Reading different theological perspectives. Historical readings express their authors' perspectives, including Arminian and Reformed or Calvinist traditions. Inclusion does not make an author's position settled CTS doctrine. Read with Scripture and the assigned material. A supported answer from another evangelical perspective should be assessed on its reasoning, not penalized simply for differing from the author. If an automated score rejects such an answer, ask CTS for review.

Master’s Assigned Readings (all five)

M.Div. and Th.M. students read all five assigned selections and take their separate exam after activation. The test page states the current rule; valid earlier completions remain valid.

Optional Honors (choose three)

Honors is optional on every track. Certificate and Associate students may read three honors selections without a required-reading exam. Honors does not replace either master’s exam.

The Master's textbook test: read The Journal of John Wesley, 1735–1740 (selections), then take its test: twenty fill-in-the-blank questions, drawn from forty; eighteen right passes. Each answer is marked right or wrong at once. Correct answers and explanations are available after the attempt passes. It is separate from the reading test on the five digests below: passing one does not pass the other. On the M.Div. and Th.M. tracks both tests are being introduced; each test's page says whether it is in force yet. Until then any student may take them, and a pass is kept in your record.

The Master's reading test: separate from the honors invitation below. Honors asks you to read any three of these digests; the Master's test covers all five. It has twenty fill-in-the-blank questions, four from each reading, drawn from forty; eighteen right passes. Each answer is marked right or wrong at once; correct answers and explanations are available after the attempt passes. You may try again after a short wait. The test is being introduced: its page says whether it is in force yet. Until then any student may take it, and a pass is kept in your record.

Honors option: Complete any three of the five readings below. These readings supplement the course and do not replace its units or examinations.

On this site: Each of the five readings is a Chapala Theological Seminary digest, written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French here on the site — every one opens directly from this page, with nothing to download. Each card names the work its digest is made from.

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Reading 1 · The Voyage and the Moravians

Not Afraid to Die

A CTS digest of John Wesley, Journal, 14 Oct 1735 – 5 Feb 1736; Works, ed. Thomas Jackson (3rd ed., 1872), vol. 1

Wesley sails for Georgia in 1735 with his brother Charles and two Oxford friends, keeping a strict rule of prayer and study on board. Twenty-six Moravians impress him with their humility, and when a storm splits the mainsail they calmly sing on while the English scream. Their freedom from the fear of death exposes what his own disciplined religion still lacks.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

Not Afraid to Die: The Voyage to Georgia and the Moravian Witness

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — the opening pages of Wesley’s published Journal, from his departure for Georgia in October 1735 to the first sight of the American shore in February 1736

A CTS digest of John Wesley’s Journal, 14 October 1735 – 5 February 1736, as printed in The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, ed. Thomas Jackson (3rd ed., 1872), vol. 1. The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Journal, Oct 1735 – Feb 1736
Primary source
The Atlantic voyage
John Wesley

A word before you read. This course follows John Wesley (1703–1791) through the most decisive five years of his life, using his own Journal. The Journal is not a private diary. Wesley edited it and published it in parts, partly to defend the Methodist movement against its critics. So we read it as his testimony: honest, often painfully so, but shaped by what he later came to believe. In this first reading he is a thirty-two-year-old Anglican clergyman, deeply devout and very disciplined, sailing to the new colony of Georgia. He is also, by his own later account, a man who does not yet know the peace of faith.

1.Before the Voyage: Oxford and the Holy Club

To understand the man who boarded ship in 1735 we need to go back to Oxford. Wesley was a Fellow of Lincoln College and an ordained priest of the Church of England. In 1729 he joined a small circle that his younger brother Charles had gathered. They met to read the Greek New Testament and the early church fathers, to pray, to examine their lives, and to receive Holy Communion every week. From 1730 they also visited prisoners in the Oxford Castle jail and helped poor families in the town. Other students laughed at them and gave them nicknames: the “Holy Club,” the “Bible moths,” and the name that stuck, “Methodists,” because they lived by rule and method. Jackson’s volume opens with Wesley’s 1732 letter to Richard Morgan, whose son William had been one of the first members. In it Wesley describes how, in August 1730, he and his brother walked with young Morgan to the Castle prison. The Holy Club was earnest and generous, but it was also a religion of effort. Its members hoped to become holy by doing everything God commanded, as fully as they could.

2.Why Georgia? Oglethorpe and the New Colony

Georgia had received its royal charter in 1732. Its leading founder, General James Oglethorpe, was a soldier and Member of Parliament who wanted to give poor English families a new start, to shelter persecuted Protestants from Europe, and to protect the southern edge of the British colonies against Spanish Florida. A board of Trustees in London governed the colony. Savannah was founded in 1733. The Trustees needed a minister, and Oglethorpe knew the Wesley family. After their father Samuel died in April 1735, John agreed to go, and Charles went too, as Oglethorpe’s secretary. Wesley states his purpose plainly on the first page. He did not go to escape poverty or to gain riches or honour, but “singly this,—to save our souls; to live wholly to the glory of God.” In letters of the time he added a second hope: to preach to the Native peoples of America, whom he imagined as simple hearers, ready to receive the gospel without the corruptions of Europe. Both hopes will be tested. Two other young men from the Oxford circle sailed with the brothers: Benjamin Ingham of Queen’s College and Charles Delamotte, the son of a London merchant.

3.A Floating Holy Club

The four friends boarded the Simmonds at Gravesend on 14 October 1735. Contrary winds held the ship for weeks off the English coast, and they did not clear the Isle of Wight until 10 December. They used the time exactly as they had used their time at Oxford. Wesley records their daily rule. “From four in the morning till five, each of us used private prayer.” Then came two hours of Bible study together, which they carefully compared with “the writings of the earliest ages.” There was public prayer, study of languages, teaching the children, and visits to passengers in their cabins. At noon they met to give account to one another of what they had done and what they intended to do. They gave up meat and wine and later suppers, believing that self-denial in small things would help their souls. On the first Sunday Wesley “now first preached extempore,” that is, without a written text, and gave Communion to six or seven people. He also baptized a family of former Quakers after careful instruction. When a recovering woman asked to be taught about the Lord’s Supper, he decided she first needed teaching “in the nature of Christianity,” and read William Law’s Christian Perfection with her every day. This is the young Wesley at his best and at his most demanding: tireless, orderly, and pastoral, but with a faith that rests heavily on discipline.

4.The Germans on Board

Twenty-six German passengers were travelling to Georgia. They belonged to the Moravian Church, the renewed Unity of the Brethren, which had found refuge on the estate of Count Nicolaus von Zinzendorf at Herrnhut in Saxony. Their leader on board was David Nitschmann, a bishop. On the third day Wesley began to learn German “in order to converse with the Germans,” and Nitschmann and two others began to learn English. Wesley prays that they may be “not only of one tongue, but of one mind and of one heart.” He watched these people closely. They did the dirty and humble work that the English passengers refused, and they took no pay for it, saying it was “good for their proud hearts” and that “their loving Saviour had done more for them.” When they were pushed or struck, they simply got up and walked away without complaint. Wesley admired their humility and meekness. He did not yet understand where it came from.

5.Three Storms and an Honest Confession

January 1736 brought violent weather. On 17 January the sea broke over the ship and flooded the cabin where Wesley sat. He lay down not knowing whether he would wake alive, and “much ashamed of my unwillingness to die.” He writes: “O how pure in heart must he be, who would rejoice to appear before God at a moment’s warning!” After an earlier night storm he had already confessed that the tossing ship “plainly showed I was unfit, for I was unwilling, to die.” A second storm came on 23 January, and he asked himself the question of Jesus to the disciples: “How is it that thou hast no faith?” The third storm, on Sunday 25 January, was the worst. The Moravians were singing a psalm at their evening service when the sea split the mainsail, covered the ship and poured in between the decks. “A terrible screaming began among the English. The Germans calmly sung on.” Afterwards Wesley asked one of them, “Was you not afraid?” He answered, “I thank God, no.” Wesley pressed him: were not the women and children afraid? “No; our women and children are not afraid to die.” Wesley went straight to the frightened English passengers and pointed out the difference between those who fear God and those who do not. Then he wrote: “This was the most glorious day which I have hitherto seen.”

6.What the Storm Revealed

We should notice what Wesley is honest enough to record. The point of the storm story is not the danger of the sea but the condition of his own heart. He has given up wealth, comfort and country. He prays four hours a day and fasts often. Yet when death comes near he is afraid, and a group of simple German craftsmen and farmers are not. He also notices something about the sailors. After the first storm most of them denied they had been in any danger at all, and he concludes that people cannot “long obey God from fear, who are deaf to the motives of love.” Without yet seeing it, he has written his own diagnosis. His religion, too, rested more on duty and fear than on a settled confidence in the love of God. The Moravians had something he lacked, and he will spend the next two and a half years trying to find out what it was. On 5 February the ship entered the Savannah River. Wesley describes the pine groves along the shore as “the bloom of spring in the depth of winter,” and the evening lesson seemed to speak to the mission: “A great door, and effectual, is opened.” He adds a prayer: “O let no one shut it!”

7.What a Methodist or Nazarene Pastor Takes from It

Every Wesleyan church today, from the United Methodist Church to the Church of the Nazarene and the Wesleyan and Free Methodist churches, traces its story back through Aldersgate to this ship. Several lessons stand out. First, method is not the enemy of grace. The Holy Club’s rule of prayer, study, accountability and service would later become the backbone of Methodist societies, classes and bands. What changed after 1738 was not the discipline but the foundation under it. Second, honesty about one’s own spiritual state is a pastoral gift. Wesley did not hide his fear; he wrote it down and published it. Pastors who admit their own need make it easier for their people to admit theirs. Third, God often teaches us through Christians of another tradition. The Moravians were German Pietists, heirs of the Lutheran Reformation and the old Czech Brethren, not Anglicans. Wesley learned their language in order to learn from them. A pastor in Mexico who learns from believers of another church, or another tongue, stands in that tradition. Finally, fear of death is a real test of faith. Wesley did not ask whether he was religious enough. He asked whether he could die in peace.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Wesley’s day on board was planned from four in the morning to ten at night. What rhythm of prayer and Scripture shapes your own day, and does it rest on duty or on love? The Moravians were “not afraid to die.” What would you have answered if Wesley had asked you, “Was you not afraid?” And who are the Christians outside your own church from whom God may want to teach you something you have not yet learned?

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Reading 2 · The Georgia Ministry

A Strange Land

A CTS digest of John Wesley, Journal, 6 Feb 1736 – 22 Dec 1737; Works, ed. Thomas Jackson (3rd ed., 1872), vol. 1

Wesley’s twenty-two months in Savannah: Spangenberg’s question, “Do you know he has saved you?”; a strict High Church ministry and the first little societies; respectful conversations with Tomo Chachi and Chickasaw warriors beside a prejudiced second-hand summary of Native peoples; compassion for enslaved Africans in Carolina; and the Sophia Hopkey affair and lawsuit that drove him from Georgia in December 1737.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

A Strange Land: Wesley’s Ministry in Georgia, 1736–1737

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — Wesley’s twenty-two months as minister of Savannah: a searching question from a Moravian pastor, a hard and divided parish, encounters with Native and African people, a painful scandal, and a night departure

A CTS digest of John Wesley’s Journal, 6 February 1736 – 22 December 1737, as printed in The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, ed. Thomas Jackson (3rd ed., 1872), vol. 1. The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Journal, Feb 1736 – Dec 1737
Primary source
Savannah and Frederica
John Wesley

A word before you read. This is the longest and in some ways the most uncomfortable reading in the course. Wesley went to Georgia full of zeal and came home, in his own words, having preached the gospel there “not as I ought, but as I was able.” The Journal shows a faithful, hard-working pastor, but also a rigid one who made serious mistakes. It also records his attitudes toward Native Americans and enslaved Africans, some of them generous and some of them deeply prejudiced. CTS asks you to read all of it honestly. Wesley’s heirs are not served by a cleaned-up hero.

1.Spangenberg’s Questions

The day after landing, Wesley met August Gottlieb Spangenberg, a pastor of the Moravian settlers in Savannah. Wesley asked his advice about his own conduct. Spangenberg answered with questions. “Have you the witness within yourself? Does the Spirit of God bear witness with your spirit, that you are a child of God?” Wesley was surprised and did not know what to say. Spangenberg asked, “Do you know Jesus Christ?” Wesley said, “I know he is the Saviour of the world.” “True,” said the Moravian, “but do you know he has saved you?” Wesley answered, “I hope he has died to save me.” Then he adds a painful line to his own Journal: “But I fear they were vain words.” The question of assurance, that a believer may know by the witness of the Spirit that he is a child of God (Romans 8:16), had been put to him at the door of his ministry. He would carry it for more than two years. A few weeks later Wesley lodged with the Moravians and watched them elect and ordain a bishop. Their simplicity made him almost forget “the seventeen hundred years between,” as if he were among the apostles.

2.A Strict Pastor in Savannah

Wesley began his ministry in Savannah on 7 March 1736, preaching on 1 Corinthians 13. The church was crowded and the people attentive, yet he wrote that he could hardly believe how many of them would later turn against the preacher. He was right. Wesley served the colony as a High Church Anglican who meant to follow the Prayer Book to the letter, as he believed the early church had done. He baptized an infant, Mary Welch, “by immersion,” as the rubric of the Church of England then directed for healthy children. When another mother refused to have her child dipped, he would not pour water unless the parents declared the child weak, and the child was baptized by someone else. He divided the Sunday services into an early morning service, a late morning service with Communion, and an afternoon service. He refused Communion to those who had not given their names the day before, and he would not accept godparents who were not communicants. He visited every household in the heat of the day, from noon to three, when people could not work. Many respected his devotion. Many others found him harsh, and his sermons were taken as personal attacks.

3.Little Societies and a Wider Flock

In April 1736, finding no door yet open to preach to the Native peoples, Wesley and his friends decided how to serve “the little flock at Savannah.” They agreed to advise the more serious members “to form themselves into a sort of little society,” meeting once or twice a week “to reprove, instruct, and exhort one another,” and to choose from these a smaller group for closer fellowship. Wesley later called this the second beginning of Methodism, after the Holy Club at Oxford. He wrote to Dr. Bray’s Associates, who had sent a parish library, describing a children’s school taught by Delamotte, catechism every Saturday and Sunday, and meetings at his house for prayer, singing and mutual exhortation. Savannah was a mixed colony, and Wesley tried to reach all of it. He read prayers in French at Highgate, in German at Hampstead, and in Italian to a few Vaudois. In April 1737 he began to learn Spanish “to converse with my Jewish parishioners,” some of whom, he wrote, seemed nearer the mind of Christ than many who called Christ Lord. Frederica, the military town to the south, was harder. A leading man there told him to his face, “I like nothing you do,” and in January 1737 Wesley left Frederica for good in “an utter despair of doing good there.”

4.Native Americans: Respect, Hope and Prejudice

Wesley had come above all to preach to the Native peoples, and the Journal records several meetings with them. Within a week of landing, the Yamacraw leader Tomo Chachi came aboard and spoke through the interpreter Mary Musgrove. He was glad the missionaries had come, but warned, “We would not be made Christians as the Spaniards make Christians: We would be taught, before we are baptized.” In July 1736 Wesley questioned a group of Chickasaw warriors about God, the soul and the afterlife, and recorded their answers in full and with evident respect. One of them, Paustoobee, said they would be glad to hear the “great word” if they were ever at peace, but that now they had time only to fight. The Creek elder Chicali told him that white men build great houses “as if they were to live for ever.” Yet Wesley never went to live among any nation. Oglethorpe would not let him leave Savannah without a minister, and the frontier was at war. At the end of his stay Wesley wrote a summary of the “Georgian Indians,” drawn, he admits, largely from traders. It is harsh and sweeping. He calls them, except perhaps the Choctaws, “gluttons, drunkards, thieves, dissemblers, liars,” and says the Creeks show no desire to learn Christianity. CTS students should name this plainly. It is second-hand stereotyping, written by a disappointed missionary who had little direct contact with the people he describes. It also contradicts the dignified voices of Tomo Chachi and Paustoobee that Wesley himself had recorded.

5.Enslaved Africans in Carolina

When Georgia was founded, its Trustees forbade slavery in the colony; the ban lasted until 1751. In neighbouring South Carolina, however, enslaved Africans did most of the work on the plantations. On visits there Wesley was moved by what he saw. At Charleston in 1736 he spoke with an enslaved woman who attended church faithfully but had never been told she had a soul, and he cried out, “O God, where are thy tender mercies?” In April 1737, near Ponpon, he spent a day teaching a young enslaved woman about God and the soul, and was struck by how carefully she listened. Elsewhere a lame man told him he would crawl to church if there were one within reach. Wesley proposed a plan: to find serious planters and go from plantation to plantation teaching those they held as slaves. He saw these men and women as souls for whom Christ died, and he blamed their masters for neglecting them. But in these pages he does not yet condemn slavery itself, and his language for them, “these outcasts of men,” reflects his age. Decades later he would. In 1774 he published Thoughts upon Slavery, and in 1791 his last letter, written to William Wilberforce, urged him on against the slave trade.

6.Sophia Hopkey and the End of the Mission

The mission ended in a painful personal affair. Sophia Hopkey was the niece of Thomas Causton, the chief magistrate and storekeeper of Savannah. Wesley gave her spiritual instruction, and the two grew close. He considered marriage but hesitated, partly from his own doubts and partly on the advice of friends. On 4 March 1737 he records, without naming the matter, “directions” he received from God about “an affair of the greatest importance.” From his private papers we know that he and his friends drew lots, a practice he had learned from the Moravians, and that the lot told him not to marry. That same month Sophia married William Williamson. In July Wesley privately rebuked her for things he thought blameworthy in her conduct, and on 7 August he refused her Communion, citing the Prayer Book rule that communicants must give notice beforehand. Her husband and uncle took him to court. Causton told the town that Wesley had acted “purely out of revenge” because she had refused him. A grand jury, which Wesley says was packed with his opponents, brought ten charges against him. Twelve jurors signed a protest calling the case an artifice of Causton. Wesley appeared at court again and again but was never given a hearing. On 2 December 1737 the magistrates ordered that he must not leave the colony. That evening, after prayers, he “shook off the dust” of his feet and slipped away by boat to Carolina. On 22 December he sailed for England.

7.What a Methodist or Nazarene Pastor Takes from It

Georgia was a failure by Wesley’s own measure, yet much of later Methodism was planted there: small societies for mutual care, preaching in several languages, schools, and the conviction that every person, whatever their nation or condition, has a soul God loves. A pastor today can also learn from Wesley’s mistakes. Rules applied without wisdom divide a congregation. A pastor should never exercise church discipline in a matter where his own heart is involved; Wesley may have acted on principle, but he could not be seen as impartial. Missions fail when we never actually live among the people we hope to reach, and our reports about them become unfair when we rely on others’ opinions. And above all, Spangenberg’s question remains the right one to ask a minister: not “Are you working hard?” but “Do you know he has saved you?”

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. How would you answer Spangenberg’s questions today? Where in your ministry might strictness be hiding a lack of love or wisdom? When have your personal feelings made it hard to act fairly as a leader, and what safeguards would help? Tomo Chachi asked to be taught before being baptized. What does it look like to respect the dignity and voice of people from another culture as you share the gospel with them?

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Reading 3 · Böhler and Aldersgate

A Heart Strangely Warmed

A CTS digest of John Wesley, Journal, 1 Feb – 24 May 1738; Works, ed. Thomas Jackson (3rd ed., 1872), vol. 1

Back in England, Wesley meets the Moravian Peter Böhler, who convinces him that saving faith is a sure trust in Christ that brings peace and power over sin and may be given in a moment. The Fetter Lane society forms its bands, Charles Wesley finds peace, and on 24 May 1738 John feels his heart “strangely warmed” at Aldersgate Street.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

A Heart Strangely Warmed: Peter Böhler, Assurance and Aldersgate

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — the four months from Wesley’s return to England to the evening of 24 May 1738, when he heard Luther’s preface to Romans read in a London meeting and came to trust in Christ alone

A CTS digest of John Wesley’s Journal, 1 February – 24 May 1738, as printed in The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, ed. Thomas Jackson (3rd ed., 1872), vol. 1. The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Journal, Feb – May 1738
Primary source
Aldersgate
John Wesley

A word before you read. This is the most famous passage Wesley ever wrote, and every Methodist, Wesleyan and Nazarene student should know it well. But it is best understood as the end of a journey, not as a sudden bolt from a clear sky. The pages before 24 May show a man being argued, step by step, out of trust in his own righteousness and into trust in Christ. Read slowly, and watch how Scripture, conversation, testimony and the prayers of the Church all play their part.

1.Home from Georgia

Wesley landed at Deal on 1 February 1738 and reached London two days later, after an absence of “two years and near four months.” He tried to count the blessings of the failed mission. God had humbled him and “shown me what was in my heart.” He had lost his fear of the sea. He had come to know the Moravians, and through them the writings of devout people in German, Spanish and Italian. And everyone in Georgia, he said, had at least heard the word of God. He reported honestly to the Georgia Trustees about the state of the colony, “not a little differing” from the reports they usually received, and he handed back the document that had appointed him minister of Savannah. He also began to preach in London churches. Again and again the Journal adds the same note after a sermon: he was told he was to preach there no more. His message of a religion of the heart offended respectable congregations even before he had found the faith he would later preach.

2.Peter Böhler: “Preach Faith till You Have It”

On 7 February, a day he calls “much to be remembered,” Wesley met Peter Böhler, a young Moravian minister just arrived from Germany on his way to Carolina. Wesley found him lodgings and spent every possible hour with him. At first, he admits, “I understood him not.” Böhler told him in Latin, “My brother, my brother, that philosophy of yours must be purged away.” On 5 March, at Oxford, Wesley was “clearly convinced of unbelief, of the want of that faith whereby alone we are saved.” Immediately the thought struck him: how could he preach to others, if he had no faith himself? He asked Böhler whether he should stop preaching. “By no means,” came the reply. “Preach faith till you have it; and then, because you have it, you will preach faith.” Wesley obeyed. The first person to whom he offered salvation by faith alone was a condemned prisoner named Clifford. Later that month, with his friend Charles Kinchin, he prayed in Oxford Castle with another condemned man, who rose from his knees and said, “I am now ready to die. I know Christ has taken away my sins.” Notice a small but important detail. Jackson prints a footnote Wesley added in later editions, explaining that the faith he lacked was faith “with the full Christian salvation.” The older Wesley did not want readers to think he had no faith at all before 1738.

3.Faith in a Moment?

By late April Wesley had no objection to Böhler’s definition of faith, which he gives in the words of the Church of England’s homilies: “a sure trust and confidence which a man hath in God, that through the merits of Christ his sins are forgiven.” He also accepted that holiness and happiness are the fruits of this living faith. What he could not accept was “an instantaneous work”: how could a person be turned “from darkness to light” in a moment? So he searched the Scriptures, especially the Acts of the Apostles, and found “scarce any instances there of other than instantaneous conversions.” He retreated to his last defence: perhaps God worked that way in the first ages, but times had changed. On Sunday 23 April Böhler brought living witnesses who told how God had given them such faith in a moment. “Here ended my disputing,” Wesley writes. “I could now only cry out, Lord, help thou my unbelief!” This is a model of how Wesley would always test doctrine: first by Scripture, and then by the experience of real believers, with Scripture as the final rule.

4.The Fetter Lane Society and Charles’s Pentecost

On 1 May 1738, on Böhler’s advice, Wesley and his friends formed a society in London that soon met in Fetter Lane. Its rules, printed in the Journal, are the seed of much later Methodist life. Members would meet weekly “to confess our faults one to another, and pray one for another, that we may be healed” (James 5:16). They were divided into “bands,” little companies of five to ten, where each person was to speak freely and plainly about “the real state of his heart.” New members were received on trial for two months. There were days of intercession and a regular love-feast. Böhler sailed for Carolina on 4 May, and Wesley wrote, “O what a work hath God begun, since his coming into England!” Charles Wesley, who had at first resisted what he called “the new faith,” was won over and, during an illness, found peace on Whitsunday, 21 May 1738. John received the news that his brother “had found rest to his soul.” For the next three days John himself felt “continual sorrow and heaviness.” In a letter he wrote that he knew God’s law was holy and that he deserved only wrath, yet he heard a voice saying, “Believe, and thou shalt be saved.”

5.Wesley Tells His Own Story

Before describing 24 May, Wesley pauses to tell the whole story of his religious life in numbered paragraphs. As a child he was taught that he could be saved only “by universal obedience.” At school he hoped to be saved by not being as bad as others, by having a kindness for religion, and by Bible reading, church and prayers. At Oxford he read Thomas à Kempis and William Law and resolved to keep God’s whole law, inward and outward. In 1730 he began visiting prisons and the sick, giving away all he could and fasting twice a week. Yet when he thought himself near death, all this gave him no assurance of acceptance with God. He had been “building on the sand.” On the voyage the Moravians tried to show him “a more excellent way,” but he was “too learned and too wise.” In Georgia he was “beating the air,” trying to establish his own righteousness. Böhler’s claim that true faith brings dominion over sin and constant peace from a sense of forgiveness seemed to him “a new Gospel.” But Scripture and the witnesses convinced him, and he resolved to seek this faith by renouncing all dependence on his own works and by continual prayer for it.

6.Aldersgate Street, a Quarter before Nine

On the morning of Wednesday 24 May, Wesley opened his New Testament on the promise that we may be “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4), and then on the words, “Thou art not far from the kingdom of God.” In the afternoon at St. Paul’s Cathedral the choir sang Psalm 130: “Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord.” Then comes the passage every Methodist knows. “In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate-Street, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans.” About a quarter before nine, while the reader described the change God works in the heart through faith in Christ, “I felt my heart strangely warmed.” He continues: “I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation.” And “an assurance was given me, that he had taken away my sins, even mine.” He began at once to pray for those who had mistreated him, and he told everyone present what he now felt. Doubts came quickly: “This cannot be faith; for where is thy joy?” He learned that peace and victory over sin belong to faith, but that God gives or withholds the transports of joy as he wills. Temptations returned that night, but now, he says, “I was always conqueror.”

7.What a Methodist or Nazarene Pastor Takes from It

Aldersgate is often called Wesley’s conversion, and Methodists around the world remember 24 May as Aldersgate Day. Some historians prefer to call it his evangelical assurance, since Wesley had been a sincere and baptized believer for years, and he himself later spoke of having had the faith of a servant before he received the faith of a son. Both views agree on what changed: Wesley moved from trusting his own efforts to trusting Christ alone, and he received the witness of the Spirit that he was forgiven. Nazarene and other holiness churches add that this was the beginning, not the end, of Wesley’s teaching about grace; he would go on to preach that the same faith that justifies also leads on to entire sanctification. For a pastor today the lessons are practical. Assurance is a privilege of ordinary believers, not only of saints. Feelings vary, but trust in Christ is the ground. God uses means: Scripture, the prayers of the Church, a small group, a friend’s counsel, and a text read aloud by an unnamed layperson in a back room. And the pastor’s own heart matters. Wesley had to receive what he hoped to preach.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Read again Wesley’s list of the things he once hoped to be saved by. Which of them have you trusted at some point? Böhler told Wesley to “preach faith till you have it.” Is that wise counsel for a doubting pastor, and why? Wesley went to Aldersgate Street “very unwillingly.” When has God met you in a place you did not want to go? And how would you describe, in your own words, the difference between knowing that Christ is the Saviour of the world and knowing that he has taken away your sins?

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Reading 4 · Bristol and Field Preaching

Submitting to Be More Vile

A CTS digest of John Wesley, Journal, 31 Mar – 30 Jun 1739; Works, ed. Thomas Jackson (3rd ed., 1872), vol. 1

In April 1739 Wesley follows George Whitefield to Bristol and, overcoming his love of church order, “submitted to be more vile,” preaching in the open air to thousands, among them the Kingswood colliers. He preaches free grace for all, tests dramatic bodily signs by their fruits and by Scripture, lays the first stone of the New Room, and claims all the world as his parish.

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The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

Submitting to Be More Vile: Bristol and the Turn to Field Preaching

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — the spring of 1739, when George Whitefield drew Wesley to Bristol, Wesley preached in the open air for the first time, the colliers of Kingswood heard the gospel, and the New Room began to rise

A CTS digest of John Wesley’s Journal, 31 March – 30 June 1739, as printed in The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, ed. Thomas Jackson (3rd ed., 1872), vol. 1. The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Journal, Mar – Jun 1739
Primary source
Bristol and Kingswood
John Wesley

A word before you read. Between Aldersgate and this reading, Wesley spent the summer of 1738 visiting the Moravians in Germany, including Count Zinzendorf at Herrnhut, and the winter preaching in London societies. The evangelical revival was already stirring in England, Wales and New England. In the spring of 1739 it burst out of the churches and into the fields. This reading shows the birth of the Methodist movement as a mass movement among the poor. It also shows strange scenes of people crying out and falling down, which Wesley reports in detail. Read them with care: Wesley himself insisted they be judged by their fruits.

1.George Whitefield and the Fields

George Whitefield (1714–1770) had been a younger member of the Holy Club at Oxford. By 1739 he was the most famous preacher in England, a man of extraordinary voice and dramatic power. When London pulpits closed to him, he went out to preach in the open air, first to the coal miners of Kingswood, near Bristol, in February 1739. Thousands came. He was about to sail for Georgia and begged Wesley to come and take over the work. Wesley’s friends at Fetter Lane were divided; they finally decided by lot that he should go. He reached Bristol on 31 March and watched Whitefield preach in the open air the next day. His honest reaction tells us much about him: “I could scarce reconcile myself at first to this strange way of preaching in the fields.” He had been all his life so attached to “decency and order” that he “should have thought the saving of souls almost a sin, if it had not been done in a church.” Wesley was a loyal priest of the Church of England, and field preaching seemed to him close to disorder.

2.2 April 1739: “I Submitted to Be More Vile”

The next evening Wesley began explaining the Sermon on the Mount to a small society in Nicholas Street, and he notes with a touch of humour that it is “one pretty remarkable precedent of field-preaching.” Then, on Monday 2 April, at four in the afternoon, he took the step that changed his life. “I submitted to be more vile, and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation.” The phrase recalls King David, who was willing to be “more vile” for the Lord’s sake (2 Samuel 6:22). Wesley stood on a little rise of ground outside the city and preached to about three thousand people. His text was Luke 4:18: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor.” He believed that these words are fulfilled in every true minister of Christ. From that day the pattern was set. Within a few weeks he was preaching at Baptist Mills, on Hanham Mount, at Rose Green, at the Bowling Green in the city, at Bath, and at Two Mile Hill to the colliers. His congregations ranged from one thousand to, as he estimated, ten thousand.

3.The Colliers of Kingswood and Free Grace

Kingswood was a district of coal pits east of Bristol whose people had no church of their own, little schooling, and a reputation for drunkenness and violence. Wesley’s Journal lists his weekly round: every morning prayers and preaching at Newgate prison, every evening a society meeting, and open-air preaching in Kingswood and around Bristol through the week. His theme was what he calls the free grace of God offered to all. On 26 April, preaching in Newgate, he was led to declare “strongly and explicitly” that God wills all people to be saved, and he asked God to bear witness to his word if it were true. Several people sank to the ground at once. This emphasis matters. Whitefield and many other revival preachers were Calvinists who taught that God had chosen only some for salvation. Wesley taught that Christ “gave himself a ransom for all.” In 1739 he published a sermon called Free Grace, and the disagreement eventually led to a painful separation from Whitefield in 1741, although the two men later renewed their friendship.

4.Crying Out and Falling Down

The most puzzling pages of this reading describe people who cried out, trembled or fell to the ground under the preaching, and then rose “full of peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.” A physician who suspected fraud stood close to a woman at Newgate until he was convinced it was neither fraud nor natural illness. A Quaker who scorned these “dissimulations” fell down himself. A weaver, named only by his initials in the Journal but usually identified as John Haydon, who had gone about calling it all a delusion of the devil, was seized at home while reading a sermon on salvation by faith. Wesley prayed with him until he was set free. Wesley was asked again and again, “How can these things be?” His answer is careful. He does not judge by the tears, fits or cries, which “are not the fruits,” but by the change of life that follows: “him that was a lion till then, and is now a lamb.” Later in June he warned the Bristol society not to rely on visions, dreams, tears or “involuntary effects wrought upon their bodies,” but to test every spirit by “the Law and the Testimony,” that is, by Scripture. The Scottish minister Ralph Erskine wrote that such outward signs may come from God, from nature, or even from Satan, and that the main thing is the fruit of a holy life. That balance is still wise.

5.The New Room and Beau Nash

On 9 May the Bristol societies took possession of a piece of ground in the Horsefair, and on 12 May the first stone was laid of what came to be called the New Room, the oldest Methodist chapel in the world. Wesley had intended trustees to bear the cost and the control. But Whitefield and the London friends warned that trustees could one day “turn me out of the room I had built” if they disliked his preaching, so Wesley took the whole responsibility, and a debt of more than one hundred and fifty pounds, on himself. A few weeks later a school for the colliers’ children was begun in Kingswood. Opposition came too. At Bath on 5 June the famous master of fashion, Richard “Beau” Nash, confronted Wesley and asked by what authority he preached. Wesley answered: by the authority of Jesus Christ, conveyed to him by the Archbishop of Canterbury when he was ordained. Nash called the gathering an illegal meeting and said the preaching frightened people out of their wits. Wesley asked whether he had ever heard him preach. He had not. An old woman in the crowd finished the argument: “You, Mr. Nash, take care of your body; we take care of our souls.”

6.“All the World as My Parish”

Wesley knew that many clergy thought he had no right to preach in other men’s parishes. In June he printed part of a letter answering a friend who had urged him to settle in college or accept a parish. Wesley replied that he allowed no rule of faith or practice except the Holy Scriptures. God commanded him to instruct the ignorant and reform the wicked; man forbade him to do it in another’s parish, “that is, in effect, to do it at all,” since he had no parish of his own. Then come the famous words: “I look upon all the world as my parish.” He meant that wherever he was, it was his duty to declare the gospel to all who were willing to hear. In June he went briefly to London, where the Fetter Lane society was in confusion. With Whitefield he preached at Blackheath to perhaps twelve or fourteen thousand, and soon afterwards in Moorfields and on Kennington Common. Back in Bristol he met Howel Harris, the leader of the Welsh revival. Among those struck down in Bristol on 21 May was a young man named Thomas Maxfield, who would later become one of Wesley’s first lay preachers.

7.What a Methodist or Nazarene Pastor Takes from It

Field preaching made Methodism a movement of the people. The Church of the Nazarene, whose founders spoke of preaching to the poor, and the many Methodist churches that grew in mining towns, city streets and rural villages, all stand in this tradition. Three lessons follow. First, faithfulness sometimes requires a minister to give up his own preferences and dignity. Wesley never stopped loving order, but he “submitted to be more vile” for the sake of people who would never enter a church. Second, the gospel is for all. Wesley’s free grace preaching is the root of the Wesleyan conviction that no one is beyond the reach of God’s love. Third, revival needs both fire and discernment. Wesley did not suppress strong emotion, but he refused to treat it as proof of anything. He measured the work by changed lives and by Scripture, and he immediately built structures, a room, a school and societies, to care for the people who responded.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. What “decency and order” in your own ministry might God be asking you to lay aside for the sake of people outside the church? Where are the “colliers of Kingswood” in your town today? How do you respond when worship becomes emotional: with suspicion, with enthusiasm, or with patient discernment by the fruit of changed lives? And what would it mean for you to see “all the world” as your parish?

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Reading 5 · The Early Societies

The Old Paths

A CTS digest of John Wesley, Journal, 1 Nov 1739 – 31 Dec 1740; Works, ed. Thomas Jackson (3rd ed., 1872), vol. 1

Wesley resists Philipp Molther’s teaching that seekers should “be still” and give up prayer, Scripture and the Lord’s Supper, insisting instead on degrees of faith and the means of grace. In July 1740 he leaves the Fetter Lane society, gathers his followers at the Foundery, cares for the poor, and lays the groundwork for the bands, classes and General Rules of Methodism.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

The Old Paths: Stillness, the Foundery and the Shaping of the Societies

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — November 1739 to December 1740, when a quarrel over “stillness” divided the Fetter Lane society, Wesley led his followers to the Foundery, and the discipline of the Methodist societies began to take shape

A CTS digest of John Wesley’s Journal, 1 November 1739 – 31 December 1740, as printed in The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, ed. Thomas Jackson (3rd ed., 1872), vol. 1. The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Journal, Nov 1739 – Dec 1740
Primary source
Fetter Lane and the Foundery
John Wesley

A word before you read. Revivals are exciting at the beginning and difficult in the second year. This reading shows Wesley as a pastor and organizer more than as a preacher. He has to deal with false teaching inside his own fellowship, with mobs outside it, with poverty among his people, and with the first signs of a division over predestination. The controversy at the centre of this reading may seem technical, but it touches a question every Christian faces: how should a person who longs for faith wait for God?

1.Molther and the Doctrine of “Stillness”

When Wesley returned to London in November 1739, the first person he met told him she had been convinced by Philipp Heinrich Molther, a young Moravian minister recently arrived from Germany, that she “never had any faith at all.” Molther had advised her, until she received faith, “to be still, ceasing from outward works.” Others at Fetter Lane were saying the same. The meeting sat in silence for an hour, and members claimed that until a person had true faith he ought not to use “the means of grace,” especially the Lord’s Supper, because “there being no other means than Christ.” Wesley consulted Spangenberg, who was then in London, and agreed with him about the power of faith. But he could not agree that no one has any faith while still troubled by “any doubt or fear,” or that seekers should abstain from the ordinances of God. He met a woman who had been told she had no faith and who replied that Christ had never left her since “He was made known to me in the breaking of bread.” From that one testimony Wesley drew a conclusion that became central to Methodism: there are outward means, the Lord’s Supper among them, through which God ordinarily gives his grace, even to those who do not yet believe.

2.Wesley’s Answer: True Stillness

On 31 December 1739 Wesley spoke at length with Molther, then wrote down the difference between them. Molther believed there are no degrees of faith, so that a person has none at all until he has “the full assurance of faith.” Wesley believed “there are degrees in faith,” and that a person may be justified with a weak faith before all things in him are made new. Molther believed the way to faith is to be still: not to go to church, not to take Communion, not to fast, not to read Scripture, not to do good to others. Wesley believed the way is “to wait for Christ and be still,” but “in using all the means of grace.” He recommended what he called “true stillness,” which he defined as patient waiting upon God “by lowliness, meekness, and resignation” in all the ways of God’s law. In June 1740 he preached a series of expositions on the means of grace. He taught that prayer, searching the Scriptures and the Lord’s Supper are ordained by God for all who need grace, believers and unbelievers alike. He even called the Lord’s Supper “a converting ordinance,” since many of his hearers knew their conversion had begun at the Lord’s table. All that is required to come, he said, is a sense of our need: anyone who knows he is fit for hell is “just fit to come to Christ.”

3.The Break with Fetter Lane

For months Wesley tried to keep the society together. In April 1740 some thirty people told him they had been pressed to deny what God had done in their souls and to give up prayer and Scripture. One member insisted that believers were no more bound by the commands of the New Testament than English subjects were bound by the laws of the King of France. On 16 July Wesley read aloud a passage from a mystical book teaching that, for one not yet born of God, reading the Scriptures and praying were “deadly poison.” A leading member, Mr. Bell, answered at once that this was the truth. When someone asked whether Wesley would still be allowed to preach at Fetter Lane, the answer was no: the place was now “taken for the Germans.” On Sunday 20 July 1740, at the end of the love-feast, Wesley read a statement. The members had taught for nine months that there is no such thing as weak faith and that seekers should not use the ordinances. He believed this flatly contrary to the word of God and had borne with them long. “You that are of the same judgment, follow me.” He walked out, and eighteen or nineteen went with him. Three days later, he writes, “Our little company met at the Foundery, instead of Fetter-Lane.” About twenty-five men had joined them, and forty-seven or forty-eight of the fifty women who were in bands.

4.The Foundery

The Foundery was a large, ruined building in Moorfields, on the edge of the City of London, which had once been a royal foundry for casting cannon. Wesley acquired it late in 1739 and repaired it at great cost. It became the first headquarters of London Methodism: a preaching house holding well over a thousand people, a meeting room for the bands, a schoolroom, a dispensary for the sick, and living quarters where Wesley’s mother Susanna spent her last years. From now on the Methodist societies were Wesley’s own, though he insisted that they remained within the Church of England. In this reading the Foundery is also a place of conflict. In September 1740 a crowd pushed into the middle of it and began to shout, but Wesley read on, and “the hammer of the word brake the rocks in pieces.” Several times mobs surrounded his door. Wesley walked out among them, spoke to them of the mercy of God, and was often sent away with blessings. He believed opposition only weakened the devil’s cause.

5.Caring for the Poor, Holding the Discipline

The early societies were not only prayer meetings. During the hard frost of January 1740 Wesley took three collections in Bristol for unemployed families outside Lawford’s Gate, and they were able to feed one hundred, sometimes one hundred and fifty people a day. In November the London society gathered clothes for its poorest members. In December, to keep the unemployed “at once from want and from idleness,” they employed twelve of the poorest, with a teacher, in carding and spinning cotton in the society room. Wesley also worked hard at discipline in the gentle sense of the word. When members were offended with one another, he made accusers speak “face to face with the accused,” and most offences “vanished away.” He reminded the Kingswood bands to know “nothing but Christ crucified.” He wrote that he wanted his religion to be “plain, artless, simple,” with meekness, temperance, patience, faith and love as its highest gifts. By the end of 1740 a new storm was gathering. A man named Acourt demanded the right to argue for predestination wherever he went, and at Kingswood the schoolmaster and preacher John Cennick turned cold to Wesley because, he said, Wesley “did not preach the truth” about election. The Calvinist division with Whitefield and Cennick would come in 1741.

6.What Grew from This: Societies, Bands and Classes

The pattern visible in this reading soon became the Methodist “connexion.” Wesley called the people who left Fetter Lane with him the United Society. Within it, the bands continued: small groups of believers of the same sex who confessed their sins to one another, as the Fetter Lane rules had required. In February 1742, at Bristol, the society agreed that every member who could would give a penny a week to pay the debt on the New Room, and divided the members into “classes” of about twelve, each with a leader who collected the money. The leaders soon found that visiting their members each week was the best way to know their spiritual state, and the class meeting became the heart of Methodist pastoral care. In 1743 Wesley published the General Rules, which asked members to show their desire for salvation by doing no harm, by doing good, and by attending upon all the ordinances of God. That third rule is the answer to Molther. The means of grace, in Wesley’s plan, are not a substitute for faith but the ordinary place where faith is received and nourished.

7.What a Methodist or Nazarene Pastor Takes from It

The Church of the Nazarene, the Wesleyan Church, the Free Methodists and the many Methodist churches of Latin America all inherited this balance. Grace comes through faith alone, and faith may be weak but real. God’s people wait for him actively, in prayer, Scripture, the Lord’s Supper, worship and works of mercy, not by doing nothing. Small groups need clear rules, wise leaders and the courage to speak face to face. And sometimes a pastor must separate from a fellowship that has abandoned the teaching of Scripture, but only after long patience, and without bitterness. Wesley closed 1740 at Kingswood “wrestling with God in prayer, and praising him for the wonderful work which he had already wrought upon earth.”

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Have you ever been told, or told someone else, that a weak faith is no faith at all? How does Wesley’s teaching on degrees of faith help a struggling believer? Which means of grace do you most neglect, and why? Wesley left Fetter Lane only after nine months of patient argument. What would it take for you to know that the time to separate had come? And what could your congregation do, like the early societies, to keep its poorest members “from want and from idleness”?

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Further Study: Six Public-Domain Works

These six works are for further study, for the student who wants to go on reading. They are not part of the honors reading above: that stays as it is — the five CTS digests, any three read in full and recorded on your honor. All six are in the public domain; each link opens the work online, and most can also be found in the Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg. Most are in English: the Chrome browser can translate a page (right-click, “Translate to…”; on a phone, the browser menu).

The Whole Journal · 1735–1745

1. The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, vol. I

John Wesley; ed. Thomas Jackson · London, 1872; Wesley House Digital Library

Read the journal entries the textbook leaves out, in the 1872 Jackson edition from which its selections were taken.

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Wesley’s Sermons · 1771

2. The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, vol. I

John Wesley · Bristol, 1771

Read the sermons on salvation by faith and assurance that Wesley preached after the years the journal describes, and compare them with his account of Aldersgate.

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A Victorian Life · Tyerman

3. The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley, vol. I

Luke Tyerman · 1870

Set the journal beside a full nineteenth-century life of Wesley covering Georgia, Aldersgate and the first societies. Tyerman’s judgments are his own; weigh them against modern scholarship.

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The Movement Grows · Tyerman

4. The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley, vol. II

Luke Tyerman · 1871

Follow the story past the years of the readings, as the societies spread and Methodism took its settled form.

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The Preaching · Jackson Edition

5. The Sermons of John Wesley (1872 edition)

John Wesley; ed. Thomas Jackson · 1872; Wesley Center Online

Read the sermons in the same 1872 edition as the journal, to hear the preaching the journal keeps mentioning.

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The Journal Online · Wesley Center

6. The Journal of John Wesley

John Wesley · Wesley Center Online

Read on in the journal past 1745, entry by entry. Check which edition the page follows before you quote it.

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Honor attestation: By selecting three readings above, you affirm that you have read those three digests in full. The digests are CTS-authored summaries that may include brief excerpts or adaptations of public-domain works.