Methodism

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. Methodist doctrines are contained in Wesley's sermons and ‘Notes on the New Testament’. A series of doctrinal divisions in the early 19th century were reconciled by a conference in London in 1932 that brought Wesleyan Methodists, Primitive Methodists, and United Methodists into the Methodist Church. The church government is presbyterian in Britain and episcopal in the USA. Supreme authority is vested in the annual conference (50% ministers, 50% lay people; members are grouped under ‘class leaders’ and churches into ‘circuits’).

Expansion in the 19th century in developing industrial areas enabled people to overcome economic depression or change by spiritual means. Its encouragement of thrift and simple living helped many to raise their economic status. Smaller Methodist groups such as the Primitive Methodists and the Methodist New Connexion provided leadership in early trade unionism in disproportion to their size. Mainstream Wesleyans at first were politically conservative but identified increasingly with the liberalism of the British political leader William Gladstone in the second half of the 19th century.