John Wesley

In 1709, a five-year-old child was rescued at the last possible moment from a burning window at the Epworth rectory — an episode the boy himself would, decades later, interpret as a sign of a purpose still to be revealed. John Wesley would grow up under his mother Susanna's rigorous discipline and found at Oxford a small group of students so methodical in their spiritual pursuit that fellow students, mocking them, would nickname them "Methodists."

A failed mission to the colony of Georgia, marked by a personal scandal that forced him to flee under legal accusation, sent him back to England spiritually exhausted — until, on an evening in May 1738, hearing a reading of Martin Luther's words at a small meeting in London, Wesley felt, in his own words, his "heart strangely warmed." What followed was reluctant open-air preaching to coal-dust-covered miners, the beginning of a system of small-group spiritual discipline that would spread across England, and decades of roads covered on horseback under stoning, hostile mobs, and transformed crowds alike.

A friendship that would end in painful doctrinal rupture, yet never in personal hostility. A marriage the same inflexible discipline that built a national movement could never sustain in peace. And, in his final days, a bold theological decision that would forever reshape the relationship between Methodism and the Church of England — taken by a man who, to his last breath, would insist he had never intended such a rupture.

This biography reconstructs, from verified historical sources, the life of the reluctant clergyman who became one of the most tireless preachers in the history of English-speaking Protestantism — and the final conviction he repeated in his last hours: that the best of all, always, is that God is with us. Ideal for readers interested in the history of the evangelical revival, in Methodism, and in eighteenth-century England.