John Wesley (born June 17 (Old Style: June 28), 1703, died March 2, 1791) was an English cleric, theologian, and evangelist whose open-air preaching and small-group discipleship model launched the Methodist movement within the Church of England.
Known for riding an estimated 250,000 miles on horseback to preach an estimated 40,000 sermons, Wesley became one of the most influential religious figures of the 18th century, and Methodism, along with its many offshoots, now counts more than 80 million adherents worldwide.
John Wesley at a Glance
| Personal | |
|---|---|
| Full name | John Wesley |
| Born | June 17, 1703 (Old Style), Epworth, Lincolnshire, England |
| Died | March 2, 1791 (age 87), City Road, London, England |
| Nationality | English |
| Spouse | Mary “Molly” Vazeille (m. 1751; separated; d. 1781) |
| Children | None |
| Parents | Samuel Wesley (father, Anglican rector); Susanna Wesley (mother) |
| Siblings | Charles Wesley and 17 others (19 children total, 9 survived infancy) |
| Education | |
| School | Charterhouse School, London |
| University | Christ Church, Oxford (BA 1724, MA 1727); Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford (1726) |
| Ministry | |
| Ordained | Deacon, 1725; Priest, Church of England, 1728 |
| Movement founded | Methodism, beginning with the Holy Club at Oxford (1729) and field preaching (1739) |
| Key event | Aldersgate Street conversion experience, May 24, 1738 |
| Career | |
| Books | Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament; Sermons on Several Occasions; The Christian Library (50 volumes); his personal Journal |
| Cause of death | Natural decline in old age, following a five-day final illness |
Early Life and Family
John Wesley was born on June 17, 1703, in Epworth, Lincolnshire, the fifteenth of nineteen children born to Samuel Wesley, an Anglican rector, and Susanna Wesley.
Only nine of the Wesley children survived past infancy, and Susanna personally educated all of them at home, running a strict daily schedule of Bible study, reading, and discipline that shaped John’s lifelong habits of order and self-examination.
In February 1709, when John was five, the rectory at Epworth caught fire in the night. He was the last child pulled from the burning building, lifted from an upstairs window moments before the roof collapsed.
His mother reportedly called him “a brand plucked from the burning,” a phrase from the book of Zechariah that Wesley later used to describe his own sense of purpose and survival.
His younger brother, Charles Wesley, would go on to become his closest lifelong partner in ministry and the author of more than 6,000 hymns, including “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing.”
Their partnership, one built on faith rather than blood alone, became the backbone of the early Methodist movement.
Education
Wesley attended Charterhouse School in London before entering Christ Church, Oxford, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1724 and his master’s in 1727.
In 1726, he was elected a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, a position that gave him financial independence and academic standing for the rest of his life.
At Oxford, John, Charles, and a small group of students formed a disciplined devotional society that met to study Scripture, take Communion weekly, and visit prisoners and the poor.
Other students mocked their methodical habits, calling them “Methodists,” a nickname the group eventually adopted with pride.
That small club became, in hindsight, the seed of a movement that would outlive the British Empire it started in.
Ministry Career and the Rise of Methodism
Wesley was ordained a deacon in 1725 and a priest in the Church of England in 1728. In 1735, he and Charles sailed to the colony of Georgia as missionaries, a trip that turned into one of the more painful chapters of his early ministry.
His rigid, high-church style as rector in Savannah alienated his congregation, and a personal entanglement with a young parishioner named Sophia Hopkey ended badly when Wesley refused her Communion after she married another man.
Her new husband filed suit, and Wesley left the colony in December 1737 without ever facing trial.
Wesley returned to England discouraged, questioning his own faith. On May 24, 1738, at a religious meeting on Aldersgate Street in London, he heard a reading of Martin Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans and later wrote that he felt his “heart strangely warmed.”
That moment, now known as his Aldersgate conversion, marked the turning point that historians and Methodists alike point to as the true beginning of his ministry.
Field Preaching and the Methodist Societies
In 1739, at the urging of fellow evangelist George Whitefield, Wesley began preaching outdoors to crowds that no church building could hold, often to coal miners and laborers who rarely set foot inside a parish church.
Field preaching scandalized many of his fellow Anglican clergy, who saw it as undignified and disorderly, but it let Wesley reach people the established church had largely ignored.
Wesley organized his converts into small accountability groups called “societies,” “classes,” and “bands,” where members met weekly to confess struggles, encourage one another, and grow in personal holiness.
This structure, more than any single sermon, is what let Methodism scale. By the time of his death, these societies had spread across Britain, Ireland, and the American colonies.
Wesley kept up an extraordinary pace for more than 50 years, traveling an estimated 250,000 miles, mostly on horseback, and preaching roughly 40,000 sermons.
He rose most mornings at 4 a.m. for private prayer and Bible study before the day’s travel and preaching began, a discipline he maintained well into his eighties.
Rise to Prominence and Break with the Calvinists
Wesley’s preaching drew massive crowds, sometimes numbering in the tens of thousands, and made him one of the most recognized religious figures in Britain by the 1740s.
His early partnership with George Whitefield eventually fractured over theology.
Whitefield held to Calvinist predestination, the belief that God chooses who will be saved in advance, while Wesley preached Arminian free grace, the belief that salvation is available to anyone who freely responds to God’s offer.
The two men remained personally respectful but led separate, competing wings of the broader evangelical revival for the rest of their lives.
Wesley also broke new ground by authorizing lay preachers, men without formal ordination, to lead Methodist societies and preach in his absence.
Church of England leaders objected strongly, since it undercut clerical authority, but the practice let Methodism expand far faster than an ordained-only structure ever could have.
Books and Publications
Wesley was a relentless writer and publisher, producing biblical commentary, sermons, hymnals, and even guides on health and simple medicine for his followers. His major works include:
- Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament (1755), a commentary still used in Methodist theological education today
- Sermons on Several Occasions, a multi-volume collection considered foundational Methodist doctrine
- The Christian Library, a 50-volume set of abridged Christian classics he compiled for lay readers
- His personal Journal, kept for more than 50 years and later published, offering a firsthand record of the revival
- Primitive Physic, a home-remedy guide he wrote to help poorer Methodists access basic medical care
He also published hundreds of hymnals and songbooks with Charles, whose lyrics remain some of the most sung hymns in the English-speaking church.
Personal Life
Marriage to Mary Vazeille
Wesley’s romantic life before marriage was marked by repeated disappointment.
In addition to the Sophia Hopkey episode in Georgia, an 1749 relationship with Grace Murray, a widow and Methodist class leader, ended when Charles Wesley intervened and arranged her marriage to another Methodist preacher, a decision that badly strained the brothers’ relationship for years afterward.
On February 18 or 19, 1751, Wesley married Mary “Molly” Vazeille, a widow with four children from her first marriage. The marriage was troubled almost from the start.
Wesley refused to slow his travel schedule for married life, and Molly grew resentful and suspicious of his close friendships with women in the Methodist societies.
She left him permanently in the mid-1770s, and the couple never divorced but lived separately until her death in October 1781. Wesley and Molly had no children together.
Personal Discipline and Daily Life
Wesley followed a strict personal rule of life built around early rising, structured prayer, fasting twice a week, and careful use of time, habits he had absorbed from his mother and refined at Oxford.
He was famously frugal, living on a small fixed amount each year regardless of how much money passed through his hands from book sales, and giving away the rest, reportedly tens of thousands of pounds over his lifetime, to the poor and to Methodist causes.
Theology and Ministry Philosophy
Wesley’s theology centered on what he called “Christian perfection,” or “entire sanctification,” the belief that a believer could, by God’s grace, be freed from willful sin and grow into complete love of God and neighbor in this life.
He paired that high view of holiness with Arminian free grace, insisting that God’s saving grace was genuinely available to every person, not reserved for a predetermined elect.
He also placed heavy emphasis on practical, lived faith.
Wesley pushed Methodists toward prison visits, care for the poor, opposition to the slave trade, and education for the working class, arguing that personal holiness without social action was incomplete.
That combination of inward conversion and outward action became a defining mark of the Methodist tradition long after his death.
Influence and Legacy
By the time Wesley died in 1791, Methodist societies claimed roughly 70,000 members in Britain and 60,000 more in the American colonies, numbers that would explode in the century that followed.
The Methodist Episcopal Church, founded in America in 1784 with Wesley’s blessing, grew into one of the largest Protestant denominations in the United States, and its many descendant denominations, including the modern Methodist Church and the Global Methodist Church, still trace their doctrine directly back to Wesley’s sermons and Notes.
Wesley’s small-group discipleship model influenced Christian movements far beyond Methodism itself, shaping later evangelical accountability groups, Sunday school systems, and even elements of the modern small-group church structure used across denominations today.
His emphasis on social holiness, prison reform, and anti-slavery advocacy, including a widely cited 1791 letter he wrote to William Wilberforce days before his death urging him to continue the fight against slavery, left a mark on British social reform well into the 19th century.
Criticism and Controversies
Wesley faced sustained criticism throughout his ministry, much of it from fellow Anglican clergy who saw his field preaching and lay ministers as a direct threat to church order.
He was frequently accused of “enthusiasm,” an 18th-century term for excessive, disorderly religious emotion, and mobs occasionally attacked him and his preachers, particularly in the movement’s early years.
His time in Georgia left a lasting stain on his early reputation, after his handling of the Sophia Hopkey affair led to a lawsuit and his hurried departure from the colony in 1737.
Later in life, his very public separation from his wife, Molly, and his refusal to alter his relentless travel schedule for the sake of the marriage, drew private and public criticism from friends and family alike.
Wesley also drew fire late in life for opposing the American colonies during the Revolutionary War, a political stance that cost him support among American Methodists even as the denomination he inspired grew rapidly on their soil.
Awards and Recognition
Wesley predates the modern concept of formal awards and honors, but his legacy is memorialized worldwide. Statues of Wesley stand outside Wesley’s Chapel on City Road in London and on the campus of numerous Methodist-founded universities, and his birthplace at Epworth and his London home remain preserved as heritage sites operated by the Methodist Church.
Countless Methodist-affiliated schools, colleges, and hospitals across the world carry his name or his family’s name in tribute.
Interesting Facts About John Wesley
- He was pulled from a burning rectory as a five-year-old child, an event his mother saw as evidence of divine purpose on his life
- He rose most days at 4 a.m. for prayer, a habit he kept into his late eighties
- He wrote a home medical guide, Primitive Physic, to help working-class Methodists treat common ailments without a doctor’s fees
- The word “Methodist” started as a taunt aimed at his Oxford devotional club, not a name he chose
- He wrote one of the last letters of his life to William Wilberforce, encouraging him to keep fighting the slave trade
Timeline of Key Events
- June 17, 1703: Born in Epworth, Lincolnshire, England
- 1709: Rescued from the burning Epworth rectory as a child
- 1720 to 1724: Studies at Christ Church, Oxford
- 1725: Ordained a deacon in the Church of England
- 1726: Elected a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford
- 1728: Ordained a priest
- 1729: The Oxford “Holy Club,” later nicknamed the Methodists, takes shape
- 1735 to 1737: Serves as a missionary in the colony of Georgia; the Sophia Hopkey affair ends his time there
- May 24, 1738: Experiences his Aldersgate conversion in London
- 1739: Begins open-air field preaching
- February 1751: Marries Mary “Molly” Vazeille
- 1755: Publishes Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament
- 1781: Molly Vazeille dies, following years of separation from Wesley
- 1784: The Methodist Episcopal Church is founded in the United States
- 1791: Writes a letter to William Wilberforce urging continued opposition to slavery
- March 2, 1791: Dies at his home on City Road, London, at age 87
Frequently Asked Questions
What was John Wesley most known for?
John Wesley is most known for founding Methodism, a movement built on open-air preaching, small-group discipleship, and the belief that God’s saving grace is available to everyone, not a predetermined few.
What were John Wesley’s last words on his deathbed?
Wesley’s most widely reported final words were, “The best of all is, God is with us,” repeated with what witnesses described as unusual strength shortly before his death on March 2, 1791. His actual last audible word, spoken while attempting to sing a hymn, was reportedly “Farewell.”
What was John Wesley accused of?
Wesley was accused of religious “enthusiasm” and disorderly conduct by fellow Anglican clergy for his field preaching and use of unordained lay preachers. Earlier in life, in colonial Georgia, he faced a lawsuit connected to his refusal to give Communion to a former love interest, Sophia Hopkey, after she married another man.
How many hours a day did John Wesley pray?
Wesley did not log a fixed number of hours, but he consistently rose around 4 a.m. for private prayer and devotional reading before beginning his day’s travel and preaching, a discipline biographers and Methodist historians point to as central to his output and endurance.
Who was John Wesley’s wife?
Wesley married Mary “Molly” Vazeille, a widow with four children, in February 1751. The marriage was difficult from the start and the couple separated permanently in the mid-1770s, though they never formally divorced. Molly died in 1781.
What books did John Wesley write?
His major works include Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament, the multi-volume Sermons on Several Occasions, the 50-volume Christian Library, and his personal Journal, kept over more than five decades of ministry.
Who was Charles Wesley?
Charles Wesley was John’s younger brother and closest ministry partner, a founding member of the Oxford Holy Club and the author of more than 6,000 hymns, including “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” that remain central to Methodist and broader Christian worship today.
What was John Wesley’s cause of death?
Wesley died of natural causes tied to old age, following a five-day final illness, at his home next to his chapel on City Road in London on March 2, 1791. He was 87.
Final Word
John Wesley spent more than fifty years on horseback trying to reach people the established church had written off, and he built a system of small groups and lay leadership sturdy enough to outlast him by centuries. The denomination that grew out of his preaching now spans continents, but the core of what he built was simple: ordinary people, meeting weekly, holding each other accountable to a faith that showed up in daily life.
