In Admiration of John Wesley and Methodism

Three hundred years ago, in 1725, John Wesley was ordained as a minister. Hardly anyone has been more instrumental in the spread of the Christian faith than Wesley. 

(John Wesley, c.1766)

Early on a February morning when John was five years old, a fire broke out in the rectory. All the large family except John, who was sleeping on the top floor, were able to flee to safety, and they all thought the boy had perished in the fire. But he was “miraculously” saved by escaping through a window.

John never forgot the significance of that event and not long before he died in 1791, he penned a statement he thought would be fitting for his grave marker. It began, “Here lieth the Body of John Wesley, A Brand plucked out of the burning.”*¹

The first chapter of a recent book about “John Wesley, the fearless evangelist,” begins with an account of that February 1709 fire. In the concluding paragraph of that chapter, the author writes,

In that nearly tragic event from his childhood, he saw a providential deliverance and the call on his life to help deliver those who would otherwise be engulfed in the spiritual flames of the wrath of God to come.*²

Wesley graduated from Christ Church, Oxford University in 1724. Then following in his father’s footsteps, at the age of 22 he was ordained as a minister in the Church of England in October 1725.

After his ordination, John wrote in his diary, “Leisure and I have taken leave of one another. I propose to be busy as long as I live.” And busy he was! During his lifetime, Wesley is said to have ridden 250,000 miles on horseback and to have preached over 40,000 sermons!

The most important event in Wesley’s spiritual life occurred on May 24, 1738, a month before his 35^th birthday. This was not long after he had returned to England with a strong sense of failure. In October 1735, he and his younger brother Charles had embarked as missionaries to the colony of Georgia.

Wesley was deeply impressed by the faith of the Moravian missionaries he met aboard the ships both going and returning from the “new world.” In contrast to the terror he felt when strong storms threatened the ships, the Moravian Christians were calmly singing hymns.*³

Back in England, Wesley sought out the Moravian Christian community on Aldersgate Street in London and went to one of their services on the evening of May 24. There he felt his heart “strangely warmed,” and that was the beginning of a “new” John Wesley.

Shortly thereafter, Wesley returned to Oxford and delivered a sermon titled "Salvation by Faith," based on Ephesians 2:8: "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God" (NKJV).

Wesley’s preaching about salvation by faith alone was not well received by the Church of England (CoE). He soon experienced considerable opposition, especially after he began “field preaching” in 1739. The latter was preaching outside rather than in a “proper” CoE church building.

Wesley began to form small Methodist groups across England, but he never broke with the CoE. However, in 1784 the Methodist Episcopal Church was organized in the U.S. by Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury, and from the 1820s until 1967, Methodism was the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S.

For 240 years now, Methodism has had significant positive impact on the U.S. and countries around the world. It has been a leading force in evangelism by fueling religious revival and emphasizing personal faith and salvation.

Methodists in the U.S. have also been in the forefront of social reform, being deeply involved in social justice movements, including abolitionism, temperance, and women's rights.

According to their website (see here), the United Methodist Church is now

… a worldwide connection of about 10 million members in more than100 countries including Africa, Asia, Europe and the United States. United Methodists are people of God who share a common mission and values. The church and its members are called to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.

Thank God for all the good done by John Wesley and Methodism!

_____

*¹ These words come from Zechariah 3:2 in the Old Testament. A more contemporary English translation renders these words as “a burning stick snatched from the fire” (NIV). Roy Hattersley (b. 1932) is a prominent British politician and author. Among his many books is The Life of John Wesley: A Brand from the Burning (2002).

*² These are the words of author Jake Hanson in his book Crossing the Divide (2016). The last ten words sound similar to Jonathan Edwards’s famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741), although I doubt that Wesley himself would have phrased it that way.

It is interesting to note, though, that Wesley, who undoubtedly became one of the greatest preachers and theologians in British history was born in June 1703, and Edwards, generally recognized as one of the greatest preachers and theologians in American history, was born in October 1703.

*³ The Moravian missionaries were sent by Herrnhut, the community of faith established by Nicolas Ludwig, Count von Zinzendorf in 1722. At that time, it was a part of Saxony in the Holy Roman Empire. It is now in Germany and roughly only ten miles from the borders of Poland and of Czechia.

The Moravian Church traces its beginning back to Jan Hus, the Czech reformer who was burned at the stake in 1415. The last part of my November 20, 2019, blog post was about Hus and ends with a reference to the founding of the Moravian Church in 1727.

Thinking about Bohemians

The word Bohemian has two distinctly different meanings. The two parts of this blog posting are about the word used in those disparate ways. Originally, Bohemian referred to a resident of Bohemia, now a region of the Czech Republic. For the last two centuries, though, Bohemian has often been used to denote “a socially unconventional person, especially one who is involved in the arts.”

The Bohemians in “La Bohème”

Most of you, I assume, are familiar with “Babette’s Feast,” the short story by Karen Blixen and the 1987 Danish film by the same name. Recently, I have called my daughter Karen Babette, for she, too, was lavish in her birthday gift to me.

This past weekend, Karen made a special trip to Kansas City for the main purpose of taking me to see a performance of Puccini’s opera “La Bohème” at the magnificent Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in Kansas City. We thoroughly enjoyed it.  

Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts (opened 2011)

The original opera premiered in 1896 and the first American performance took place the next year. It has become one of the most popular operas of all time.

Earlier this year, a website describing the ten most popular operas said this about “La Bohème”:

Puccini’s masterpiece perfectly captures the pleasures, pains, and sheer over-the-top hugeness of love in the first flush of youth. The story is so simple, it’s almost a joke: the Parisian poet Rodolfo falls for the quiet seamstress Mimi, and then she gets ill and dies. But around that framework Puccini creates arias (solos) and duets of ravishing beauty.

The opera’s name is simply the French word for Bohemia (or Bohemian). Early in the 19^th century, the Romani people (called Gypsies in the past) in western Europe were thought to be from Bohemia and inaccurately given that name.

The opera begins with four “Bohemian” men (in the second sense of the word) in their shabby garret in Paris on Christmas Eve in 1830 or so—and it ends after more than two hours of beautifully sung arias in the same place with the sad death of Mimi.

Jan Hus, a Real Bohemian

In thinking about the 19^th (or 20^th) century “Bohemians,” I couldn’t help but think of one of my “heroes” of church history, Jan Hus (aka John Huss), the Bohemian reformer who was burnt at the stake in 1415.

Long before the Reformation led by Martin Luther in the first third of the 16^th century, the “Bohemian Reformation” began in the last third of the 14^th century. Hus is the best-known representative of that Reformation. 

Born around 1369, Hus became a prominent preacher and educator in Prague. He became the leader of those who deplored what they considered the current corruption of the Church and emphasized that Christ rather than the pope was the head of the Church. That led to his martyrdom.

As he was perishing in the flames, Hus, whose name means “goose,” reportedly declared to his executioners, "You are now going to burn a goose, but in a century you will have a swan which you can neither roast nor boil."

It was 102 years later that Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the Wittenberg Church door as the start of the Protestant Reformation in Germany.

The Unitas Fratrum or Unity of the Brethren Church was founded in 1457 by Bohemian followers of Hus who were greatly disappointed by the wars that followed Hus’s martyrdom.

About two hundred fifty years later some of those followers in Moravia, which borders Bohemia, migrated to Saxony and found refuge in Nicholas von Zinzendorf’s Herrnhut, and there the Moravian Church was born in 1727.

I greatly enjoyed the “Bohemians” singing on the opera stage, but even more, I remain grateful to the Bohemian reformer Jan Hus and those who carried on his legacy.