Methodism

At a glance

Methodism begins with John and Charles Wesley’s Oxford “Holy Club” (1729) and the eighteenth-century Evangelical Revival.

It stresses prevenient grace, personal holiness, and itinerant preaching. In America the Methodist Episcopal Church organized in 1784; later unions and splits produced bodies such as the United Methodist Church (1968).

Origin and history

John Wesley (1703–1791) and Charles Wesley (1707–1788), Anglican priests, formed a methodical student group at Oxford (dubbed “Methodists”). After missionary struggle in Georgia and contact with Moravians, John experienced assurance at Aldersgate (24 May 1738). Field preaching, class meetings, and societies grew inside—and increasingly alongside—the Church of England.

Wesley never intended a separate denomination in England, but American independence forced organization: the Christmas Conference (1784) created the Methodist Episcopal Church with Francis Asbury (1745–1816) as leading superintendent and bishop figure. British Methodism separated more gradually after Wesley’s death.

Nineteenth-century Holiness movements and African-American Methodist bodies (AME 1816; AME Zion, and others) expanded the family. The United Methodist Church formed in 1968. From 2019 to 2024 large traditionalist exits, including the Global Methodist Church, split that denomination over sexuality and doctrine.

• 1729 — Oxford Holy Club (“Methodists”)
• 1738 — Wesley’s Aldersgate assurance
• 1784 — Methodist Episcopal Church (U.S.) organized
• 1816 — African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME)
• 1968 — United Methodist Church formed
• 2019–2024 — major UMC realignment / splits

Key figures

John Wesley was the organizer and the theologian of prevenient grace and Christian perfection; Charles Wesley catechized the movement in song. George Whitefield (1714–1770), a fellow revivalist, headed the Calvinistic Methodist stream, and Francis Asbury became the apostle of American Methodism’s circuit riders.

• John Wesley (1703–1791)
• Charles Wesley (1707–1788)
• George Whitefield (1714–1770) — Calvinistic Methodist
• Francis Asbury (1745–1816) — American Methodism

Theology and beliefs

Classical Wesleyan theology is Arminian: prevenient grace enables response; justification by faith; assurance possible; sanctification pressed toward “Christian perfection” or perfect love (not flawlessness in the popular sense, though later Holiness groups harden Wesley’s language).

Sacraments: baptism (including infants in mainstream Methodism) and Lord’s Supper as means of grace—higher than memorialist Baptist practice in Wesley’s own teaching. Wesley taught a real means of grace, which is more than a bare memorial. Scripture is primary; later Methodists summarized his appeal to Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience as the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. He did not use that name. Scripture remained first for him.

• Prevenient / justifying / sanctifying grace
• Arminian resistance to double predestination
• Holiness / Christian perfection emphasis
• Infant baptism retained in mainline Methodism
• Connectional church government (conferences)

• Articles of Religion

  Of Free Will, from Article X of the Thirty-Nine Articles, kept by American Methodists in 1784

  Of the Justification of Man, from Article XI of the Thirty-Nine Articles

  “The condition of Man after the fall of Adam is such, that he cannot turn and prepare himself, by his own natural strength and good works, to faith, and calling upon God: Wherefore we have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christ preventing us, that we may have a good will, and working with us, when we have that good will.”

  Preventing grace

  Suggest a correction

  “We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith, and not for our own works or deservings: Wherefore, that we are justified by Faith only is a most wholesome Doctrine, and very full of comfort.”

  Justification

  Suggest a correction

Practices and worship

Class meetings, itinerant circuit preaching, hymn-singing, and revivals defined early Methodism. Modern Methodism ranges from liturgical to evangelical-contemporary. Bishops in many Methodist bodies are general superintendents. The office is not claimed as the historic episcopate in the Catholic sense.

• Hymnody (Charles Wesley)
• Small groups / classes historically
• Conference governance
• Open table communion common today in mainline settings

Scripture they cite

Wesley preached justification by faith from Romans and Galatians, and holiness from Hebrews 12:14 and 1 Thessalonians 4:3. He called the teaching “Christian perfection”: love of God and neighbor that can be whole in this life, not a life with no mistakes. He rejected Calvinist reprobation with 1 Timothy 2:4, that God desires all people to be saved.

He called the Supper a means of grace and cited the words of institution. He did not teach transubstantiation.

• Romans 3–5
• Hebrews 12:14

  “Follow after peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no man will see the Lord,”

• 1 Thessalonians 4:3

  “For this is the will of God: your sanctification, that you abstain from sexual immorality,”

• 1 Timothy 2:4

  “who desires all people to be saved and come to full knowledge of the truth.”

• 1 Corinthians 11:23–26

  “For I received from the Lord that which also I delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night in which he was betrayed took bread.”

Where Catholic teaching differs

Wesley remained an Anglican priest and wanted Methodism to renew that church. The American body of 1784 became a separate church. Catholics share his refusal of double predestination and his insistence that grace comes before any good work. They teach that the ordinary means of that grace are the sacraments, and that holiness is life in the Church, not only a second blessing beside it.

Methodist doctrine is settled by conference. In the 2020s the United Methodist Church and the Global Methodist Church used that polity and reached opposite decisions on sexuality and on what the Articles still require.

In conversation

John Wesley died an Anglican priest. The separate church is clearest in America, at the Christmas Conference of 1784. George Whitefield’s Calvinistic Methodists are a different stream from Wesley’s Arminian one.

Today the name covers the United Methodist Church, Black Methodist churches such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church (1816), Holiness churches that press a second blessing, and the Global Methodist Church after the recent split. Ask which.

• Aldersgate is 24 May 1738.
• Christian perfection means perfect love, not flawlessness.
• Charles Wesley’s hymns are the movement’s catechism.

Common misconceptions

Sources

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