Lecture 16-3: A Global Church, a Holiness Movement, and an Unfinished Reckoning

Wesley himself invoked language very much like this verse's logic in his own anti-slavery writing, arguing that an enslaved African was as fully human, and as fully a possible object of God's saving grace, as any European reader of his pamphlet — a claim that should have been self-evident to anyone holding Galatians 3:28 as Scripture, and evidently was not self-evident enough, in practice, to the parts of the Methodist movement that continued to accommodate slaveholding for decades after Wesley's death. This lecture asks you to hold the verse and the history of its non-application side by side, rather than let the verse's clarity substitute for an honest look at what Methodists actually did.

From renewal movement to separate church

Wesley's death removed the one figure whose personal authority and explicit wishes had kept British Methodism formally inside the Church of England. The separation did not happen instantly or in one clean act, and it happened differently on the two sides of the Atlantic, for different and instructive reasons.

In America, the pressure came from an external fact Wesley could not control: the American Revolution had severed the Church of England's institutional presence in the newly independent United States, leaving American Methodist societies with almost no ordained Anglican clergy to administer the sacraments at all. Wesley, who held no episcopal authority of his own within Anglican polity, took the extraordinary step in 1784 of ordaining Thomas Coke as a general superintendent for America and authorizing him to ordain Francis Asbury in turn — an act that scandalized his own brother Charles, who wrote that Wesley had effectively "assumed the episcopal character" he had no formal authority to claim. That same December, American Methodist preachers met in Baltimore for what became known as the Christmas Conference and formally organized the Methodist Episcopal Church, with Coke and Asbury recognized as bishops (a title Wesley himself objected to, preferring "superintendent," though it did not stick). Wesley authorized the ordinations because American Methodists had no other realistic way to receive the sacraments; he did not intend, and by his own later letters resented, the fact that the result was an American church fully separate from his own.

In Britain, no such external emergency forced the issue during Wesley's lifetime, and he held the line there personally until he died. Only in 1795, four years after his death, did the British Methodist Conference adopt the Plan of Pacification, permitting Methodist preachers, under specified conditions, to administer the sacraments themselves rather than requiring members to receive Communion at their parish church — the practical step that made British Methodism a church in its own right rather than a society operating inside the Church of England. The two national stories differ in cause (external crisis in America, internal gradual drift in Britain) but agree on the point this chapter has asked you to hold onto throughout: both separations happened after Wesley's death, not because of a plan he had set in motion to leave, but because the structure he built could not indefinitely survive without the one person holding it inside the church he had never intended to abandon.

Growth into a global church

Once separated, Methodism grew rapidly on both sides of the Atlantic. In America, the "circuit rider" system Francis Asbury built on Wesley's own itinerant model sent traveling preachers on regular, months-long circuits through the expanding American frontier, reaching settlements far ahead of most other denominations' capacity to plant settled congregations, and by the middle of the nineteenth century Methodism had become one of the largest religious bodies in the United States. In Britain, Methodism grew into the country's largest nonconformist (non-Anglican Protestant) denomination through the nineteenth century, spreading through the same pattern of lay leadership and disciplined small-group accountability Wesley had built decades earlier.

The following two centuries saw significant institutional consolidation on both continents: British Methodism's several branches, which had themselves split repeatedly over questions of church governance and lay authority during the nineteenth century, reunited into a single Methodist Church in 1932, and American Methodism, after its own nineteenth-century divisions (discussed below), eventually reunited and then merged further, forming The United Methodist Church in 1968 through union with the Evangelical United Brethren Church. Today, Methodist and Wesleyan-tradition churches count members in the tens of millions worldwide, organized loosely through bodies like the World Methodist Council, with especially rapid growth in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries across parts of Africa and Asia — a genuinely global church descended from a renewal society Wesley built to operate inside a single national establishment he never meant it to leave.

The holiness movement

Wesley's doctrine of entire sanctification did not stay confined to eighteenth-century Methodism. In nineteenth-century America, a distinct holiness movement arose, drawing directly and explicitly on Wesley's teaching about Christian perfection, and developed its own institutions, camp meetings, and popular teachers — most prominently Phoebe Palmer, whose widely read writings offered what she called a "shorter way" to entire sanctification, framed as an act of consecration and faith a believer could enter into more immediately than Wesley's own more gradual, cautious language had generally implied. By the later nineteenth century, some holiness advocates concluded that mainline Methodism itself had drifted from Wesley's original emphasis on entire sanctification, and a number of new holiness denominations formed as a result, including the Church of the Nazarene and the Free Methodist Church, both explicitly organized to preserve and promote the doctrine of Christian perfection as they believed Wesley had originally taught it.

The holiness movement is also widely, though not simply, connected to the rise of Pentecostalism at the start of the twentieth century. A number of early Pentecostal leaders and participants in the 1906 Azusa Street revival — including figures who had come directly out of Wesleyan holiness churches — carried holiness categories of a "second blessing" experience of sanctification into what they added to it as a further, distinct experience of Spirit baptism evidenced by speaking in tongues. It would overstate the case to call Pentecostalism simply a later stage of Wesleyan holiness theology — the movement also drew on other, non-Wesleyan streams, including the Reformed-inflected Higher Life and Keswick teaching and distinct traditions of African American worship and spirituality — but the Wesleyan holiness line is one of the movement's genuine and well-documented taproots, not a claim invented after the fact to connect two otherwise unrelated things.

Slavery: a late, real opposition, and its limited effect

Wesley's public record on slavery has two parts, and an honest account keeps both in view rather than letting either one stand alone.

The first part is genuinely admirable and unambiguous. In 1774, Wesley published Thoughts Upon Slavery, a forceful pamphlet condemning the transatlantic slave trade and slaveholding itself as a moral evil, drawing heavily on the arguments of the Quaker abolitionist Anthony Benezet and insisting, in Galatians-3:28 terms, on the full humanity of enslaved Africans against the racial justifications slaveholders offered for the practice. Wesley's opposition only grew firmer with age: the last letter he is known to have written, dated February 24, 1791, six days before his death, was addressed to the young William Wilberforce, then beginning his parliamentary campaign against the slave trade, urging him onward — "Go on, in the name of God and in the power of his might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it" — and calling slavery, in the same letter, "that execrable villainy." It is a striking thing for a dying man's last written words to be spent on someone else's unfinished political fight, and it is fair to weigh that fact seriously in assessing Wesley's character.

The second part is harder, and this chapter will not soften it. Wesley's own forceful conviction did not translate into a Methodist movement that consistently practiced what he preached, particularly as Methodism spread through the American South, where its growth depended in real measure on winning converts, including converts who owned slaves, in a slaveholding society. Early American Methodist conferences adopted rules at various points restricting slaveholding among members and especially among preachers, but enforcement was inconsistent and repeatedly weakened under pressure from Methodism's own growth in slaveholding regions, and the tension Wesley's own writing had named so clearly went unresolved for decades after his death. It came to a head in 1844, when the Methodist Episcopal Church split — specifically over whether a bishop could continue in office while owning slaves — into the Methodist Episcopal Church and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, a division that lasted until the two branches, along with a third Methodist body, reunited in 1939 as The Methodist Church, nearly a century later.

Weighing this record honestly does not mean splitting the difference into a vague, noncommittal middle. Wesley's own opposition to slavery was real, late-developing but eventually total, and expressed with as much force as anything he ever wrote or said. The movement he left behind did not, for the better part of a century, live up to it, and the cost of that failure fell, as it always does, hardest on the enslaved people whose full humanity Wesley himself had insisted on in print. Both facts are part of Wesley's legacy. Neither one is the whole of it.

4-1. From Wesley's pen to Methodism's 1844 split

5. Going to the Sources

Read Wesley's final letter to William Wilberforce, dated February 24, 1791, in full — it is short, freely available in editions of Wesley's collected letters at ccel.org, and worth reading as a whole rather than only its most quoted sentence, since the letter also urges Wilberforce toward personal perseverance against opposition he had not yet fully faced, in terms that make clear Wesley expected the fight to be long and difficult, not quickly won.