Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Priests & Reformers of the Church
March 3 · d. 1791
also known as The Wesley Brothers, John and Charles Wesley, Methodist Founders
John Wesley (1703-1791) and Charles Wesley (1707-1788) were Anglican priests whose preaching and hymn-writing ignited the Methodist revival, the most transformative religious movement in eighteenth-century England. John was the organizer, theologian, and tireless itinerant, preaching over forty thousand sermons and traveling a quarter of a million miles on horseback. Charles was the poet and hymnwriter, composing more than six thousand hymns that became the devotional lifeblood of Methodism—including 'Hark! the Herald Angels Sing,' 'Love Divine, All Loves Excelling,' and 'And Can It Be.'Both men lived and died as priests of the Church of England, though their movement eventually separated from it, and they fundamentally shaped evangelical Anglicanism and the wider Protestant tradition.
Traditionally, John and Charles Wesley are remembered as the founders of Methodism and as exemplars of evangelical piety, Christian perfection, and the integration of faith with social concern. John Wesley's strict discipline, his refusal to allow Methodist societies to stagnate into mere sentiment, his constant innovation in organizational structure, and his willingness to challenge clerical authority made him a controversial but increasingly influential figure in eighteenth-century religion.
Charles is remembered particularly for the theological content of his hymns and for their role in preserving Methodist doctrine across generations and social classes. His combination of doctrinal precision with emotional intensity and poetic beauty established a new standard for Christian hymnody. Wesley hymns have influenced the worship of virtually every Protestant denomination.
Both brothers are venerated in the Methodist tradition as models of serious, consistent Christian discipleship. John's tireless traveling, his open-air preaching, and his organizational genius, despite his rigidity and occasional harshness, have secured him a place as one of the defining figures of eighteenth-century Christianity. Charles's steadier, more pastoral approach and his refusal to break with the Church of England have earned him respect among Anglicans. The tradition emphasizes the brothers' complementary gifts: John the prophetic reformer and organizer, Charles the poet and theologian of the interior life.
The Methodist movement itself became the vehicle through which their influence perpetuated far beyond their lifetimes: in revivalism, in the emphasis on personal conversion experience, in lay preaching, in the organization of believers for mutual support and accountability, and in the integration of active service to the poor with personal piety.
The Wesleys were born in Epworth, Lincolnshire, in the rectory of their father Samuel Wesley, an Anglican clergyman of considerable learning and principle. Their mother, Susanna Wesley (née Annesley), was a woman of formidable intellect, spiritual depth, and pedagogical gift who educated her nineteen children with remarkable discipline and systematic care. The household was marked by both strict parental authority and deep religious commitment; it was here that the characteristic Methodist emphasis on method, discipline, and the serious pursuit of sanctification was first formed.
John Wesley was born in 1703, Charles four years later in 1707. Both were educated at Charterhouse School (a rigorous training ground) and then at Christ Church, Oxford. At Oxford, both brothers experienced intellectual and spiritual awakening. John, the more intellectually restless, established the 'Holy Club' or 'Oxford Methodists'—a small group of earnest students devoted to systematic prayer, Bible study, fasting, and service to prisoners and the poor. Fellow students mocked them as 'Methodists' for the methodical rigor of their piety, a name that would eventually encompass a global movement.
After ordination and brief pastoral experience, both brothers encountered what they understood as a spiritual crisis. They had been disciplined, learned, pious—yet they lacked assurance of God's acceptance and the conscious experience of salvation. In the spring of 1738, both brothers came to a transformative realization of Christ's justifying work through faith. Charles experienced it first, on May 21, 1738, during an illness, when he sensed God's direct assurance of pardon and acceptance. Three days later, on May 24, 1738, John attended a Moravian meeting in Aldersgate Street, London, where while hearing Luther's Preface to Romans read aloud, he felt his heart 'strangely warmed' and knew with certainty that Christ had taken away his sins. These experiences of 'assurance'—the direct, felt knowledge of justification by faith—became the core of Methodist preaching and the template for Methodist understanding of salvation.
After 1738, the brothers' ministries diverged in method but remained unified in purpose. John became the movement's organizing genius and public face. When parish churches increasingly refused him their pulpits because of his evangelistic preaching and his emphasis on the new birth (which offended respectable Anglican sensibilities), John took the revolutionary step of following George Whitefield's example and preaching in the open air—in fields, at mine heads, on commons, and in the streets. He organized his converts into 'societies' (congregations of committed believers), and within societies into 'bands' and 'classes'—small groups for mutual accountability, prayer, and the mutual confession of struggles. This organizational structure, borrowed partly from the Moravian church and partly innovated by Wesley himself, proved remarkably effective at sustaining spiritual renewal across social classes and across the breadth of England.
John's theology, while remaining formally Anglican, emphasized justification by faith, the witness of the Spirit (the inward assurance of salvation), the possibility of Christian perfection or 'entire sanctification' (perfect love of God and neighbor) in this life, and the availability of God's grace to all people. He preached not only in marketplaces but in industrial towns being transformed by the early Industrial Revolution, reaching miners, factory workers, servants, and the desperately poor in ways that the established church had largely abandoned.
Charles's primary contribution was lyrical and theological. He wrote at an astounding rate, eventually composing more than six thousand hymns. These were not mere devotional verses but theological teaching set to memorable meter. 'And Can It Be' compressed the entire drama of redemption—God's eternal love, human sin, Christ's sacrificial death, the resurrection of hope, and the believer's joyful liberation—into six stanzas. 'Love Divine, All Loves Excelling' expressed the paradox of divine love combining holiness and tenderness. 'Hark! the Herald Angels Sing' (which he wrote and which was subsequently altered by others) presented the incarnation in terms of cosmic paradox and moral transformation. Charles's hymns became the vehicle through which Methodist theology was learned, internalized, and preserved across generations. In an era before widespread literacy and before printed prayer books were common, hymns were the primary mode of theological education for ordinary believers.
Charles, more cautious than his brother on matters of church order and governance, consistently opposed formal separation from the Church of England. He remained a parish minister and maintained stronger ties to Anglican structures, though he participated in Methodist activities and preached in Methodist chapels. He married and raised a family, and his later years were quieter than his brother's, devoted more to pastoral work and hymn-writing than to itinerant evangelism.
Charles died in 1788, aged eighty-one. John lived on until 1791, dying at the advanced age of eighty-eight. Both had the satisfaction of seeing their movement spread across the English-speaking world, but both died before the formal separation of Methodism from the Church of England, which came in 1795. The movement they founded has grown to encompass over eighty million members worldwide and has become one of the defining forces in evangelical Christianity.
Readings for a Reformer
Jeremiah 1:4–10Psalm 461 Corinthians 3:10–23Matthew 5:13–20
O God, by your grace your servants John and Charles Wesley, kindled by the flame of your love, became a burning and shining light in your Church, turning pride into humility and error into truth: Grant that we may be set aflame with the same spirit of love and discipline, and walk before you as children of light; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.