John Wesley

The moment

John Wesley was an Anglican priest, an Oxford scholar, and by his own account a failure. A mission to the colony of Georgia had ended badly. In May 1738, at a meeting on Aldersgate Street in London, he wrote that he felt his heart “strangely warmed” and trusted Christ alone for salvation.

England at the time was full of people the established church did not reach: miners, laborers, and the new urban poor. Many pulpits were closed to Wesley’s kind of preaching.

What he did

He went where the people were. In 1739, at the urging of his friend George Whitefield, Wesley preached outdoors to coal miners near Bristol. He found the idea distasteful and did so anyway. “I look upon all the world as my parish,” he wrote that year.

He organized what he started. In 1742 the Bristol society needed to pay off a building debt. Someone proposed dividing the members into groups of about twelve, each with a leader who would collect a penny a week. The leaders began to learn how their members were really living. Wesley saw what he had and made the class meeting the center of the movement.

He trusted ordinary people to lead. Class leaders were tradesmen, laborers, and women as well as men. They met weekly, asked each member about the state of their soul, and cared for those in trouble. Wesley also came to accept lay preachers, after his mother told him that one such man was as surely called to preach as he was.

He kept moving. He is commonly estimated to have ridden about 250,000 miles and preached some 40,000 sermons across fifty years. He visited the societies, examined the classes, and wrote constantly.

What leaders can take from him

Inspiration needs structure. Great preaching drew crowds. Small groups kept people. By the time Wesley died in 1791, Methodist membership in Britain and America was well over one hundred thousand.

Small groups need real leaders. A class leader had a defined role, a short list of people, and a weekly rhythm. Responsibility was specific enough to carry.

Use the people the system overlooks. Wesley’s leaders had no credentials the church of his day recognized. They had character, and they were present.

Change the method when the method stops reaching people. Preaching outdoors offended his sense of order. He did what the mission required.

Know the limits of the model. Wesley kept tight personal control of the movement for most of his life, and his critics called him autocratic. His marriage was unhappy and ended in separation. A leader can build a system that develops thousands and still fail to share authority at the top.

Read the ROAR issue Your job is to equip, not to do the work alone.