Wesley the Outdoor Preacher
Wesley the Outdoor Preacher Donald Soper If it is true to say that Methodism was born in song, it was certainly bred in the open air. Methodism took its place alongside the great movements of Christian revival in as much as it expressed and renewed the one great and eternal gospel (the faith once declared to the saints), but like all evangelical revivals it possessed elements and characteristics which gave it a special and recognizable voice.
One of the early and unique sounds of Methodism was the singing of Charles Wesley's hymns. There is, however, another and equally unique sound — the sound of John Wesley's field preaching.
Methodism was nurtured in the open air. Moreover, just as the Methodist singing is preserved for us in Charles Wesley's hymns, so the story of the Methodist open-air evangelism is recorded in John Wesley's Journal. Here are some typical passages from the Journal which indicate the conditions under which this Anglican clergyman resorted to the open air, and equally exemplify the nature and environment of this open-air preaching to which he committed himself.
Wesley began his life-long commitment to field preaching largely from the prompting of that other great eighteenth-century evangelist, Whitefield, and with considerable 'perturbation', as he wrote in his Journal on 31 March 17309:
In the evening I reached Bristol, and met Mr Whitefield there. I could scarce reconcile myself at first to this strange way of preaching in the fields, of which he set me an example on Sunday; having been all my life (till very lately) so tenacious of
John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives every point relating to decency and order, that I should have thought the saving of souls almost a sin, if it had not been done in a church.
On 2 April 1739 Wesley wrote:
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 adjgining to the city, to about three thousand people.
So it began, and the Journal records example after example of this field preaching. As he wrote in Dublin fifty years later: "In a course of years, necessity was laid upon me to preach in the open air.'
Here are a number of quotations which give something of the scenario and flavour of this remarkable ministry. John Nelson has this to say after hearing Wesley make his first address at Moorfields:
Oh! that was a blessed morning for my soul! As soon as he got up upon the stand, he stroked back his hair and turned his face towards where I stood, and I thought he fixed his eyes on me.
His countenance struck such an awful dread upon me before I heard him speak, that it made my heart beat like the pendulum of a clock, and when he did speak, I thought his whole discourse was aimed at me. When he had done, I said, 'This man can tell the secrets of my heart.'
Wesley's deliberate, unemotional magnetism produced, much more than Whitefield's emotive appeals, violent reactions in the field preaching of those early years. At Wapping, for instance:
Many of those that heard began to call upon God with strong cries and tears. Some sank down, and there remained no strength in them; others exceedingly trembled and quaked; some were torn with a kind of convulsive motion. ... I have seen many hysterical and many epileptic fits; but none of them were like these.
Once in Bristol 'the street was filled with people, shouting and cursing and swearing', who were not dispersed till the Mayor's officers took the ringleaders into custody. In Cardiff's Shire Hall
Wesley the Outdoor Preacher
he found an attentive audience with 'many gentry', but at his next stop in Newport met 'the most insensible ill-behaved people', including one 'ancient man' who spent Wesley's sermon time in non-stop swearing and cursing, and in repeated attempts to throw a 'great stone', which fortunately proved too heavy for him. At Upton, near Bristol, 'the devil knew his kingdom shook, and therefore stirred up his servants to ring bells and make all the noise they could. But my voice prevailed.'
From the foregoing excerpts there emerges a picture of this field preaching (or rather it is possible to discern the outline of that picture), the subject matter, the arrangement of the constituent elements that go to make it up and the various colours that distinguished it. What can only be suggested is the impact of this ministry, for like the great impressionist paintings, this ministry was much more than the sum ofits parts. Ultimately,
John Wesley in the open air was a phenomenon. He appeared, and his appearance was invested with psychological (or as I would want to put it, spiritual) dynamism, an impression that defies analysis, yet is not totally unknown to such a disciple as myself.
The main characteristics that accompanied this field preaching are doubly valuable. They indicate certain requirements for success which are basic and unchanging. At the same time they would warn Wesley's disciples of the vast changes that have taken place since his day, many of which make some of his methods unrepeatable, and have altered what may be called the 'receptivity' of his hearers.
In as much as Wesley took to field preaching largely because many church doors were shut against him, he took his sermons into the open air. There must have been modifications in the manner of their delivery, and the interruptions which made the flow of his speaking often spasmodic rather than continuous. The evidence such as it is, and it is tantalizingly little, is that he offered
Christ to the crowd and set that offer within the framework of a conversion experience open to all who would repent of their sins, and yield themselves to the everlasting mercy of God. The emphasis was moral; what evidence he advanced was the word of God as infallibly expressed in the Bible. He called for immediate decision and couched that call in the language of his brother's hymns. The effects of such preaching were indeed immediate.
Over and over again the response was dramatic. The records tell,
John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives as I have quoted, of convulsions which convinced those who experienced them that the devil was being thrust out of the penitent sinner's life. Whether they fell in swoons or acclaimed their salvation by shouts of deliverance, there can be no doubt that a genuine revival experience took hold of many as they listened and as they responded. There were other immediate effects.
Wesley was often met with hostility, he was threatened physically, he was occasionally molested and was protected and ushered into safety on more than one occasion. The Journal is laconic about meetings which must have been riotous, but the results of this field preaching are beyond doubt. A religious revival happened in eighteenth-century England, and it was largely due to the taking of the Gospel out of doors by this neat little evangelical Anglican priest.
Now if all scripture is written for our learning, so is history; and in the present age with its declining churchmanship, its everincreasing agnosticism and its apocalyptic dangers, then a religious revival must be the hope of organized Christianity.
What can be profitably learned from the history of John Wesley's field preaching? The beginning of the answer must lie in the personal, social and intellectual circumstances that characterized that eighteenth-century evangelism compared with the circumstances which belong to such open-air preaching today.
The differences are as obvious as they are critical. The crowds to whom Wesley preached (and in terms of numbers asserted in the Journal it is prudent to divide by three at least to get anywhere near the size of his audiences) were largely uneducated by modern standards. Whatever their lack of theology in general, it is clear that they were susceptible to the threat of hell. They were equally aware of the prospect of heaven for those who received the gift of salvation from sins which were a constant cause of anxiety because they seemed beyond the power of the sinner to refrain from them.
Moreover their acquaintance with the world around them was in many Cases non-existent, or inevitably fragmentary.
At the same time the emergence of the proletariat of the Industrial Revolution alongside the rural population which had changed relatively little for centuries was already heralding the 'economic' man, although the economic theory to explain him was still in the future. Such a generalization, however, should be accepted in the light of Professor E. P. Thompson's epic work on
Wesley the Outdoor Preacher
The Making of the English Working Class. Yet, whatever exceptions there were to the foregoing description of those who listened to John Wesley out of doors, the format of his meetings was relatively unchanging whether he was preaching to tin miners in Cornwall, or coal miners in Durham, or country folk up and down the land.
It was an evangelical sermon taken outside the church doors, hymns now and then, no collection of course, but a proclamation culminating in an appeal and resulting in a response. As he records in his Journal, he was frequently heckled, occasionally shouted down, but not argued with or questioned, as is the pattern of open-air meetings in Hyde Park today. In one sense the campaigns of modern evangelists like Dr Billy Graham represent the contemporary equivalent of Wesley's field preaching. The range of his voice determined the size of his crowd (which included those who were ready to mingle in any crowd whatever the occasion). The range of the mechanical loudspeaker makes for much larger crowds today but entirely inhibits the 'to and fro' and the intimacy of comment and argument. The hearer is invited to respond; he is not invited to participate. Whether or not this form of field preaching will provide the seeds of revival, which the church indoors is failing to achieve, is speculative. I would only venture the feeling that its appeal, particularly in these islands, lacks universality and, on the available evidence, tends to shuffle and reshuffle an already existing pack rather than doing what
Wesley did — reaching out to those untouched by any other evangelical method of propaganda. Nonetheless, it would be impudent to appear to write it off, though its effects and prospects lead me to claim the need of another form of field preaching which responds more closely to elements in the contemporary scene. I am satisfied that the kind of outdoor preaching which John Wesley undertook, and in which he was so successful, is insufficient to meet that contemporary situation. There is urgent need for the advocacy of the Christian case which begins in a 'fellowship of controversy' shared by speaker and audience. The reason for such a Claim lies in the fact that whereas Wesley could count on an overall sense of guilt among his hearers, the preacher today can only, initially at least, count on a sense of doubt.
Moreover, there is another all-important difference between the condition of those who were attracted to Wesley's preaching and those who tend to listen to open-air evangelism today. The
John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives modern crowd is 'informed', however superficially. The press and especially radio and television have opened up areas of awareness about the world around them, and communicate the prevailing social and political ideas, of which in their day John Wesley's hearers were totally ignorant. We know that ignorance breeds superstition, but a little knowledge, however thinly spread, is dangerous in quite a different way. It breeds scepticism.
John Wesley's call to salvation could and did produce an immediate response time after time, because there were few inhibiting doubts in the hearers' minds to interfere in that straightforward process. Despite the sudden conversions that accompany the open-air witness today, the overall response, if any, is conditioned by speculation which inevitably slows down the impetus of the challenge.
Conversion is rarely instantaneous. At best it is a series of choices rather than one all-embracing response. Nevertheless, an increasing number of preachers today, myself included, have come to believe from the experience of taking the Gospel out of doors, and especially out of the church doors, that this is where a return to the faith in the Gospel could happen, and with comparable results with those which were reached by John
Wesley's field preaching 200 years ago.
Why? Surely because the root problem is fundamentally a moral one and repentance is now, as ever it has been, the gateway to forgiveness and the coming of the Kingdom of God. The threat of a nuclear calamity gives an unprecedented immediacy to this problem. We need to repent at once, to be forgiven at once, and to seek that Kingdom at once, and all for one supreme reason.
Hitherto the end of the world was exclusively in the hands of God.
We could speculate on its timing but we could neither facilitate nor delay this awful occasion. It is no flippancy to say that in relation to this apocalyptic prospect we human beings now have a 'do-it-yourself kit'. We have the nuclear bomb, and if it explodes life on this planet could end suddenly and irrevocably. Therefore the moral response to such a final calamity is urgent as it has never been in the great disasters of the past like plague, drought, climatic shifts and of course all the wars of the centuries.
To mobilize the moral case in this global emergency demands the imperative use of every form of the media, the pulpit, the press, radio and television, and every means of exhortation and argu-
Wesley the Outdoor Preacher
ment, while yet there is time. The medium of the open air is essential in this 'ministry of all the talents'.
It might be extravagant to claim that it is the leaven within the lump of advocacy. On the other hand the Methodist Revival could not have happened without the ingredient of field preaching asa vital constituent. The moral and spiritual revival which is the hope, indeed the requirement, of man's future on this planet requires a similar evangelical excursion into the open air today.