 preachers across the Atlantic and established the American Methodist church with 43,265 members.[376]
Yet this was just the beginning. As we will see in the next chapter, the Methodist church was soon growing exponentially in the young United States as more and more pastors were recruited and trained to preach the gospel and plant theologically solid, Bible-believing congregations. The methods were working because they were rooted in biblical principles and because God was showing tremendous favor to the humble and faithful Methodist shepherds.
Without question, God used the Wesleys to make an enormous impact in the Great Awakening in the eighteenth century, and as we will also see, they helped plant seeds that would bear enormous fruit in the Second Great Awakening in the nineteenth century as well.
Bottom Line
In the early 1700s, the American people were living in darkness. Their political leaders were corrupt and oppressive. The culture was coarsening. The churches were weak. Yet God in his mercy heard the prayers of some faithful pastors and laypeople and sent a series of revivals that dramatically transformed individuals, families, and a continent.
During the Great Awakening, God raised up:
• a brilliant but humble theologian, pastor, and author by the name of Jonathan Edwards to advance the Kingdom of God through the pulpit and the printed word
• a powerful itinerant evangelist by the name of George Whitefield to advance the Kingdom of God through open-air preaching, an new and unconventional form of ministry
• a passionate and tireless shepherd with a genius for organization by the name of John Wesley to advance the Kingdom of God through discipleship, pastor training, and church planting
• a tremendously gifted hymn writer by the name of Charles Wesley to advance the Kingdom of God through praise and worship
What’s more, God raised up myriad other faithful pastors and laypeople to teach, pray, give, and serve sacrificially as God poured out his Holy Spirit on the American people far beyond what any of them could have ever imagined.
Was every lost soul in the thirteen colonies saved during the Great Awakening? No. Did every pastor and every person in every congregation on the American continent rededicate his or her life to Jesus Christ at the time? No. Did every believer then (or now) agree with every point of theology that Edwards, Whitefield, the Wesleys, and the others taught? No.[377] This spiritual revival was not a one-size-fits-all solution to every social problem. It didn’t create a perfect society. Indeed, the Bible makes it clear that society will never be perfect until the new heaven and the new earth described in the book of Revelation.
But the goal of the revivalists in the early 1700s wasn’t perfection; it was progress. Their Scriptural basis for this was sound. The apostle Paul didn’t require perfection in his disciple Timothy or expect him to save the whole city of Ephesus when he directed the young pastor to serve there. Rather, Paul urged Timothy to faithfully use his spiritual gifts, to boldly preach the gospel, to preach the Word of God consistently, to be faithful in prayer, to make disciples and encourage those under his care to do the same, and to govern himself and the congregation he pastored in such a way that “your progress will be evident to all” (1 Timothy 4:15). These were the goals of the leaders of the Great Awakening as well.
In this regard, the historical record is clear and compelling: the Great Awakening had a dramatic and positive impact on individual lives and families and on early American society as a whole. Millions of people became hungry for the Word of God. Millions of people renewed their commitments to live lives of greater holiness and to pray for their neighbors and their nation. As Americans rediscovered the timeless truths of the Scriptures, they became more unified as a people and more courageous in standing for what was right.
In time, this national hunger for spiritual freedom and wise, moral leadership led to the widespread desire to be a nation free from the relig
ious, economic, and political tyranny imposed by King George III. While not every founding father was a devout Christian, many of them were, and they sought to establish a free society based firmly on Judeo-Christian principles. The Great Awakening thus created the moral climate for the Declaration of Independence and the founding of a new country, conceived in liberty, which would truly become a light to the nations. No country in the history of mankind has done more to liberate other peoples politically, economically, or spiritually than the United States of America. And all this began with the prayers and the preaching of a few faithful, prayerful men.
To be clear, neither George Whitefield nor most of the other powerful preachers of his day had political motives. Their goals were spiritual. They weren’t trying to build an independence movement against the king of England. They were trying to be faithful to the King of kings and the Lord of lords. They weren’t trying to build powerful political parties. They were trying to wake up a sleeping church and rediscover the power of the Holy Spirit. They were not trying to run for office. They were trying to run the race marked out for them by Christ himself. But their efforts had social and political consequences beyond their expectations. And by God’s grace—and in his power and for his glory—they were remarkably successful in turning many Americans back to the Lord and setting the fledgling nation on the right track for decades to come.
Let me encourage you to study the events and the leaders of the Great Awakening for yourself. I think they will amaze you as they have me. Understanding the dynamics of the Great Awakening has inspired and encouraged me. It has given me cause for optimism that what God has done in the past to revive and restore America he could certainly do again. Even more encouraging is the fact that amazingly, this wasn’t the only time America experienced a spiritual rebirth. Just a few decades later, a Second Great Awakening swept the young country in a historic way. Let us turn our attention now to this second remarkable revival as we ponder the question of whether God might be so gracious as to give us another one in our time.