John Wesley is known for his role in founding and being a leader of the Methodist movement, alongside George Whitefield and his brother Charles, which today claims approximately 80 million adherents. However, before Methodism became an independent religious force, it was a movement within the Church of England and John Wesley was an Anglican priest who had been educated at Oxford, where he also lectured and organized the Holy Club with his brother Charles. Dedicated to the pursuit of a devout Christian life, members of the club engaged in daily prayer, communion, and biblical readings, along with fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays. They also visited prisoners, as well as preached, educated, and relieved debtors, and cared for the sick. The methodical way in which they carried out their practices gained them the nickname “methodist”, and Wesley himself referred to the name in a letter, whilst a published pamphlet described the group as the “Oxford Methodists”.
The turning point in Wesley’s life, which led to Methodism taking root into what is today, was probably when he was invited by General James Edward Oglethorpe to become rector of the new Anglican parish in the colony he had recently founded in Savannah, Georgia. He became a missionary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts and, along with his brother Charles, joined Oglethorpe on his second voyage to Savannah in 1735. During the journey, Wesley came into contact with a group of Moravian Christians, whose sense of piety and inner spiritual strength made an impression on him, especially when other passengers panicked during a storm which had broken a mast off of the ship, but they calmly sang and prayed.
Upon arriving in Georgia on February 6, 1736 – almost three years to the day of its founding by Oglethorpe – Wesley led his fellow passengers in a prayer of Thanksgiving on what is now Cockspur Island. About a month later on March 7th, he conducted his first formal church service and preached his sermon at the site now occupied by the US Customs House at the corner of Bay and Bull streets. Even though a lot was set aside for a church in Oglethorpe’s planned city, Wesley conducted services from his parsonage at Abercorn and St. Julian streets on Reynolds Square – now occupied by the Oliver Sturges House – and at the town hall on Wright Square at Bull and York streets, where there now stands a post office and courthouse. Each of these sites has a historical marker to commemorate their association with Wesley and his time in the city.
Wesley’s ministry was supposed to be primarily about evangelizing the local Native American Indians, but a shortage of clergy necessitated that he spend most of his time ministering to European settlers in the city, and he served as the parish priest for Christ Church. In this position, communion attendance increased and Wesley was successful in establishing one of the first Sunday schools in America. He also oversaw the publication of a Collection of Psalms and Hymns, the first Anglican hymnal published in America, and the first of many hymnals Wesley published throughout his life. However, he became increasingly unpopular with the congregation, due in part to his insistence on strict discipline.
Such discipline carried over to his relationship with Sophia Hopkey, whom he had met soon after arriving in the colony. It devolved into a strained courtship as Wesley hesitated to marry her, because he believed his first priority was to be a missionary to the Native Americans and he desired to practice clerical celibacy. Eventually, the relationship had become completely soured between the two and Hopkey ended up marrying another man, William Williamson. This resulted in Wesley concluding that she was no longer pious in practicing the Christian faith, and using a strict interpretation of the Book of Common Prayer, he denied her communion when she failed to notify him in advance of her intention to take communion. Refusal of this sacrament had the effect of tainting her character, and legal proceedings were brought against Wesley for defaming her in public. He believed the matter to be of an ecclesiastical nature, and therefore refused to recognize the authority of the secular court, but this only further eroded his standing among the population.
By now, John Wesley had been in Savannah for nearly two years; the length of time and the almost continuous struggles of this missionary journey were taking their toll. He had done better than his brother Charles, who left after only six months in his roles as General Oglethorpe’s secretary and the parish priest at Fort Frederica, seventy-five miles south of the city on St. Simon’s Island. Plagued by illness and difficulties with the colonists, he had sailed back to Britain in August 1736 in a general state of discouragement. Over a year later, John was reaching the end of his own tether. On top of the struggles he too had been having with colonists, he had failed to make a missionary impact on the Native Americans, and he started to question the state of his own soul – writing in his journal journal, “I came to convert the Indians, but, oh, who will convert me?”
Finally, on December 2, 1737, Wesley departed Savannah and returned to Britain. He would later say that his twenty-two months in the city had amounted to no more than him “beating the air”, but it would appear that the issues that he faced there forced him to confront spiritual and theological questions, and his interactions with the Moravians were instrumental in providing the answers he sought. Within a year of returning home, he underwent an evangelical conversion within a Moravian religious society on Aldersgate Street in London, where he recounted that his heart had been “strangely warmed” with the reading of Martin Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans, which described the “change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ.”
In the aftermath of this “Aldersgate Experience” and armed with the belief in personal salvation through trust in Jesus Christ, Wesley, with his brother Charles and others, would go on to preach and successfully organize a network of Methodist groups and societies throughout Great Britain and Ireland. These would flourish and spread across the British Empire, until by the time of Wesley’s death 1791, Methodism had become an independent force unto itself outside of Anglicanism, and this development has been a legacy of John Wesley’s missionary journey to Savannah.
