John Wesley (1703-1791)

John Wesley was born in Epworth in Lincolnshire. He was the 15th of 19 children born to Susanna Wesley and her husband, Samuel, an Anglican clergyman.

Wesley, a clergyman of the Church of England, was a founder of Methodism.

He was the foremost leader in England of the Evangelical Revival, a movement in Protestant Christianity during the 1700's that emphasized personal faith and practical good works.

In carrying out his evangelical mission, Wesley traveled about 250,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) and preached over 40,000 sermons, often as many as 4 in a day. His concern for the poor led him to provide loan funds, establish homes for widows and orphans, extend ministries to prisons and the armed forces, and open free medical dispensaries.

Wesley was admitted to Christ Church College at Oxford University in 1720 and was ordained a priest in the Church of England in 1728.

He returned to Oxford in 1729.

At Oxford he became spiritual adviser to some students, including his brother Charles, who gathered in small groups to help each other with study, devotions, and practical good works. They were ridiculed by other students as "The Holy Club" and "Bible Moths," but the nickname that prevailed was "Methodists." Their practice of accountability in small groups for the spiritual life of all their members became the basic structure of the later Methodist movement.

While Wesley was a missionary to Georgia from 1735 to 1737, he was influenced by the Moravians, a German church that stressed personal faith and disciplined Christian living. In 1739, at the invitation of George Whitefield, another prominent evangelist, he began to preach in the open air.

Wesley's evangelical message created controversy. It was opposed by many Anglican clergy as religiously fanatical and politically disruptive. The Calvinist wing of the Evangelical Revival criticized it as being too universal and putting too much emphasis on good works.

In 1784, Wesley ordained Methodist preachers for North America, a step that led to the formation of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and then of the Methodist Church worldwide.

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