The Cost of Discipleship: John Wesley: Field Preaching.

John Wesley’s life had caught up with his preaching, His theme was not only salvation by God’s grace through faith, now he also felt it inside! As the Moravian Peter Bohler had told him: “Preach faith till you have it, and then, because you have it, you will preach faith” ( A. Skevington Wood, The Burning Heart, John Wesley: Evangelist. [1967] 2007. Page70).

Wesley’s Aldersgate Experience in which he felt assured of his salvation became the personal witness he needed to testify about confession, forgiveness, and justification. And that is why, increasingly, he was disinvited from returning to many Anglican churches. He was even accused of ‘enthusiasm’, that is, of preaching new doctrines based on his own experiences. Yet there is hardly a more foundational set of doctrines in Christianity than these:

God so loved the world that he sent his only son Jesus to live, suffer, and die for our sins, and then to be resurrected to pave the way for our new life in Christ.
God did this because we are all by nature sinners and we fall far short of the expectations of God in our behavior. Therefore, upon accepting Jesus, the old person must die away and a new person in Christ is born.
With the guidance of the Holy Spirit, another gift from God, we then must order our steps and seek out the purpose for which God has called us, that is, our vocation as redeemed children of God while we are granted this time on earth.

What the good church-going English people of the mid-1700s resisted and resented was the truth that they were sinners, that they needed Christ, and that when Jesus came with the Holy Spirit, they would have to put away their old life and put on Christ. Jesus called it being ‘born again’, and Paul said “...it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me (Galatians 2:20).

More and more Anglican churches were closing their doors to Wesley’s preaching, or more finely put, to Wesley charging the congregation with being sinners themselves who need the Lord. By 1739 a new venue was emerging.

George Whitefield, an old friend from the Holy Club, began preaching in Newgate Prison, and then set himself up on a hill outside the village of Kingswood where several hundred colliers (coal miners) who were finishing their shift gathered to hear him. Whitefield invited John to come to Bristol to continue the work that he had started. Wesley was the better organizer, as we will see later.

So, this prim and proper Oxford dandy had his new vocation thrust upon him. After watching Whitefield preach to a crowd in the open air, Wesley records his reaction.

“At four in the afternoon I submitted to be more vile, and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation, speaking from a little eminence in a ground adjoining the city, to about three thousand people” (Wood, page 101).

Wesley preached again the next couple of days. Albert Outler described the scene. “The reaction of the people was amazing, and to no one more than Wesley himself. Here were great crowds of eager listeners, who apparently were hearing the gospel in his preaching, whose behavior was visibly affected, whose lives were being ‘revived’. Conversions were taking place…” (Outler, editor, John Wesley, 1964, Page 17).

Outler concludes that Wesley “had come at long last to the threshold of his true vocation.” His vocation was not to be a parish priest for the Anglican Church, but rather an itinerant evangelist who would preach wherever people would hear him. Once when he preached in the morning at the very church his father had pastored and where he had grown up. Wesley told the crowd to come back in the afternoon, but the Rector told him that he was not invited back.

When the crowd came anyway, Wesley was outside in the graveyard by Epworth Church. He walked over to his father’s grave which was a flat slab of concrete. He stepped up on the slab and said, “This, at least, belongs to the Wesley family. I may preach from here.” Later, in a letter defending his actions to another evangelist, Wesley wrote,

“Suffer me now to tell you my principles in this matter. I look upon all the world as my parish; thus far I mean, that in whatever part of it I am I judge it meet, right, and my bounden duty to declare, unto all that are willing to hear, the glad tidings of salvation. This is the work which I know God has called me to; and sure I am that His blessing attends to it” (Wood, Page 120). This is where we get the famous saying: “The world is my parish.”

I have stood on that very gravestone, and I have a picture of me with an outstretched arm as if I were preaching. I pray that, on the many occasions that I have preached throughout the world, I have never just been pretending.