The Moravians & John Wesley Explained | Church History 120

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:01][music] In an earlier episode, we explored patotism, that earnest, warm-hearted movement that arose as a reaction against two very different kinds of coldness. the dry dogmatism of Protestant scholasticism and the reductionist rationalism of enlightened philosophy. Pietism it wanted to get the pulse back in the Christian faith. They wanted a living trust in a living Christ and under the leadership of Philip Jacob Spinner and August Franka there in the 17th century it actually managed to do that. Spinner had a godson and godchildren have a way of either fulfilling or spectacularly disappointing the hopes of their sponsors. Oh, this particular godson did not disappoint. His name was Nicholas Ludwick von Zinendorf, a German count with a devotion to God that showed itself really early in childhood. His parents were devout pitists who sent young Nicholas to the University of Hala where he studied under Franka himself.

[00:01:11]He later moved on to Vittenberg which of course was the heart of Lutheran orthodoxy where he promptly and repeatedly clashed with his teachers.

[00:01:19]You know some students are shaped by their professors others are sharpened against them. I guess Zinsenorf well he was firmly in that second group. Well after traveling widely and studying law he married and he entered the service of the court of Dresden. It was there that a chance encounter changed the entire trajectory of his life and many others as well.

[00:01:40]You see, at court, Zinsorf met a group of Moravians. They were refugees that were looking for home. Moravia lies in the southeastern part of what is today the Czech Republic. You may recall that Yan Hus of Prague was one of the earliest voices of the Reformation. A man who got there a full century before Martin Luther and he ended up paying for it with his life. The Moravians were Husidites who were longtime heirs of Husse's renewal movement. Persecution had driven them from their homeland.

[00:02:09]They simply had nowhere to go. Well, Zenzandorf offered them asylum on his extensive lands. There they founded a community called Hernhut, meaning the Lord's watch. And the place so captured the count's heart, that he resigned his comfortable post at the Dresden Court, and he joined them. Under his guidance, the Moravians were brought into the local Lutheran parish. The Lutheran for their part were not entirely thrilled about sharing space with foreign pitists. Suspicion has a long history in church politics. Then in 1731 while visiting Denmark, Zinzadorf met two Inuit men who'd been converted by a Lutheran missionary when they were visiting Greenland. The encounter lit a fire in the count that would burn for the rest of his life. Soon the community at Hearnhood caught the same flame. In 1732, its first missionaries sailed for the Caribbean, and from there, the movement spread with remarkable speed.

[00:03:06]Within a few years, Moravian missionaries were at work in Africa, India, South, and North America. They founded the communities of Bethlehem and Nazareth in Pennsylvania, and Salem and North Carolina. Of course, that's not to be confused with the Salem and Massachusetts that we looked at in a recent episode. In just 20 years, a movement that had begun with 200 refugees had dispatched, listen to this, more missionaries overseas than all Protestant churches combined and sent in the two centuries since the Reformation.

[00:03:36]That's just simply incredible.

[00:03:38]Well, meanwhile, tensions with the German Lutheran authorities had not slackened. Zindorf was eventually banned from Saxony and traveled to North America where in 1741 he was present at the founding of Bethlehem Township in Pennsylvania.

[00:03:54]Fittingly named of course is the uh for the birthplace of the Savior that the missionaries were following.

[00:04:00]After his return to Germany, a peace was hammered out between the Lutherans and the Moravians. Sadly, it didn't last.

[00:04:07]The count agreed to become a bishop for the Moravians, but through a spiritual line of authority tracing back to Yan Husse. The Lutherans didn't recognize H.

[00:04:17]They wanted his authority rooted, of course, in Martin Luther's line instead.

[00:04:21]Now, I'm going to insert a personal aside here. What silly things we Christians often bicker over. Does a person's spiritual authority rest in being called by God or in some correct ecclesiastical genealogy?

[00:04:35]It's the original source that matters and God he doesn't check lineage charts.

[00:04:41]Well, Zinsenorf died at Hearn Hood in 1760 and shortly after his followers broke with Lutheranism. The Moravian church never really grew very large and the pace of missionary sending eventually did slow. But its example seated the great missionary awakening of the 19th century. Its greatest legacy, the one that rippled out furthest across history, was its impact on a young Anglican priest named John Wesley.

[00:05:08]In late 1735, early 36, a group of Moravians was sailing to the new world, hoping to preach among the Native Americans of Georgia. On board was John Wesley, an ordained Anglican priest whom Georgia's governor orthorp had invited to pastor in the city of Savannah.

[00:05:26]Wesley had his own evangelistic hopes.

[00:05:28]He wanted to reach the Native Americans as well. During the calm early weeks of the voyage, Wesley learned enough German to converse with his Moravian fellow passengers.

[00:05:39]Then the weather turned and it got it got bad. It got nasty. The ship ran into a severe Atlantic storm. The main mast of the ship cracked. The crew panicked and chaos threatened to take the vessel.

[00:05:52]Wesley, the chaplain on board, the man professionally responsible for the spiritual welfare of the passengers.

[00:05:58]He found himself terrified and to his deep embarrassment more concerned for his own life than for those around him.

[00:06:07]Meanwhile, the Morabians were singing hymns through the whole ordeal calmly as if it were a Sunday service rather than fighting for their lives on a heaving deck. After the storm passed, the Moravians explained their composure.

[00:06:24]They believed that their lives were in God's hand. And should they perish at sea, they would pass directly into the presence of their glorious king. Death simply held no terror for them because they knew where they were going after death. Wesley simply couldn't relate. He served God professionally. He knew the doctrines, but that kind of settled, joyful trust in the face of death, that was simply something he had never felt.

[00:06:52]Arriving in Savannah, Wesley sought out one of the Moravians. August Spannenberg for pastoral counsel. He left a record of the conversation in his diary.

[00:07:03]Spannenberg asked, quote, "My brother, I must first ask you one or two questions.

[00:07:08]Have you the witness within yourself?

[00:07:10]Does the spirit of God bear witness with your spirit that you are a child of God?" Unquote.

[00:07:16]So Wesley then writes in his journal, quote, I was surprised and knew not what to answer. Well, he observed it and asked, do you know Jesus Christ? I paused and said, "I know he's the savior of the world." "Well, true," he replied.

[00:07:30]He said, "But do you know that he has saved you?" I answered, "I hope that he has died to save me." He only added, "Do you know yourself?" I said, "I do." And then Wesley added this line, one of the most haunting selfassessments in the history of Christian autobiography. He said, "But I fear they were vain words," unquote.

[00:07:54]Now, these encounters left Wesley both moved and deeply unsettled because he had always assumed that he was a good Christian and by any external measure, the [clears throat] assumption was reasonable. Now, we're going to backtrack in the story here a bit.

[00:08:09]John's father, Samuel, was an Anglican priest. His mother, Susanna, was the daughter of one as well. She had been meticulous, some might say formidable in the religious upbringing of her, get this, 19 children. When Jon was 5 years old, fire broke out in their home. He was the last child rescued, pulled from an upstairs window with moments to spare. And from that day, Susanna regarded him as a quote brand plucked from the burning unquote, convinced that God had preserved him for a special purpose.

[00:08:41]At Oxford, Wesley distinguished himself academically and religiously. After a season assisting in his father's parish, he returned to Oxford and joined a religious society that was founded by his brother Charles and a circle of like-minded friends. They covenanted together to live holy and sober lives, taking communion weekly, maintaining private devotions, visiting prisons, and spending three hours every afternoon in scripture study and devotional reading.

[00:09:12]Because John was the only ordained priest among them, and because he had a gift for leadership and teaching, he naturally became the group's leader.

[00:09:20]Now, other students took notice, but they were not impressed, or at least they pretended not to be. They mocked the group as the Holy Club and because of their disciplined, methodical approach to the Christian life, began calling them Methodists.

[00:09:36]Well, the nickname stuck in ways that no one at the time could have predicted.

[00:09:41]All of this preceded Wesley's time in Georgia. But now, in the aftermath of that storm and the conversation with Spannenberg, Wesley began to doubt the very reality of his own faith. And making matters worse, his pastoral work in Georgia was a disaster. It was a quiet one, but no less disastrous for all of that. He expected his parishioners to live like the Holy Club back in Oxford. His parishioners expected him to be satisfied with their Sunday attendance. Both parties ended up disappointed. His brother Charles, also serving in Georgia under uh Governor Ogulthorp, he grew discouraged and returned to England. John stayed really out of sheer stubbornness, which is in fairness sometimes a useful quality. But eventually he too was forced to leave under awkward circumstances.

[00:10:35]You see, a young woman that he had courted and then broken off with, married another man. Wesley, judging her to be fickle, refused her communion, so she sued him for defamation. It was by any fair accounting largely self-inflicted. He returned to England to the relief of the people of Georgia.

[00:10:55]So at a low point, Wesley reached out again to the Moravians. A man named Peter Bowler became his personal counselor. After extended conversation, Bowler concluded that Wesley lacked a genuine saving faith and advised him to stop preaching. Wesley asked what he should do in the meantime. Bowler's response was simply, I think, pastoral genius. Keep preaching, he said, until you have the faith that you preach about. Then came the evening of May 24th of 1738, one of the most famous dates in church history. Wesley wrote this quote, "In the evening, I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther's preface to the epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before 9ine while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ. 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."

[00:12:01]Those words strangely warmed. No, they resonate with many. It's not the most dramatic conversion language in Christian history. There was no blinding light, no audible voice. But what happened in Wesley that night, it was real and it was lasting. The obsessive, anxious self-examination that had plagued him for years, it gave way to a settled confidence that freed him to turn his considerable intellect outward toward the salvation of others.

[00:12:29]and they captured the essence of what the entire Potistic endeavor aimed at, a real apprehension of a personal connection to God through the redemptive work of Christ. Wesley went immediately to visit the Moravian community at Hearnhood out of gratitude and curiosity. The visit was inspiring, but it convinced him that Moravian spirituality with its contemplative inward focus was really ills suited to his temperament and his passion for social engagement. He would be grateful to the Moravians for the rest of his life, but he would not become one of them. While Wesley was working through all of this, a former member of the Holy Club had already become a celebrated preacher. George Whitfield had experienced something similar to Wesley's Aldergate a few years earlier, and he was now dividing his time between his Georgia parish and preaching across England, where he was drawing enormous crowds, especially in Bristol, the heart of England's industrial region.

[00:13:31]Whitfield's preaching was passionate, theatrical, and when ecclesiastical critics objected to his pulpit style indoors, he simply moved outside. If the church wouldn't have him, the open field would. People came by the thousands.

[00:13:48]When it was time for Whitfield to return to Georgia, he needed someone to manage the work in Bristol. And so he asked Wesley. Wesley accepted somewhat reluctantly.

[00:13:58]Opener preaching was not his style. He later confessed that at the time he was so convinced that God required everything to be done decently and in order that he considered it nearly sinful to save souls outside of a church building.

[00:14:12]But then Wesley started seeing what was happening. People were weeping. They were collapsing under conviction. They were crying out over their sins and then rising with expressions of overwhelming joy, declaring that they had been cleansed.

[00:14:27]Wesley preferred more dignified proceedings, but he watched carefully and eventually concluded that what he was witnessing was a genuine contest between darkness and the Holy Spirit, and that he had no business obstructing what the spirit was doing. Over time, the more dramatic physical responses settle down, as they often do in the early stages of genuine revival. Wesley and Whitfield labored together for a season, though Wesley eventually became the movement's primary leader. Their parting ways came over well theology.

[00:14:59]Both held broadly reformed convictions in most areas. But on the question of predestination and free will, Wesley broke decisively with Calvinist orthodoxy in favor of an Armenian position. Now, after several spirited debates, which is a polite way of saying that they disagreed rather forcefully, the two friends agreed to go their own separate ways and avoid public controversy. That agreement was remarkably honored. With the support of the Countess of Huntington, Whitfield organized what became the Calvinist Methodist Movement, which was strongest in Wales.

[00:15:34][snorts] Wesley had no interest in founding a new denomination. He was an Anglican, and he remained one until the day that he died, officially at least.

[00:15:44]His goal was to do for England what Pietism was doing for Germany, kindle a living faith within the existing church.

[00:15:51]He avoided scheduling Methodist meetings to conflict with Church of England services. And he assumed his followers would attend Anglican worship and receive communion there. For Wesley, as for most of the church across the centuries, the Lord's table was the center of Christian worship.

[00:16:09]But movements, they have a life of their own, and they rarely stay tidily within the boundaries that their founders intended for them. As Methodist societies grew, Wesley organized them into classes of 11 members each with a lay leader. These groups met weekly to read scripture, pray, discuss the faith, and collect alms. Leadership was open to people of any social class, including women who took a prominent place in early Methodism. That radical accessibility was both theologically principled and practically explosive.

[00:16:40]The Church of England had long felt distant to England's working poor, but Methodism, it didn't. Wesley now spent his life on the road, preaching multiple times a day, covering thousands of miles by horseback every year. He kept this pace up well into his 80s. The man was by any measure remarkable. He was still preaching at the age of 87, the year of his death in 1791. Opposition came early and hard. Mobs, sometimes hired by clergy and nobility, who resented the movement's influence among the lower classes, disrupted Methodist meetings.

[00:17:12]Wesley's life was threatened more than once. But the opposition accomplished nothing except to demonstrate that the movement could not be stopped. Well, there were internal tensions as well.

[00:17:23]Wesley reluctantly broke with the Morabians whose drift towards quietism and contemplative withdrawal he feared would produce an inward-looking, socially passive Christianity, which was not at all what he had in mind. His most significant conflict, though, was with the Church of England itself. Until his final years, Wesley scolded Methodists who wanted a clean break with Anglicanism. But his followers could see what he seemed unwilling to acknowledge.

[00:17:49]A separation was not a possibility to be avoided. It was an inevitability that was already underway. Some Anglican authorities viewed Methodism as an indictment of their own failures and resented it. Others objected to the Methodist practice of preaching anywhere and everywhere without regard for parish boundaries. Wesley understood the concern. He simply believed the lostness of the people trumped every procedural objection. A legal complication pushed things further. Under English law, non- Anglican worship services could be permitted, but they had to be officially registered. For Methodists, that created a dilemma. Register and implicitly declare themselves non- Anglican or don't register and break the law. In 1787, after long hesitation, Wesley told his preachers to register. the first legal step towards a separate church had been taken. Now, three years earlier, Wesley had already taken steps with even deeper implications.

[00:18:46]As a scholar of the church fathers, he had long been convinced that in the early church, the terms bishop, elder, and pastor were used interchangeably that the highurch monarchial episcopate uh by which specially ordained priests fill out some kind of hierarchy ranging from deacons at the bottom to archbishops at the top was a later development. It was not a New Testament institution. This led him to conclude that all ordained elders, including himself, had the authority to ordain. He had refrained from acting on that conviction for years, not wanting to inflame tensions with Anglican leadership. But then the American Revolution forced the issue.

[00:19:26]During the war, most Anglican clergy in the colonies had been loyalists. After independence, nearly all of them, well, they went back to England. American Methodists found themselves without clergy to administer the sacraments. and the bishop of London, who still held jurisdiction over the former colonies, refused to ordain anyone for the new country.

[00:19:49]Wesley was not particularly sympathetic to the American rebellion. He thought it both politically unwarranted and morally inconsistent given that many of its champions owned slaves, but he believed no Christian people should be denied the Lord's table on account of political circumstances.

[00:20:07]So what did he do? Well, in 1784, he ordained two lay preachers as presbytors for America and appointed Thomas Ko, an Anglican priest, as their bishop. He later ordained others for Scotland and elsewhere. His brother Charles told him plainly this was a breach. Wesley insisted it wasn't, but the facts had their own logic. By the time that John Wesley died on March 2nd of 1791, Methodism was in every practical sense a separate church whether or not its founder ever [music] fully admitted it.