By Lee Downen

The Englishmen aboard the wooden vessel cried out in fear as the winds howled and the storm raged. The German Moravians calmly continued singing to their God.

The storm passed after a few hours, and John Wesley, a young Anglican minister, marveled at the different responses. He began questioning his own Christian conversion, and after hearing the gospel a few years later, declared, “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.”

John Wesley, who died on March 2, 1791, was an Anglican clergyman, an itinerant evangelist, and the reluctant founder of Methodism, the movement that led to the formation of the Methodist Church, which founded SMU in 1911.

Born into the family of an Anglican priest in 1703, Wesley was one of nineteen children (only ten lived past infancy). He studied at Oxford, where he was part of the Holy Club—a name of mockery given to it by other students—whose members included his brother, Charles Wesley, and George Whitefield, who later became a prominent figure in America’s religious revival, the Great Awakening.

After being ordained in the Anglican Church, Wesley departed for the New World in 1735 to minister to souls in the colony of Georgia. On this voyage, Wesley witnessed the German Moravians’ display of trust in the God of the Bible—an experience he never forgot.

In just three years time, Wesley left Georgia because the members of his congregation resisted his attempts to instill in them the spiritual disciplines that he had learned from the Holy Club. Upon returning to England, Wesley joined Whitefield, his Oxford companion, on Whitefield’s novel open-air preaching tours. He began to organize new converts into societies, which eventually became classes that met weekly to pray, read the Bible, examine their spiritual lives, and collect money for charity.

Wesley and Whitefield soon came to a theological disagreement, however, that split the movement. Whitefield, like Augustine, Martin Luther, and Jonathan Edwards, believed the God—out of his own good pleasure and not because of any good in people—predestined some to salvation and not others. Wesley found this to be an “uncomfortable doctrine” and elected not to believe it. The two men parted ways, although they later reconciled (Wesley preached Whitefield’s funeral).

As the number of converts in America rose, Wesley, who remained an Anglican throughout his life, reluctantly gave his approval for the formation of the Methodist denomination because there were not enough Anglican clergy to administer communion. Members of the newly formed denomination followed Wesley’s class model—the predecessor to modern Sunday school, small groups, and cell groups—and also advocated for social reform—Wesley himself was strongly opposed to slavery.

At the age of 87, as he lay in his wooden-frame bed at the sea-mouth of eternity, Wesley, like the Moravians from his younger years, said to his friends, “The best of all is God is with us.”

Over a century later, the United Methodist Church chartered Southern Methodist University. It is here, as it is inscribed upon the floor of the law school’s Florence Hall, that church leaders sought to, in the words of Wesley, “unite the two so long divided: knowledge and vital piety.”

As we remember the life of John Wesley, we should wonder if we have united this divide or widened it.