3| “Little Christ’s” Changed a Nation
How the early Methodist movement prevented a bloody revolution
This is part three of the Boxed Wine & Bad Ideas series on how we killed a church movement and how we can get it back.
The Leaders of a Movement
John Wesley had a list of 22 questions that any of his students are familiar with. Somewhere around 1729 while teaching at Oxford, he designed these questions for daily self-examination and accountability of his little tribe, and of himself. They mostly address habits. Either habits of thinking or of action, except for question number 22.
This 22nd question was prophetic in a way.
“Is Christ real to me?”
In 1738, he answered that with a different kind of “yes.”
Here’s what Wesley wrote in his journal:
“In my return to England, January, 1738, being in imminent danger of death, and very uneasy on that account, I was strongly convinced that the cause of that uneasiness was unbelief; and that the gaining a true, living faith was the “one thing needful” for me. But still I fixed not this faith on its right object: I meant only faith in God, not faith in or through Christ. Again, I knew not that I was wholly void of this faith; but only thought, I had not enough of it.”
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 he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. 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, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”¹
Did you catch that? He wrote that he didn’t realize that he didn’t have faith before that night, he just thought he needed more of it.
So the dude who gave his whole life to Jesus and did whatever he could including daily rigorous discipline and country-hopping to make disciples came to the conclusion that he had been faithless?
Then what does that make me? How about you?
Before this night he intellectually knew something that his heart was evidently oblivious to. This deep revelation of his own poverty brought with it a divine knowledge of what grace really meant. Question 22 was settled. Christ had become real to him.
Soak in these excerpts from that Luther text that Wesley referred to in his journal:
“Neither nature nor free will nor our own powers can bring about such a justice, for even as no one can give himself faith, so too he cannot remove unbelief. How can he then take away even the smallest sin? Therefore everything which takes place outside faith or in unbelief is lie, hypocrisy and sin (Romans 14), no matter how smoothly it may seem to go.”²
Luther writes that the “chief sin” that Jesus points out is unbelief. The counter to that unbelief is faith. Yet there’s nothing we can do to rid ourselves of the unbelief and we are powerless to give ourselves faith.
“Faith is a work of God in us, which changes us and brings us to birth anew from God. It kills the old Adam, makes us completely different people in heart, mind, senses, and all our powers, and brings the Holy Spirit with it. What a living, creative, active, powerful thing is faith! It is impossible that faith ever stop doing good. Faith doesn’t ask whether good works are to be done, but, before it is asked, it has done them.”²
Jan Hus lit a fire, when he was set on fire, 300 years before that journal entry was written — and it had now caught on to John Wesley like he was a man doused in kerosene.
From there, the fire began to spread.
The Vision is Caught
In a letter dated January 14, 1732, Richard Morgan, Jr. (who goes by William) writes home to his father Richard Morgan, Sr. about his experience at Oxford with the early beginnings of John Wesley’s movement. “There is a society of gentlemen, consisting of seven members, whom the world calls Methodists, of which my tutor is president. They imagine they cannot be saved if they do not spend every hour, nay minute, of their lives in the service of God. And to that end they read prayers every day in the common goal, preach every Sunday, and administer the sacrament once every month. They almost starve themselves to be able to relieve the poor, and buy books for their conversion…”³
Wesley’s movement invited others into a different way of life focused on dedicating every moment of their lives to service of God and others. However, the power was not in Wesley or his way. The power was in the Holy Spirit and the unique ways that the Holy Spirit asked each of these individuals to love and serve the world around them.
We, like many others, study that society of seven gentlemen because of how God expanded one faithful Bible study on Oxford’s campus to eventually over 180,000 members across England. In the cycles of church history, the old becomes new.
The power of a movement comes from the power of the Holy Spirit and the replicating of lives lived in full abandon. Because Wesley started this Bible study, William Morgan both found Jesus and found a different way to live. For movements to continue beyond just ourselves, they need to be teachable and catchable to someone else beyond just reading words and talking about feelings. It is the work that the Holy Spirit asks us to do that frees someone else to then start the work that the Holy Spirit asks of them.
William Morgan, for example, experienced the love of God and the power of Wesley’s way in observing his tutor at Oxford (John Wesley) living out his faith. Then, once he learned the practices and lived the rhythms of the group, Morgan expanded the social ministry of the movement in Oxford by visiting those who were in prison. Whether they were imprisoned for debt or another crime, Morgan would regularly visit the incarcerated with the goal of conversion to faith in mind.
When John and his brother Charles eventually came along with William on one of his visits to the prison, they were so impacted by those conversations with the prisoners that they started to do the same weekly. William Morgan is one of the first members who saw the faithfulness of the seven in John’s original Bible study called the Holy Club. They experienced the power of God in a gathering of just a few people, caught the vision, and then dedicated his life to serving God and others. Morgan’s commitment to the movement was to the point that when he died from a lingering illness on August 26, 1732, his father accused Wesley of killing his son by his commitment to fasting and prayer.
In reality, William had caught a secondary illness that later led to his death. Rather than stopping the work when he got sick, William died from that sickness while still doing the work. God had broken his heart for the people in prison, so that the movement could expand to reach a part of society that people had forgotten.
The Environment for Movement
The cultural climate that seems to perpetuate movement requires,
- Workers that are prepared
- A culture with an identity crisis
As the age of reason came along and “the death of God” emerged in the 1700’s, society experienced a whiplash that created a punch-drunk society that couldn’t agree on where to begin the conversation from. Sound familiar?
But the Methodists were being trained. They were prepared for difficulty and they were becoming people that would withstand rather than people that would wither.
In the late 1700s, this concept of a dead God gave birth to the French Revolution. But why did the same bloody revolution not happen in England?
“The mystery of the UK’s capacity to honor the old guard, while raising up a more democratic system without a revolution, is a sociological wonder. Many credit the Great Awakening, in particular the Methodist movement, launched by John Wesley, for this extraordinary and peaceful transition.
“Methodism unleashed an army of ‘little Christs’ all over Europe. They cared for the poor, took in unwanted and abused children, fought unjust laws and labor conditions, visited prisoners, and battled against slavery; They joined hands with the Apostles and ‘turned the world upside down.’ Eventually compassion became fashionable.”⁴
A movement intends to reach well past those whom it can dictate and control. A movement gives space for the Spirit of God to reach into the soul of individuals who take responsibility for the part they are designed to play and sets them free.
[2] Luther’s Introduction to Romans
[3] The Works of Wesley, Volume 25. Pg. 365
