Methodism

John Wesley (1703-91), the founder of Methodism. With his brother Charles, and George Whitefield, John Wesley formed the Methodist Church in reaction to the rationalism and social apathy of the Anglican Church. He is said to have preached 40,000 open-air sermons to the poor throughout Britain.

Evangelical Protestant Christian movement that was founded by John Wesley in 1739 within the Church of England, but became a separate body in 1795. The Methodist Episcopal Church was founded in the USA in 1784. In 2001 there were over 50 million Methodists worldwide.

The itinerant, open-air preaching of John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield drew immense crowds and led to a revival of faith among members of the English working and agricultural classes who were alienated from the formalism and conservatism of the Church of England. The Methodist emphasis on emotion and the conversion experience proved equally popular in America, where the Wesleys went to preach in 1735. As the movement grew there during the Great Awakening, Wesley encouraged the formation of an independent American Methodist Church. Methodist doctrines are contained in Wesley's sermons and ‘Notes on the New Testament’. There are now more than 20 separate Methodist groups in the USA. The largest, the Methodist Church, was formed through the merger of various Methodist groups in 1938 and 1968.