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, 1746–1760 (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.

Selected: 0 of 3

Reading 1 · Itinerancy and Pastoral Visits

Physic for the Poor, Snow on the Road

A CTS digest of John Wesley, Journal, 25 November 1746 – 30 March 1747; Works, ed. Thomas Jackson, vol. 2 (imprint year to be confirmed), pp. 39–51 (provisional, from OCR running heads)

Wesley opens a free dispensary for the London poor, rides through mobs at Devizes and a winter of snow to Lincolnshire, visits small societies such as Tetney, where members gave all they had to God, and examines the Newcastle classes one by one, asking not about the heart but about the life.

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.

Physic for the Poor, Snow on the Road: Wesley on Circuit, 1746–1747

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — four months of John Wesley’s Journal, from a free dispensary in London to a winter ride north and the careful examining of the classes at Newcastle

A CTS digest of John Wesley’s Journal for 25 November 1746 to 30 March 1747, as printed in The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, ed. Thomas Jackson, vol. 2. The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Journal, Nov. 1746 – Mar. 1747
Primary source
Itinerancy
Pastoral visits

A word before you read. John Wesley (1703–1791) kept a journal for more than fifty years and published it in instalments. It is not a private diary. It is a public record, written to show what God was doing among the people called Methodists and to answer their critics. Read it as testimony from a busy evangelist, not as a neutral report. This first reading follows him through one winter: in London, on the road to Bristol, through the snow to Lincolnshire, and among the coal and lead miners of the north-east.

1.A Movement Still Finding Its Shape

By late 1746 the Methodist revival was about eight years old. Wesley was still a priest of the Church of England, and so were his brother Charles and a handful of clergy friends. But most of the preaching was now done by lay preachers, men without ordination whom Wesley appointed and moved from place to place. The converts were gathered into “societies.” Each society was divided into “classes” of about a dozen people who met weekly under a lay leader, gave a small offering for the poor, and gave an account of their spiritual lives. The country was nervous. The Jacobite rising of 1745, which tried to restore the Catholic Stuart family to the throne, had only just been crushed. Many people suspected that the Methodists were secret rebels. The very first entry of this reading shows a former member breaking with Wesley because, she said, he was “disaffected to the Government.” Wesley’s comment is sharp, but his deeper concern is pastoral: she had, in his view, left her first love.

2.Medicine as Ministry

On 4 December 1746 Wesley told the London society of his plan of “giving physic to the poor,” that is, free medicine and medical advice. About thirty people came the next day, and about three hundred within three weeks. The work continued for several years, until the number of patients made the cost too great to bear. Wesley notes simply that many who had been ill for months or years were restored to health. In 1747 he published Primitive Physic, a book of simple home remedies for people who could not pay a physician. Much of its medicine is outdated now, and some of it was doubtful even then. The point for us is not the remedies but the instinct. For Wesley, caring for a sick body was part of caring for a soul. The gospel he preached in the open air did not stop at the edge of a person’s physical need. The same weeks show him writing “Lessons for Children” and visiting the fallen: one old member he found “very loving, and very drunk,” and he could do nothing with him.

3.Mobs, Carts and the Winter Road

In January 1747 Wesley rode west. At Devizes the whole town was in uproar, stirred up, he was told, by a local clergyman who went from house to house against him and even posted a crude advertisement mocking the meeting. Wesley preached anyway, and the mob that came in grew quiet. In Bristol a cart knocked his horse down in a narrow street and threw him into the road; the wheel passed close by his side. He got up, cleaned himself, and kept his three o’clock appointment at Wick. Then in February he set out north to take his brother’s place. The entries describe hail, frost, wind “ready to overturn both man and beast,” and roads lost under drifting snow. When his servant said there was no travelling that day, Wesley answered: “At least we can walk twenty miles a day, with our horses in our hands.” This is itinerancy in its plainest form. The preacher went to the people, in all weathers, because the people would not come to him.

4.Pastoral Visits on the Way

The journey through Lincolnshire and Yorkshire is a chain of small pastoral visits. At Epworth, his childhood home, he preached at the market cross. At Grimsby a young gentleman drowned his voice until a poor woman turned the laugh against him. At Tetney he examined a little society whose class-paper showed remarkable giving for the poor. The leader, Micah Elmoor, explained that the single members had agreed “to give both ourselves and all we have to God,” so that they could feed and lodge any stranger who came to the village. At Tealby the local minister had refused the Methodists communion, yet the house filled to hear Wesley. At Acomb he found a member confused by the mystical writer Jacob Boehme, and he pressed him back to Scripture and common sense. At Osmotherley the minister invited Wesley to read prayers and preach in the parish church, and former opponents “seemed now to be melted into love.” Wesley also took time on the road to answer a clergyman’s objection that Methodist preaching at Hunslet did more harm than good. His answer was patient: many people had truly left drunkenness and swearing, and the fault of those who mocked them did not cancel the good done.

5.Examining the Classes

At Newcastle in March Wesley spent days examining the classes one by one. Some people told him that this was impossible without a miraculous gift of discerning spirits. He disagreed. Two things were needed, he wrote: “courage and steadiness in the examiner,” and common sense and common honesty in the leader of each class. The questions were simple. Does this person live in drunkenness or any outward sin? Does he go to church and use the means of grace? Does he meet his class? “The question is not concerning the heart, but the life,” he wrote. The Newcastle society, which had more than eight hundred members in its first year, was now about four hundred. Wesley was not troubled. Quoting an old proverb, he said that here “the half is more than the whole.” Earlier, in London, he had asked the class leaders for written reports. One leader, John Hague, confessed that his class needed advice “plain and cutting, awakening and shaking,” and that he himself felt a lukewarm spirit clinging to him. Discipline in early Methodism was not mainly about expelling people. It was about knowing the flock by name.

6.Among the Miners, and a Warning

Around Newcastle Wesley preached to coal miners and to the lead miners of the hills. At Blanchland he stood on a tombstone in the ruins of an old abbey church while the congregation, gathered from the lead mines, knelt on the grass, and a row of children sat quietly under the wall. At Newlands he rejoiced that a local man, John Brown, had gathered a society, and asked: what may not a person “of small natural talents” do, if he is “full of faith and love”? The reading closes with a sober story. Francis Coxon had once been the main support of the society at Biddick. He grew weary of well-doing, sought the world’s company, and prospered. Then he fell into a quarry and broke his leg. Facing death, he repented with strong cries, found peace again, and died. Wesley tells it as a warning against drifting back. A modern reader need not accept every reading of providence in it to hear the pastoral point: success can cool a heart that hardship never could.

7.What a Wesleyan Pastor Takes from It Today

This is the story of British Methodism in its early years, in English towns and mining villages. It does not describe later global missions. Yet the patterns here travelled far. Within twenty years Methodist lay people carried the class meeting to North America, and later the Wesleyan missionary societies, the American Methodist churches and the Church of the Nazarene (formed in 1908) planted congregations in Africa, Asia, the Pacific and Latin America, often alongside clinics and schools. A Methodist or Nazarene pastor today can take several lessons from these pages. First, go to the people; do not wait for them to come. Second, care for bodies as well as souls, as the London dispensary did. Third, know your members personally and ask plain questions about how they live. Fourth, trust ordinary leaders: a Micah Elmoor or a John Brown can hold a village together. Fifth, seek peace with the local church where you can, as at Osmotherley. A word of care is also needed. Wesley uses “Papists,” the common Protestant term of his day, for Roman Catholics. At Hainton he preached the same grace to “Protestants and Papists” alike, and that is the better part of his example. We should speak of our Catholic neighbours with the same respect we ask for ourselves.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Who are the sick and poor near your church, and what simple, practical care could your congregation offer them? If someone asked the leaders of your small groups how each member is living, could they answer truly? What “weather” keeps you from going to the people, and what would it mean to walk “with our horses in our hands”? And where has success, rather than hardship, cooled your own first love?

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Reading 2 · Societies and the Troubles of Expansion

The Lions of Bolton

A CTS digest of John Wesley, Journal, 21 September – 9 December 1749; Works, ed. Thomas Jackson, vol. 2 (imprint year to be confirmed), pp. 157–169 (provisional, from OCR running heads)

Wesley plants a society at Whitehaven and judges honestly that the work is wide but not deep, repents of refusing communion to the Lutheran pastor Bolzius in Georgia, works alongside Whitefield, faces the Bolton mob with love and tears, and reads the journal of David Brainerd, missionary among the Lenape.

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 Lions of Bolton: Society Ministry and the Troubles of Expansion, 1749

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — eleven weeks of John Wesley’s Journal, from planting a society at Whitehaven to facing the Bolton mob, with letters from Georgia and Rotterdam and a first reading of David Brainerd

A CTS digest of John Wesley’s Journal for 21 September to 9 December 1749, as printed in The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, ed. Thomas Jackson, vol. 2. The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Journal, Sept. – Dec. 1749
Primary source
Societies
Mobs and opposition

A word before you read. In 1749 Methodism was growing fast, and growth brought trouble. New societies had to be formed and taught, and in many towns crowds attacked the preachers, sometimes with the quiet approval of local gentlemen or clergy. This reading shows both sides of expansion: the patient work of building a society, and the danger of preaching where people did not want you. Remember that the Journal is Wesley’s own account, written to encourage his people.

1.Planting a Society at Whitehaven

In late September 1749 the preacher Mr. Cownley urged Wesley to come to Whitehaven, a port on the coast of Cumberland in north-west England. Wesley preached in the market-place and saw that the people were moved. So, after preaching, he asked those who were resolved to serve God to meet him apart from the crowd, and he explained to them “the design, nature, and use of Christian societies.” That evening he began to shape them “into a regular society,” and the next day he examined them one by one. He also preached in the mining villages nearby. At Hensingham, a large colliery, the eagerness of the people reminded him of the early days at Kingswood near Bristol. “O why should we not be always what we were once?” he asked. When he left two weeks later, the new society had more than two hundred members. This is the Methodist pattern in miniature: preach in the open, invite the serious to join, organize them at once, and get to know each one.

2.An Honest Assessment

Wesley did not pretend that every crowd meant revival. On 24 September he caught a fever in church, yet still preached to a large congregation in the market-place. Then he paused to reflect. The work at Whitehaven, he wrote, resembled the work at Athlone in Ireland. “It runs with a swift and a wide stream; but it does not go deep.” Much of the town seemed moved, but very few were truly awakened, and hardly anyone had yet found the pardoning love of God. A few days later he repeated the warning: many seemed affected, but “it soon died away.” This honesty matters. Wesley measured a work not by the size of the crowd but by changed lives. In the same days he rode alone across the fells in mist and storm, lost his way more than once, prayed, and found the road again. He also spent a day in fasting and prayer with John Brown and Mr. Hopper, two of the preachers in the north. Planting a society cost him his strength and his health.

3.A Letter from Georgia

At Whitehaven Wesley received a letter from John Martin Bolzius, pastor of the Lutheran settlers from Salzburg at Ebenezer in Georgia. Wesley had known him during his unhappy mission in Georgia in 1736–1737. Bolzius reported two houses of worship, two schools and several mills, and he asked for help for widows, orphans and the sick. Wesley was deeply moved by the letter’s piety and simplicity. Then he made a painful confession. When he was in Savannah, he had refused to admit this very man to the Lord’s Table, because Bolzius had not been baptized by a minister ordained by a bishop. “Can any one carry High Church zeal higher than this?” he asked, and he added that he had since been “beaten with mine own staff,” for now other clergy were shutting him out. Here is a leader who has learned from his own failure in mission. The young Wesley in Georgia had cared more for church rules than for a fellow servant of Christ; the older Wesley repents of it in print.

4.Working with Whitefield

Early in October a letter came from George Whitefield, asking Wesley to meet him at Leeds. The two men had divided in 1741 over predestination: Whitefield was a Calvinist, Wesley was not. Yet they met as friends. Whitefield preached at Leeds and at Birstal, and Wesley rejoiced that God gave him “strong and persuasive words.” Wesley spent an hour with several of his preachers “in exhortation and prayer.” Later, at Newcastle, he found that Whitefield’s recent visit there had borne lasting fruit. At Birstal Wesley found that even his strong voice could not reach two-thirds of the crowd. After twelve years of field-preaching, he noted, no one could say that people came only because it was new. The lesson for us is simple: doctrinal differences are real, but they need not stop Christians from praying and preaching together.

5.Rochdale and Bolton

On 18 October Wesley rode into Lancashire. At Rochdale the streets were lined with people shouting and cursing, so he preached from a large room open to the street, and the crowd grew quiet. At Bolton it was worse. The “lions at Rochdale,” he wrote, “were lambs in comparison of those at Bolton.” The mob followed the preachers to the house where they stayed, threw one of them down in the mud, broke the windows with stones, rang a bell to call more people, and finally burst into the house. Two of Wesley’s companions spoke to the crowd inside, one with warnings and one with gentle words. Then Wesley walked down into the thickest of them and called for a chair to stand on. “My heart was filled with love, my eyes with tears, and my mouth with arguments,” he wrote. The crowd was amazed, ashamed, and “melted down.” The next morning more people came than the house could hold, and he preached again in a meadow. Afterwards the preachers walked through every street without harm. Wesley never answered violence with violence. He answered it with presence, love and the word of God.

6.Disappointments, Friends and a Missionary’s Journal

Not every door opened. The vicar of Acton invited Wesley to preach in his church and then lost courage. Wesley was not troubled: “I love indeed to preach in a church,” he wrote, but God could work wherever he pleased. At Dudley a crowd threw dirt; at Wednesbury the praying congregation lifted him. “How does a praying congregation strengthen the Preacher!” In November a Latin letter arrived from Johannes de Koker, a friend in Rotterdam. He praised Wesley for tying himself to no sect and urged him to avoid needless disputes. Wesley planned to visit him, but de Koker died first. In London Wesley found a spirit of deadness caused by a few people who kept spreading offence, and he dealt with it until “the plague was stayed.” He buried Martha Somerset, “a mother in Israel.” Then, on 9 December, he read an extract of the journal of David Brainerd (1718–1747), the young missionary to the Lenape (Delaware) people in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. He rejoiced that God had “once more” given repentance to the nations, but he also criticized Brainerd for judging other revivals too severely. Wesley’s phrase for Native Americans, “the Indians,” was the usual term of his time; the people Brainerd served were Lenape, with their own name, language and history.

7.What a Wesleyan Pastor Takes from It Today

These scenes come from British Methodism, in the towns of northern England. They are not a history of world missions. But they already point beyond Britain: a Lutheran pastor in Georgia, a Dutch friend in Rotterdam, and a missionary among the Lenape all appear in these weeks. Later Wesleyan and Nazarene missionaries, and the national pastors who followed them, often met hostility like Bolton’s. In parts of southern Mexico, for example, evangelical families have at times been driven from their villages. A Methodist or Nazarene pastor today can learn several things here. First, gather new believers quickly into small groups, and teach them what the group is for. Second, judge a work by its depth, not its size. Third, admit past mistakes in ministry, as Wesley did with Bolzius. Fourth, work with Christians of other convictions where the gospel is served. Fifth, meet hostility without hatred: go among angry people with love, tears and good reasons. And sixth, read the stories of missionaries in other lands, but read them with discernment, as Wesley read Brainerd.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. When people respond to your preaching, how quickly do you help them into a group where they will be known and cared for? Does the work in your church run swift and wide, or deep? Is there a past decision in your ministry, like Wesley’s with Bolzius, that you need to acknowledge? And when you face opposition, what would it look like to go down among your opponents with a heart full of love?

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Reading 3 · Travel and Pastoral Care in Ireland

Preaching in Irish

A CTS digest of John Wesley, Journal, 13 July – 6 October 1752; Works, ed. Thomas Jackson, vol. 2 (imprint year to be confirmed), pp. 270–275 (provisional, from OCR running heads)

Wesley crosses to Dublin, steadies a society shaken by riot and by conflicting opinions, rides through the midland societies inviting Catholic and Protestant hearers alike to Christ, confers with his preachers at Limerick, examines the Cork society, hears Thomas Walsh preach in Irish at Waterford, and begins a new preaching-house in Cork.

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.

Preaching in Irish: Travel and Pastoral Care in Ireland, 1752

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — twelve weeks of John Wesley’s Journal, from a stormy crossing to Dublin, through the midland societies to Limerick, Cork and Waterford, to a new preaching-house begun in Cork

A CTS digest of John Wesley’s Journal for 13 July to 6 October 1752, as printed in The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, ed. Thomas Jackson, vol. 2. The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Journal, July – Oct. 1752
Primary source
Ireland
Pastoral care

A word before you read. Wesley first visited Ireland in 1747 and crossed the Irish Sea more than twenty times in his life. Ireland was not a simple extension of England. Most of its people were Roman Catholic and many spoke Irish, while political power belonged to a Protestant minority, and the Penal Laws barred Catholics from much of public life. Wesley saw Ireland as a Protestant clergyman of his day. As you read, keep in mind the voices the Journal does not record.

1.Crossing to Dublin

In July 1752 Wesley, now married, waited at Whitehaven for a ship. When at last one was ready, it sailed a quarter of an hour before he reached the quay, so he and his wife boarded another. Contrary winds kept them at sea until 17 July, when they reached Dublin. Wesley was pleased with the new preaching-house there, which had deep galleries on three sides. But the first Sunday was discouraging. The congregation was smaller than he had hoped, the behaviour of the people in St Patrick’s Cathedral shocked him, and many of his evening hearers seemed “utterly unawakened.” He wrote frankly: “I marvel how it is, that after all our labour here, there should still be so little fruit.” A missionary who keeps a journal will write entries like this. Faithful work does not always produce visible results.

2.A Shaken Society

Wesley soon learned the story of a recent riot in Dublin. A mob had broken the windows of the preaching-house and was breaking in when soldiers arrived. The leaders were arrested and tried, but, Wesley reports, the jury acquitted them; he blames the Catholic jurors for pressing the others. We hear only his side of the case, written in a time of deep mistrust between Protestants and Catholics, and we should read it that way. The next day he inquired into the society itself, which still had about four hundred and twenty members, “though many had been much shaken, chiefly by various opinions,” spread even by some of his own preachers. The greatest danger to the society was not the mob outside but confusion within. Wesley’s answer was not to scold from a distance but to visit, inquire and teach. He also cared for individuals. He met a wealthy man he had once known in Bristol, who now had everything the world could give and enjoyed nothing. “May the great Physician heal his sickness!” Wesley prayed.

3.Through the Midland Societies

From Dublin Wesley rode through the small societies of the Irish midlands: Edenderry, Portarlington, Mountmellick, Tullamore, Coolylough, Tyrrellspass and Athlone. He was often ill and hoarse. At Portarlington preaching was painful, but he called it “a comfortable pain.” After meeting friends at Coolylough, he baptized a former Quaker, Joseph English, and two of his children. At Abidarrig many Catholics were present, and Wesley felt “much concern for them.” He spoke to them directly and urged them to rely wholly on “the one Mediator between God and man.” At Athlone he preached on the Connaught side of the river to many Catholics as well as Protestants. In these scenes Wesley does not attack his Catholic hearers; he invites them, as he invited everyone, to trust Christ alone. Today we can share that invitation while also recognizing the faith that many Catholic believers already hold, and the long history of injustice that shaped Irish suspicion of English Protestant preachers.

4.A Good Death at Athlone

At Athlone Wesley heard from her husband the story of Rose Longworth, who had found peace with God in June 1749. In 1751 her strength began to fail. She never complained, being only concerned lest her soul should suffer loss. She asked to be brought back to Athlone to die. In her last hours she prayed for her husband, her parents, the society, the Church “and the whole world,” and then cried, “See my Redeemer!” Wesley records many such deaths. To modern readers they can seem strange or sentimental, but they had a pastoral purpose. In a time of high mortality, early Methodists wanted to show that faith in Christ holds when everything else fails. They also show the place of ordinary women in the movement: Rose Longworth’s witness was remembered and printed. In the same days Wesley met a man of ninety-two, a former army officer, who had begun “to serve the Prince of Peace” only a year or two before.

5.Conference and Discipline in Limerick and Cork

In mid-August Wesley reached Limerick. He spent two days “in conference with our Preachers,” and the next week he spoke with each member of the society. At Cork the crowd on Sunday morning was too large for the house, but Wesley wrote that he “judged a small congregation with peace, preferable to a large one with noise and tumult.” For two days he examined the Cork society carefully and “put away those who did not walk according to the Gospel,” leaving about three hundred who were sincerely striving to keep a clear conscience. This is Methodist oversight at work: the preachers met together, the members were known by name, and membership meant a changed life. At Kinsale soldiers cut a place in a hillside with their swords so that Wesley could stand there to preach, and many soldiers heard him. At Clonmel, by contrast, a room had collapsed after a sermon the year before, and the townspeople had vowed that no Methodist would ever preach there again.

6.Preaching in Irish, and a New House

At Waterford, on 2 September, comes one of the most important lines in this reading: “At eleven Mr. Walsh began preaching in Irish in the market-house.” Thomas Walsh (1730–1759) was an Irish-speaking lay preacher who had grown up a Catholic. It was market day, people came from every side, and many listened seriously. That evening Wesley tried to preach in English at the Court-House, but the mob was so noisy that few could hear. The contrast is telling. The next entry is dated 14 September, because Britain and Ireland had just adopted the New Style (Gregorian) calendar, and eleven days were dropped. Back in Cork, Wesley proposed building a preaching-house. Ten people pledged a hundred pounds the next day, and another hundred came within a few days. A storm then delayed his ship home, and he heard that above thirty ships had been lost on that coast; he saw a “double providence” in the delay. The reading ends on 6 October at Cove, where the inns were full and there was nothing to buy, so the travellers ate eggs and bread and “were well contented.”

7.What a Wesleyan Pastor Takes from It Today

This reading belongs to Irish Methodism within the British movement; it is not a history of later global missions. Yet Irish Methodists became one of its main bridges overseas. Philip Embury and Barbara Heck, from the Palatine Methodist communities of County Limerick, emigrated to New York in 1760, and in 1766 Embury began the Methodist preaching there. Robert Strawbridge, also from Ireland, began Methodist work in Maryland in the 1760s. From American Methodism, and later from the holiness movement, came the missions that eventually reached Mexico and much of Latin America, including the Church of the Nazarene. A pastor or missionary today can learn several lessons here. First, the gospel speaks most clearly in the heart language of the people, as Walsh’s Irish preaching shows; that is why Wesleyan and Nazarene missions have worked in many languages, from Spanish to Indigenous languages. Second, care for the society within as well as the crowd outside. Third, keep membership meaningful. Fourth, invite people of other traditions to Christ without contempt. And fifth, accept hardship and delay with contentment.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Where in your ministry do you see “so little fruit” after much labour, and how do you keep going? In what language do the people you serve pray and dream, and is the gospel reaching them in it? How do you speak of Christians from other traditions in your community? And what would it mean for your church to prefer a smaller congregation “with peace” to a larger one with noise?

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Reading 4 · Discipline and Oversight

One Jarring String

A CTS digest of John Wesley, Journal, 9 April – 24 June 1755; Works, ed. Thomas Jackson, vol. 2 (imprint year to be confirmed), pp. 326–336 (provisional, from OCR running heads)

Wesley calls a persecuted society at Manchester to examine itself, leads the 1755 Leeds Conference to a calm, shared judgment that separation from the Church of England was not expedient, settles a Newcastle society unsettled by one preacher, and asks why revivals fade when leaders trust learning, party and comfort more than God.

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.

One Jarring String: Discipline, Oversight and the Leeds Conference, 1755

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — eleven weeks of John Wesley’s Journal, from troubled societies in Lancashire through the Leeds Conference on separation to Wesley’s reflections on why revivals fade

A CTS digest of John Wesley’s Journal for 9 April to 24 June 1755, as printed in The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, ed. Thomas Jackson, vol. 2. The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Journal, Apr. – June 1755
Primary source
Conference
Lay preachers

A word before you read. From 1744 Wesley met each year with his preachers in a “Conference” to settle doctrine and discipline. By 1755 the movement had dozens of travelling lay preachers and societies across Britain and Ireland. A hard question was pressing: should the Methodists stay inside the Church of England, or leave it and become a separate church? This reading shows how Wesley led through that question, and how he kept watch over the societies one by one. As always, it is Wesley’s own account.

1.A Society Under Pressure

The reading opens at Manchester on 9 April 1755. The mob stayed fairly quiet while Wesley preached, but raged as soon as he finished. This had been going on for some time, and Wesley gives the reason: “the good Justices encourage them.” The local magistrates, who should have kept the peace, were siding with the crowd. What Wesley did next is striking. On 13 April he met the society at five in the morning and showed them where he feared they had “grieved the Spirit of God.” He did not simply blame the persecutors. He asked the believers to examine themselves. In the same days he buried a small child at Hayfield in the Peak of Derbyshire, whose short life of faith had moved her family, and found “uncommon liberty” in preaching to the large crowd that gathered. A pastor in a hard place must hold both tasks together: comfort the grieving, and call the church to holiness.

2.Liverpool, Bolton and the Yorkshire Hills

At Liverpool Wesley admired a growing, well-built town. He noted that its people were mild and courteous, showing friendly behaviour “not only to the Jews and Papists who live among them, but even to the Methodists.” This is a rare and welcome note of tolerance in an age of suspicion. Many of his hearers loved controversy, Wesley says, “But I had better work”: he pressed repentance and faith, and he explained the Rules of the society. At Bolton he found the society smaller, divided by “the sons of strife,” some following John Bennet, a former preacher who had separated from Wesley, and some following another party. Then he rode into the hills of Yorkshire. Near Todmorden the people stood row above row on the mountainside, “rough enough in outward appearance,” but with hearts “as melting wax.” At Haworth he preached in the open air because the church could not hold the crowd. At Bradford, now quiet, he remembered that the lay preacher John Nelson had once been held in its dungeon. Wesley saw answers to prayer in small things, such as a cloud covering the hot sun, and concluded that no petition is too small for God.

3.The Leeds Conference

Before the Conference Wesley and his brother read together a strong book by a Dissenting minister of Exeter, arguing that true Christians should leave the Church of England. Wesley found it lively but bitter. He contrasted it with the Puritan Richard Baxter, who wrote as if dipping his pen in tears, while this author dipped his “in vinegar and gall.” The book gave him no proof that separation was lawful, “much less our duty.” Then, on 6 May, the Conference began at Leeds. The one question put to all the preachers was “Whether we ought to separate from the Church?” Each was invited to speak his mind at length. Every argument was “seriously and calmly considered.” On the third day they were all agreed: whether separation was lawful or not, “it was no ways expedient.” Notice the method. Wesley did not simply announce his opinion. He let the preachers speak, listened, and sought one mind together. Notice too the kind of decision reached. It was practical rather than absolute; the door was not locked forever.

4.One Jarring String

A week later Wesley reached Newcastle and found trouble. Many members were on the point of leaving the Church, and some had already done so, believing they had his approval. One preacher had been teaching differently from the rest. “O how much discord is caused by one jarring string!” Wesley wrote, and how much trouble “by one man who does not walk by the same rule.” His response was patient. On Whit Sunday he took the society to the sacrament at St Andrew’s church, where many found “an uncommon blessing.” In the following week he spoke with the members one by one, and found fewer than forty prejudiced against the Church. He hoped “the plague is now stayed.” Here is the purpose of connexion and conference: preachers who agree together protect the people from confusion. In the same weeks Wesley welcomed Scottish Presbyterian ministers to preach in his Newcastle chapel, to the surprise of some, and quoted his brother’s hymn: “Names, and sects, and parties fall.” He also visited the town’s Infirmary and prayed with a patient while the whole ward listened.

5.A Landslip, a Closed Pulpit and a Rich Society

In June Wesley heard of a great landslip at Whiston Cliffs in Yorkshire, where rocks had split and acres of ground had moved. He went to see it himself, climbing over the ruins and questioning eyewitnesses. He weighed fire, water and air as natural causes, rejected each, and concluded that God had done it as a visible warning on a busy road. Today geologists would explain such a landslip by natural processes, so we need not follow his conclusion. But we can admire his habit of going to look, asking witnesses and reasoning carefully. At York a cathedral official warned a friendly clergyman not to let Wesley preach in his church. Wesley declined to put him at risk. He left York calling it the richest society, number for number, in England, and hoped it would not become, as Cork had for a time, “the Capua of our Preachers”: Capua was the ancient city where Hannibal’s army was said to have grown soft. Comfort can spoil ministers as surely as persecution can scatter them. At Sheffield, by contrast, no one had visited the society for two years, yet it had grown.

6.Why Revivals Fade

Back in London Wesley preached on Psalm 147:20, “He hath not dealt so with any nation.” He compared the revival in England with earlier awakenings in Scotland and New England. There, he said, many able ministers had led the work; in England it had been carried by “two or three inconsiderable Clergymen, with a few young, raw, unlettered men.” Then he asked why the work had slowed in Scotland and New England. He suggested three reasons. Some became wise in their own eyes and would not let God send whomever he chose, but required him to work “by men of learning, or not at all.” Some were bigots, bitterly attached to their own opinions. And self-indulgence crept in where self-denial was no longer taught. “Let us profit by their example,” he concluded. His judgment of other Christians is partisan, and he names even Jonathan Edwards. Wesley also echoes the Protestant memory of Catholic persecution; we should remember that Catholics in Britain and Ireland suffered persecution too. Yet his warning is aimed first at his own people. The next day he proposed a day of solemn thanksgiving for all that God had given.

7.What a Wesleyan Pastor Takes from It Today

These events took place in British Methodism, still inside the Church of England. They are not a history of world missions. But the questions travelled. After the American Revolution, American Methodists formed a separate church at the Christmas Conference of 1784, and in Britain separation came gradually after Wesley’s death in 1791. Methodist annual conferences, and the district and general assemblies of the Church of the Nazarene, still gather ministers and lay delegates to pray, examine and decide together. Much of the global growth of these churches has also depended on lay and bivocational pastors, the heirs of those “young, raw, unlettered men.” A pastor today can take several lessons. First, decide hard questions in council, letting others speak. Second, prefer what builds up over what you are merely allowed to do. Third, guard unity: one “jarring string” can unsettle a whole society. Fourth, visit and examine the members yourself. Fifth, do not despise ministers without formal learning; train them, as CTS seeks to do. And sixth, fear comfort as well as opposition.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. When your church faces a divisive question, how are decisions made, and who is allowed to speak? Are you ever a “jarring string” among your fellow ministers? Where might comfort be making your ministry soft, like the preachers at “Capua”? And do you expect God to work only through educated leaders, or are you ready to recognize and train the unlikely people he sends?

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Reading 5 · Itinerancy and Leadership Reflection

The Gospel to the Poor

A CTS digest of John Wesley, Journal, 23 September – 12 December 1759; Works, ed. Thomas Jackson, vol. 2 (imprint year to be confirmed), pp. 515–520 (provisional, from OCR running heads)

In wartime Wesley still preaches in the open fields, avoids even the shadow of rivalry with a parish minister, leads Bristol Methodists to clothe eleven hundred French prisoners, states his preference for preaching to the poor, weighs the Everton revival with balance, and begins revising his New Testament notes with colleagues.

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The Gospel to the Poor: Itinerancy and Leadership Reflection, 1759

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — eleven weeks of John Wesley’s Journal in wartime, from field-preaching in Moorfields and clothing French prisoners at Bristol to weighing the Everton revival and revising the New Testament notes

A CTS digest of John Wesley’s Journal for 23 September to 12 December 1759, as printed in The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, ed. Thomas Jackson, vol. 2. The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Journal, Sept. – Dec. 1759
Primary source
Itinerancy
Leadership

A word before you read. In 1759 Wesley was fifty-six and had been travelling and preaching for twenty years. Britain was at war with France in the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). This last reading shows a mature leader: still on the road, still preaching outdoors, but also reflecting on how to lead a movement wisely. It includes one of the finest acts of mercy in the Journal and one of Wesley’s most careful judgments about revival. As always, it is his own account.

1.Still in the Fields

On Sunday 23 September 1759 Wesley preached to an immense congregation in Moorfields, the open ground outside the old city of London. Twenty years after he first preached in the open air, he was still convinced of its value. No building except St Paul’s Cathedral could hold such a crowd, he wrote, and no voice could reach them there. “I can command thrice the number in the open air, that I can under a roof.” And who could say the time for field-preaching was over, while more people than ever came and God’s converting power was present among them? Then he was back on the road: Brentford, Basingstoke, Whitchurch and Salisbury, where he admired the new preaching-room. A regiment of Hampshire militia came to hear him and behaved, he said, like brutes. Yet some came back the next morning “of quite another spirit.” The itinerant did not choose his hearers. He preached to whoever came, and trusted God with the result.

2.No Shadow of Opposition

At Bradford-on-Avon Wesley had appointed to preach at seven in the evening, but when he arrived he found that the parish minister, Mr. Hart, was to preach at six. So Wesley waited until the church service was over, “that there might not appear (at least on my part) even the shadow of opposition between us.” This small act shows a principle that ran through his whole ministry. Methodism was meant to strengthen the parish church, not compete with it. In Bristol, too, he preached in the open square “for the sake of many people” who would not come to the Methodist room. A wise leader looks for the people who are outside the usual meetings, and avoids giving any cause for rivalry with other servants of Christ. During his weeks in Bristol Wesley also finished the fourth volume of his Sermons, which he thought would probably be the last he would publish.

3.The French Prisoners at Knowle

On 15 October Wesley walked to Knowle, a mile from Bristol, to see the French prisoners of war. More than eleven hundred men were crowded into that small place with nothing to lie on but dirty straw and nothing to cover them but thin rags, so that they were dying in great numbers. Wesley was deeply moved. That evening he preached on Exodus 23:9: “Thou shalt not oppress a stranger; for ye know the heart of a stranger.” Eighteen pounds were given at once, and twenty-four by the next day. With the money the Methodists bought cloth and had it made into shirts, waistcoats and breeches, and they added stockings, giving them where the need was greatest. Soon the Corporation of Bristol sent mattresses and blankets, and collections began in London and other places. These men were enemies of Britain and Catholics in a Protestant land. Wesley saw them first as strangers in need. His sermon moved a congregation, and their example moved a city. Here evangelism and social action are not rivals. The same preacher who called sinners to repentance called his people to clothe their enemies.

4.Rich and Poor

Back in London Wesley met a gentleman’s coachman who, the year before, had been a violent persecutor of Methodism and of his own wife. He had come to hear for himself, joined the society, and found peace with God. Later, while receiving the bread at the Lord’s Supper, his restless heart was filled with the love of God. A few days later Wesley spent a pleasant hour with two people of rank. He was glad that some of the rich and noble were being called. But he added, “If I might choose, I should still (as I have done hitherto) preach the Gospel to the poor.” He also heard from a man who had escaped from Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, where British forces were fighting. The soldiers’ water stank, their biscuit was full of maggots and their beef was rotten. “What wonder that the poor men died in troops! Who shall answer for their blood?” Wesley’s concern for the poor included common soldiers, whose suffering the powerful often ignored. In November he rode through snow to Bedford, where the preaching-room stood over a hog-sty. “Surely they love the Gospel,” he wrote, “who come to hear it in such a place.”

5.Weighing the Revival at Everton

At Everton, in Bedfordshire, the vicar John Berridge had seen a powerful revival in 1758 and 1759, marked by loud cries, people falling down, trances and visions. When Wesley visited in late November, Berridge was away preaching at Cambridge, so Wesley read the prayers, preached and gave communion to a large congregation alone. He noticed a change. Now no one cried out or fell down; people trembled, a low murmur was heard, and many found peace. Wesley then set down a careful judgment. One danger, he wrote, was to regard such outward signs too much, as if the inner work could not go on without them. The other danger was to regard them too little, as if they had nothing of God in them. God had truly convinced many people suddenly, and some had been strengthened by dreams and visions. In time “nature mixed with grace,” and Satan imitated the work to discredit it. Yet even counterfeits do not disprove the real thing: “The shadow is no disparagement of the substance, nor the counterfeit of the real diamond.” The safeguard was humility, for “nothing avails with God but humble love.”

6.Thanksgiving, Love-Feast and Scripture

On 29 November Britain kept a day of General Thanksgiving for victories in the war. Wesley was impressed: the shops were shut, there were no bonfires or fireworks, and the people seemed serious. What struck him most was the prayer for the nation’s enemies, perhaps, he thought, the first of its kind in Europe. On 9 December he held, for the first time, a love-feast for the whole London society, a simple meal of bread and water with testimony and prayer. On 12 December he began reading through the Greek New Testament and his own Explanatory Notes with his brother and others, comparing the English translation with the original and correcting or enlarging the notes. The reading ends here, with an itinerant leader at his desk, testing his teaching against Scripture in the company of colleagues. The man on horseback was also a student of the Word.

7.What a Wesleyan Pastor Takes from It Today

These entries belong to British Methodism, but in 1759 its horizon was widening. In November 1758, shortly before this reading, Wesley baptized two enslaved Africans from the household of Nathaniel Gilbert of Antigua. Gilbert returned home and began preaching, and from his work came the first Methodist societies in the Caribbean. That beginning took place in a slave society, and it must be remembered honestly. Wesley later condemned slavery in Thoughts upon Slavery (1774). After his death, the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society sent workers across the world, and in the next century the holiness movement gave birth to the Church of the Nazarene, now present in well over a hundred countries. A pastor or missionary today can learn several things from this reading. First, take the gospel outdoors and to the edges. Second, avoid even the shadow of rivalry with other churches. Third, let mercy reach strangers and even enemies. Fourth, keep a preference for the poor. Fifth, judge spiritual experiences with balance, neither chasing them nor despising them. And sixth, keep returning to Scripture with others.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Where are the “fields” in your community, the places where people gather who will never enter your church? Who are the “strangers” near you, migrants, prisoners or people of another nation, and what would it cost your congregation to clothe them? When you could minister to the influential or to the poor, which do you choose? And how do you respond to dramatic spiritual experiences: do you regard them too much, or too little?

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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 Volume · Library Record

1. The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, vol. II (Journal)

John Wesley; ed. Thomas Jackson · Wesley House Digital Library catalog

Look at the catalog record of the volume, the journal from December 1745 to May 1760, before you cite the work.

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The Journal Itself · 1746–1749

2. The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, vol. II (Journal)

John Wesley; ed. Thomas Jackson · Wesley House Digital Library scan

Read the whole journal extract for 1746–1749, from which Reading 1 was selected, and see the entries around it.

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The Journal Itself · 1749–1751

3. The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, vol. II (Journal)

John Wesley; ed. Thomas Jackson · Wesley House Digital Library scan

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The Journal Itself · 1751–1754

4. The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, vol. II (Journal)

John Wesley; ed. Thomas Jackson · Wesley House Digital Library scan

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The Journal Itself · 1755–1758

5. The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, vol. II (Journal)

John Wesley; ed. Thomas Jackson · Wesley House Digital Library scan

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The Journal Itself · 1758–1760

6. The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, vol. II (Journal)

John Wesley; ed. Thomas Jackson · Wesley House Digital Library scan

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