The Methodist Church

The Methodist Church in Britain evolved out of the discussions between a small group of Oxford University students in the 1730s. Of these, John Wesley (1703-91) from Lincolnshire had the greatest influence on the future path of Methodism. A few years after his death, the Methodists finally broke away from the Church of England in 1795.

Wesley was a Church of England minister and expected his followers to continue to attend CofE churches, but also join small study groups, or ‘classes’, to read the Bible methodically and deeply. He appealed to the public through his open-air preaching, advocating that God’s grace was for everyone, not just the upper classes. This message gained followers from the working-class poor and tied in with socialist politics.

Wesley, who preached daily all over the country, saying “The world is my parish”, was the head of the Methodists ~ called ‘the President’ ~ until his death, but nowadays there is a different one each year. In recent times there has been talk of the Methodists re-joining the Church of England in the face of numbers dropping to around 200,000. In contrast, its exportation to the USA after 1776 has proved to be a huge success, with 8,600,000 members at present.

(Image: Jaggery at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0)