Tribute to Rev John Wesley
Reverend the Hon. Dr GORDON MOYES [10.41 p.m.]: This week, in every single country of the world, more than 70 million Methodists will celebrate the birthday of John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, which in this country is part of the Uniting Church in Australia. Tens of thousands of Australians remembered him this week. John Wesley was born 300 years ago this week in Epworth, Lincolnshire, England. He became one of the most significant figures in British social and religious reform in the eighteenth century and one of the most significant church leaders of all time. His father, Samuel, was a Church of England clergyman. His mother, Susannah, taught all her 19 children at home.
After studies at Charterhouse School, at the age of 17 John went to Oxford University on a scholarship. He graduated with a Master of Arts. He stayed on as a tutor, and eventually became a Fellow of Lincoln College, where he gave an annual lecture for more than 60 years. He and other students met to pray and study the Bible so regularly and methodically, they were nicknamed “Methodists”. They preached in prisons, conducted schools for poor children and cared for the sick. In 1728 he was ordained a priest of the Church of England, and he and his brother Charles volunteered to go to Georgia, America, as missionaries to convert the native American Indians. The trip was a failure and they returned.
On the return voyage from America, John was impressed by the behaviour of a group of Moravians—a Protestant German religious group—during a violent storm. He saw that they fully trusted in God to keep them safe. Both he and Charles attended their home group Bible studies, and on Pentecost Sunday—21 May 1738—Charles had a conversion experience of fully trusting God. Three days later, on 24 May 1738, John fully accepted Jesus as his Saviour after a religious experience in Aldersgate Street meeting house, where he felt his heart “strangely warmed” by the love of God. From then on, John and Charles travelled all over England preaching that a person could know God’s grace fully and live a life based upon Christian love.
For more than 50 years, John rode on horseback over 225,000 miles on unmade roads and in danger of highwaymen. He had lay preachers—non-ordained Bible students—to help him. He preached out of doors so that everyone, rich and poor, could hear him. He never had a parish of his own. He said the “whole world was his parish”. In 1739 he established the “New Room” in Bristol, the first ever Methodist Church in the world. Reverend Charles Wesley lived there for many years and trained preachers. John founded an orphan house, a dispensary, a restaurant, an employment centre and several schools for the poor and miners’ children. He set up London’s first free clinic with properly qualified doctors to look after the poor.
He wrote or translated over 400 books, and his brother Charles became the world’s most prolific hymn writer with over 6,000 published hymns, many of them sung to the popular tunes of the day. There was strong opposition to his preaching. Mobs were raised against him. A drunken crowd once burst into his house. Church bells were rung to drown his voice. A maddened bull was driven into the crowd where he was preaching. I like the story of the heckler who came with a pocketful of rotten eggs to throw at him but so great was the crowd that they were squashed while they were still in his pocket. The genius of John Wesley and the Methodists was to combine evangelical preaching with a social concern, a combination seen in Wesley Mission Sydney for the past 191 years.
John Wesley lived to be almost 88. He continued to rise at 4.00 a.m. and kept up his travelling to the end. He died on 2 March 1791. His last words were “God is with us.” Ten thousand people filed past his coffin, and his funeral had to be held before dawn because of unmanageable crowds. No-one in eighteenth century England was so well known among people of every class of society. Today, the three-hundredth anniversary of his birth, we remember his influence with gratitude. 01 July 2003.
