Who was the founder of Methodism?
John Wesley was a cleric and considered as, together with his brother Charles, the founder of the Methodist Christian movement. He was born on June 28th, 1703, in the village of Epworth (England).
Biography of John Wesley
It was 1735 when he and his brother Charles both decided to move to the American colonies. They sailed to Savannah (Georgia colony) at the request of its governor to be ministers of their recently formed Parrish.
In the ship that took them to America, they met a group of settlers members of the Moravian movement that deeply influenced John Wesley by their strong faith and spirituality based on pietism.
But the arrival at the colonies became unsuccessful: he became involved in a relationship with a woman that damaged his reputation at the point of make him return to England depressed.
Back at home, he joined the Moravians and turned to be a good preacher, making public his first impressions about the witness of God’s spirit and the doctrine of salvation by faith.
It was April of 1739 when he did his first open air sermon, near Bristol, because the Anglican Church didn’t let Moravians do their preaching freely. Wesley saw the potential of open air preaching because it reached all the people that usually never entered church, more open minded than those whose faith laid on convinced Anglican precepts. He started to preach wherever he could and he remained this way for 50 years: in churches if he was well received, in fields or cottages, in halls…
But in 1739, Wesley broke his relations with the Moravians too. He decided to find a new society with his own followers, the foundation of the Methodism. At this point, he began to be attacked by clergymen and authorities who considered that Methodists were illegal because they were not formally clerics; they had not the Anglican Church license.
He planned to spread his message with the help of a chain of local preachers that explained his beliefs to people: Anglicans were corrupt and failed to show the truly way of repentance and people were dying as sinners.
Methodism religion started to grow quickly and soon Wesley began to hire chapels to house his followers. By 1743, he published a series of rules that became the basis of the so called Methodist Discipline.
At preaching he was still the most hard worker: it’s said that he rode on horseback more than 250.000 miles during his life, gave 40.000 sermons often two or three a day… John Wesley finally died on March 2nd, 1791, being 87 years old. By then, in England there were already 135.000 followers of Methodism and nearly 550 itinerant preachers spreading his message.