The Enlightenment & Awakening Era · 1738-1815 · Britain, then America
The Methodist Revival
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About This Movement
John Wesley was an Oxford-trained Church of England priest whose methodical little religious society had earned him a mocking nickname and whose mission to Georgia had ended in failure. Until, at a meeting in Aldersgate Street, London, in May 1738, he felt his heart 'strangely warmed' and began preaching assurance and holiness to anyone who would stand still for it. Shut out of many pulpits, he and George Whitefield preached in fields and at pit-heads to crowds of thousands. But Wesley did something rarer than preaching, which was to organize, dividing converts into 'classes' of a dozen who met weekly to give an account of their lives, licensing lay preachers to ride circuits, and holding an annual conference. His brother Charles wrote the movement's theology into thousands of hymns, so that people who could not have read a treatise sang one instead. Wesley meant all of this to renew the Church of England from inside and insisted to the end that he had not left it. After his death in 1791 the connexion became a separate church anyway.
In Its Own Record
Formed or Influenced
- The Holiness Movement — The Holiness movement understood itself as recovering Wesley's own doctrine of sanctification.
- The Black Church in America — Richard Allen’s AME (1816) and AME Zion (1821) are Methodist bodies — the Methodist parent line of the Black Church. Edge written at the Era 9 Freeze (Mark, 2026-08-03).
Sources
- Wesley's Journal and the Works of John Wesley (Bicentennial Edition, Abingdon, 1975-), sermons, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (primary) — Wesley's own writings, kept distinct from the connexion's communal record.
- The class meeting and connexional machinery: General Rules (1743), band and class records and class papers, society and circuit records, annual Conference Minutes (from 1744) (primary) — The movement's lived organizational core, in records scattered across archives, chiefly the Methodist Archives in Manchester.
- Charles Wesley's hymns: A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists (1780), with Charles's journal (primary) — Hymnody as actually used: the movement's theology in its sung, memorized, everyday form.
- Women's and ordinary voices: Wesley-Crosby correspondence (1761), Mary Bosanquet Fletcher's 1771 letter, Hester Ann Rogers's Account, the Arminian Magazine (1778-) lay narratives; Richard Allen's conversion c. 1777 at the era's edge (primary) — The women's-preaching debate in its own protagonists' words; a vehicle for ordinary members' narratives. Allen's narrative wasn't published until 1833, and the Primitive Methodist accounts (from 1807) come from a later period than this movement's core years.
- Henry Rack, Reasonable Enthusiasm (1989; 3rd ed. 2002), with David Hempton, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (Yale, 2005) (secondary)
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 7, 'Evangelical awakenings in the North Atlantic world' (W. R. Ward) (reference) — A direct fit for this movement.