CHAPTER four
CHAPTER four
Fire on Two Fronts
Scotland, Wales, the Wesley Split, and Marriage
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When I returned to England from America in the spring of 1741, I came back to a world that had shifted under my feet while I had been away. The revival fires I had lit in Bristol and Kingswood before my departure were burning still — but they were burning in a different configuration, surrounded now by controversies and divisions and pressures that had not existed when I left. My friends had been scattered. My congregations had been pulled in competing directions. My own name had become, in some quarters, a lightning rod for every tension that the awakening had stirred up in the established religious world of Britain. And at the center of the most painful of those tensions stood the two men who, alongside me, had been the great instruments of the revival's birth — John and Charles Wesley.
I want to be honest about what those months felt like when I returned. I wrote to a close friend from London in March of 1741, and the letter captures the raw weight of it. I told him that congregations at Moorfields and Kennington Common had dwindled from twenty thousand to two or three hundred. That I had near a hundred orphan children in Georgia to maintain, four thousand miles away, with no fund and over a thousand pounds in debt. That my bookseller — who had made considerable money from printing my sermons and journals — had been drawn away by rival theological influences and now refused to print for me. That many of my spiritual children, the very people I had seen born again through the Gospel, had been so thoroughly prejudiced against me by the doctrinal controversy that they would neither hear nor help me. That some were even sending threatening letters, saying God would soon destroy me.
I wrote that it was, through infinite mercy, that I was enabled to strengthen myself in the Lord my God. Cast down but not destroyed. Perplexed but not in despair. I had been reading the life of A Reformist during those difficult weeks, and a phrase had struck me with force: 'A Reformist is turned out of Geneva — but behold, a new church arises.' I did not compare myself to A Reformist in any other way, but I recognized in that sentence the principle that has always governed the work of God: opposition does not end the work, it redirects it. When one door closes, He opens another. When one form becomes unusable, He builds a new one. When one season ends, the next begins.
The Lord was about to build something new. He already had. My friends in London had been erecting, in my absence, a building they called the Tabernacle — a preaching house at Moorfields that would become my London base for the rest of my preaching life. I wrote of it with thankfulness even in the midst of my distress. God was providing a place, a platform, a home for the work that the established churches had tried to close down. (Psalm 3:3 KJV): "But thou, O LORD, art a shield for me; my glory, and the lifter up of mine head." He was lifting my head. He had not abandoned me. He had not abandoned the work. He was simply moving it into a new season — a season that would prove, in its own way, as remarkable and as fruitful as anything that had come before.
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The Rupture With Wesley: What Actually Happened
The break with John and Charles Wesley is one of the most misunderstood events in the history of the eighteenth-century revival, and because it has been so often misrepresented, I want to explain it as plainly and as fairly as I can. I did not want this rupture. I had done everything in my power to prevent it. And even in the pain of it, I never stopped loving both brothers with a depth and a sincerity that the passage of time would prove was genuine.
The theological issue was real. John Wesley and I disagreed, fundamentally and irreconcilably, about the doctrine of election. Wesley held to an Arminian position — the view that God's saving grace is offered to all people universally, that Christ died for all without exception, and that any individual can freely accept or reject that grace. It is a coherent theological position with a long and respectable history, and John Wesley was no fool. He held it with conviction and was prepared to defend it rigorously.
I held, and hold, the Reformed or Reformed position — what I sometimes called the doctrines of free grace. I believed that God, in His sovereign mercy, has from eternity chosen a people for salvation; that Christ's atonement, while sufficient for all, was specifically efficacious for those the Father had given Him; and that those whom God has truly chosen will, through His irresistible grace, certainly be saved and will persevere in faith to the end. I arrived at this position not by reading theology first but by reading the Bible and by the experience of grace that had broken through to me in my own conversion. When I cried out 'I thirst!' in that Oxford room in 1735, the mercy that met me felt entirely sovereign. It felt like a gift I had neither earned nor deserved, given to me not because I had chosen correctly but because God had chosen me. The doctrines of election were not, for me, an abstract philosophical system. They were the theological description of what had actually happened to me.
Wesley preached a sermon titled Free Grace that was, in effect, a public attack on the doctrine of election. He argued that the Reformed position made God the author of sin and damnation, that it undermined the universal offer of the Gospel, and that it was fundamentally unchristian. He preached it publicly and intended it to be read as a response to my theology. I wrote a reply — carefully, in much love and meekness, as I told my correspondents at the time — defending the Reformed position and responding to Wesley's arguments.
The pamphlet warfare that followed was painful. I watched men I loved argue with a bitterness that grieved me. I watched congregations split. I watched friendships dissolve. I watched the unity that had been the great glory of the Bristol revival — the sense that the Spirit of God was moving across all denominational and theological lines — begin to fracture along this doctrinal fault line. It was one of the most heart-breaking experiences of my ministry, and I made no secret of that.
What I tried to say, in every letter and every conversation and every public statement on the matter, was this: the doctrinal disagreement was real and could not be papered over with false goodwill. But it did not have to destroy the friendship. It did not have to end the partnership in the work of the Gospel. I wrote to John Wesley directly, before things became public: "I am ten thousand times more convinced of the doctrines of election and final perseverance than when I saw you last — You think otherwise: why then should we dispute, when there is no probability of convincing? Will it not in the end destroy brotherly love?" I told him I had no desire ever to enter the lists of controversy against him. I told him that the more he judged me, the more I wanted to love him. (Romans 14:4 KJV): "Who art thou that judgest another man's servant? to his own master he standeth or falleth." We were both servants of the same Master. He would judge between us. In the meantime, our calling was to preach His Gospel, not to waste the energy He had given us tearing each other apart.
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The Theology at Stake: Election, Grace, and Evangelism
Because the controversy with Wesley was so significant, and because the theological question it centered on is one that every serious reader of the Gospel must eventually confront, I want to spend some time here explaining what I actually believed about election and why, far from undermining the preaching of the Gospel, it fueled it.
There is a common assumption — Wesley voiced it, and many have echoed it since — that a belief in divine election necessarily leads to passivity in evangelism. If God has already chosen who will be saved, why preach? Why urge repentance? Why press the invitation with urgency? This assumption seems logical on the surface, but it collapses under the weight of both Scripture and experience. The Apostle Paul was the greatest Reformed theologian in the New Testament and the most tireless evangelist in the history of the church. The Puritans who planted the Gospel in colonial New England were thoroughgoing Reformeds, and their spiritual descendants were the most earnest seekers of revival that colonial America had ever seen. George Whitefield preached the doctrines of grace and preached them with a burning urgency that left no one in any doubt that he believed every soul in the crowd before him desperately needed to respond.
How does this work? It works because election does not nullify the means God has appointed for its accomplishment. God has chosen to save His elect through the preaching of the Gospel. He has chosen to use human voices as the instruments through which the Spirit calls His people. The urgency of my preaching was not despite the doctrine of election but partly because of it. I knew that in every crowd before me, God had souls that were His — souls that He had chosen in eternity and was drawing toward Himself in time. I did not know which ones. I could not identify them. My business was simply to preach the full Gospel to all of them, press it with all the urgency I could summon, and trust that the Spirit of God would do what only He could do — apply the word in convicting, regenerating power to those for whom it was destined.
At the same time, I preached the genuine, free, universal offer of the Gospel. I invited everyone. I pleaded with everyone. I said, at the close of every sermon, 'Come, poor, lost, undone sinner — come just as you are to Christ.' That invitation was not a performance. It was genuine. I believed every person in that field or square or church could come. The question of which ones God had chosen was His business, not mine. My business was to offer freely, press urgently, and leave the sovereign work of grace to the sovereign God of grace.
I used to say that the doctrines of election and final perseverance, rightly understood, gave me confidence in my preaching rather than complacency. I knew the word would not return empty. I knew God had a people. I knew the Gospel was the power of God unto salvation. I was not whisthng in the dark, hoping that perhaps some souls in the crowd might be responsive. I was proclaiming a word that was backed by the full weight of divine sovereignty and divine promise. (John 6:37 KJV): "All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out." All that the Father gives shall come. The coming is certain because the giving is certain. And the invitation to come is universal and genuine — him that cometh I will in no wise cast out. Not one soul that comes in genuine repentance and faith will ever be turned away. That double certainty — the certainty of sovereign grace and the certainty of free welcome — was the theological foundation of every sermon I ever preached, and I found it not a hindrance but a fire under my feet.
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The Moorfields Tabernacle: A New Base
By the summer of 1741 the Tabernacle at Moorfields was becoming the center of my London ministry, and it would remain so for the rest of my life. I want to say something about what it meant — not merely as a building but as a statement.
London was the largest city in the British world, a churning, sprawhng metropolis of over half a million souls, most of whom had no meaningful connection to any church of any kind. The established parish system was designed for a world of stable, settled, village communities, not for the fluid, mobile, socially complex world of a great commercial city where people arrived and departed, worked and struggled and went under, with no one to notice and no pastor to care. The Tabernacle at Moorfields was my attempt to reach that world — not by replacing the established church but by supplementing it, by creating a preaching station in the heart of the city where anyone could come, of whatever background and whatever denomination, and hear the Gospel without the social gatekeeping that formal church attendance involved.
I preached at Moorfields before the building was complete, sometimes outdoors in the space around it. I preached morning and evening, often to crowds that numbered in the thousands. The tabernacle when finished was a substantial building, able to hold several thousand people, and it was full most of the time I preached in it. I did not charge for admission. I did not require any denominational affiliation. I did not impose any social test. Anyone who came to hear the Gospel was welcome, and the people who came were as diverse a cross-section of London life as I ever encountered anywhere — from the poorest laborers to the most fashionable aristocrats, from people who had attended church all their lives to people who had not set foot inside one in decades.
I built additional tabernacles as the years went on — at Norwich in 1751, at Bristol in 1756, and at other locations in England and Wales. Each of them was an act of the same conviction: that the Gospel deserved to be preached where people were, not only in the buildings that the establishment had designated as appropriate. Each of them became a center of the kind of evangelical culture that the Awakening had created — a culture of urgency and sincerity and personal faith, of hymnody and prayer and mutual accountability, of the kind of living Christianity that the Holy Spirit produces when He is given room to work.
I was often asked by critics why I needed separate buildings at all — why I did not simply work within the structures of the Church of England that had ordained me. My answer was always honest: the established church buildings were not open to me. The pulpits had been closed. The bishops had made their position clear. I was not leaving the Church of England in spirit or in doctrine — I remained an ordained Anglican, preaching Anglican theology, faithful to the Thirty-Nine Articles. But I was not willing to stop preaching simply because the institutional church had decided it was inconvenient. (Acts 5:29 KJV): "We ought to obey God rather than men." God had called me to preach. Men had tried to prevent it. I obeyed God. And the Tabernacles were the result of that obedience — living, thriving, fruitful witnesses to the principle that when God opens a door, no man can shut it, and when God builds a house, no opposition can pull it down.
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Scotland: The Cambuslang Revival of 1742
If there is a single season of my British ministry that matches the American Great Awakening in sheer magnitude and spiritual power, it is the Scotland of 1742 — and at the center of that Scottish season stands the revival at Cambuslang, a coal-mining community just outside Glasgow, that produced scenes more remarkable than almost anything I had witnessed on either side of the Atlantic.
I had been to Scotland before — I made fourteen tours of that country over the course of my ministry — and I had found there a readiness for the Gospel that was deeply encouraging. The Scottish people, with their long history of theological seriousness rooted in the Reformed Reformation, had a capacity for genuine spiritual engagement that was distinctive and powerful. They were not easily impressed by mere religious excitement. They had seen too much of that in their own turbulent religious history. But when the real thing came — when the Gospel was proclaimed with genuine fire and genuine substance — they responded with an intensity that was extraordinary.
The revival at Cambuslang had actually been building under the ministry of the local minister, William McCulloch, before I arrived. McCulloch was a quiet, serious, deeply godly man who had begun preaching through the Gospel with renewed urgency in early 1742, and the response had been remarkable. Hundreds of people were already under deep conviction when my first visit to Cambuslang in the summer of that year brought the revival to a new intensity. The crowds that gathered were enormous — tens of thousands of people, many of them traveling long distances to attend, sleeping in the open fields when the local accommodation ran out.
I preached at Cambuslang on what became known as the great Communion Season of August 1742 — an event that has been described as the single greatest outpouring of religious enthusiasm Scotland had ever witnessed. Estimates of the crowd that gathered for the outdoor Communion service on that occasion run as high as thirty thousand people. I preached to them in the open air, as I had preached to the Kingswood miners, as I had preached in the fields of New England — without any building, without any organ or choir, with nothing but the open sky and the open Bible and the Spirit of the living God.
What I saw at Cambuslang shook even me, and I was not a man easily shaken by revivals. The physical manifestations were intense — people falling to the ground under conviction, crying out with a desperation that silenced the surrounding crowd, weeping and trembling and calling on God in language so raw and so genuine that it could not have been manufactured. I was moved to tears myself more than once. Not by the emotion as such — I had learned long since to be cautious about emotion divorced from genuine repentance — but by the evident reality of what the Spirit was doing. These were not staged performances. These were men and women breaking before a holy God, their careful defenses and comfortable assumptions stripped away in an instant by the sudden overwhelming reality of who He was and who they were.
I wrote to my friends in England and America from Cambuslang with barely contained joy. I told them the work there was among the greatest I had ever witnessed. I told them the scenes reminded me of Pentecost — not in the sense of replicating its specific gifts, but in the sense of capturing its essential character: a large crowd, a powerful proclamation, and the Spirit of God moving through that proclamation with a power that could not be attributed to human skill or human planning. (Acts 2:41 KJV): "Then they that gladly received his word were baptized: and the same day there were added unto them about three thousand souls." Three thousand on the day of Pentecost. Cambuslang was not Pentecost, and I did not claim it was. But it was a visitation of the same Spirit, working in the same way — through a Word faithfully proclaimed, applying itself with sovereign power to prepared hearts, and producing the same fruit: genuine repentance, genuine faith, genuinely transformed lives.
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Kilsyth and the Spread Through Scotland
The revival did not stop at Cambuslang. It spread to Kilsyth, another community not far away, where a minister named James Robe had also been preaching through the Gospel with unusual earnestness. At Kilsyth the scenes were equally extraordinary — large crowds, intense conviction, many genuine conversions that could be verified by the evidence of lasting transformation in the lives of those who claimed them. I traveled through Kilsyth and other Scottish communities, preaching two and sometimes three times daily, my voice carrying over fields and commons to crowds that had come from miles around.
Scotland had a particular theological significance for me because it was the homeland of the Reformed tradition in which my own faith was rooted. The Scots had fought and bled for the Gospel in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in ways that the English had not quite paralleled. The names of their martyrs were still living memories. The convictions for which those martyrs died were still, in many Scottish communities, the convictions by which ordinary people organized their lives. When the revival came to Scotland, it came to a people with deep roots — and deep roots, when the rain falls, produce extraordinary fruit.
I preached twice daily in Edinburgh, to crowds of fifteen thousand and more in the open fields around the city. I preached in Glasgow, in Dundee, in smaller towns and villages throughout the country. I encountered warm welcome from some quarters and cold suspicion from others — the Associate Presbytery, for example, was deeply hostile, insisting that I submit to their specific ecclesiastical requirements before they would grant me access to their pulpits. I declined, politely but firmly, and went to the fields instead. I told them that if the Pope himself would lend me his pulpit, I would gladly preach the righteousness of Jesus Christ therein. The remark was meant to express my absolute commitment to preaching the Gospel wherever there were souls to hear it, regardless of institutional approval or disapproval. It was not well received by the Associate Presbytery.
But the fields were full. And the fruit of those Scottish tours was genuine and lasting. Churches were strengthened and renewed. Ministers who had grown cold in their preaching were reignited. A generation of Scottish Christians was formed in the fire of the revival who would go on to carry that fire into the next generation — through the Disruption of 1843, through the later Scottish revivals of the nineteenth century, through the evangelical tradition that would eventually produce men like Robert Murray M'Cheyne and Horatius Bonar and others who bore, in their bones, the inheritance of what God had done in Scotland in 1742.
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Wales and the Reformed Methodist Church
Alongside my Scottish ministry, Wales was claiming an increasingly significant place in my heart and in my itinerary. The Welsh spiritual landscape of the early eighteenth century was a remarkable one — a small nation with a fierce, ancient religious culture that had not yet fully received the awakening fire, but was closer to the igniting point than almost anyone realized.
I had corresponded with Welsh ministers and had Welsh friends in the faith from the early years of my ministry. Wales, like Scotland, had a Reformed theological heritage that gave the revival preaching fertile soil to fall into. The Welsh people also had something that made them particularly responsive to preaching — a native love of music and language, a cultural tradition of taking words seriously, of being moved by eloquence and depth, that meant a preacher who was genuinely on fire could reach them in ways that mere information-delivery never could.
In my Welsh tours I worked alongside Howell Harris, the great Welsh revivalist who had been preaching with fire and urgency through the 1730s and who was, in many ways, the Welsh counterpart to what I was doing in England. Harris was a man of remarkable gifts — passionate, uncompromising, deeply sincere — and our partnership in those Welsh seasons was one of the most energizing of my ministry years. We reinforced each other's message, we encouraged each other in the inevitable discouragements, and we helped to establish the network of meetings and societies that would eventually crystallize into the Welsh Reformedic Methodist Church — a distinct Welsh expression of the evangelical revival, rooted in Reformed theology and marked by the particular fire and passion that the Welsh people have always brought to the things they take seriously.
The Welsh Reformedic Methodist Church became one of the lasting institutional fruits of the revival in Britain — a denomination that carried the Awakening's theological convictions and spiritual intensity forward into the nineteenth century and beyond. I am deeply grateful to have played a part in its formation, however small that part may have been compared to the foundational work of Harris and Daniel Rowland and others who gave their lives to building the Welsh evangelical movement.
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Marriage: Elizabeth James and the Wife Who Served Two Masters
In the midst of all this — the Scottish revivals, the Welsh ministry, the controversy with Wesley, the building of the tabernacles, the ongoing work of Bethesda — I married. The story of my marriage is not a simple one, and I want to tell it honestly, because honesty is the only thing that honors both the woman who married me and the God who, I believe, was at work in the arrangement.
I had known for some time that I needed a wife. Not in the way that young men typically think of needing a wife — I was not driven by the 'foolish passion which the world calls love,' as I expressed it somewhat bluntly in my letters at the time. I was driven by the practical reality of the orphanage and the family it housed. I needed a woman of godly character and practical competence who could manage the household at Bethesda during my long absences, who could be a mother to the children in my care, who could be a genuine helper in the work God had given me.
I wrote about this with a directness that has sometimes been criticized as unromantic, and the criticism is fair in one sense. My marriage proposal — or rather, the letter I wrote to the parents of the woman I was considering — was notably lacking in the language of romantic feeling. I told them plainly that I was free from the kind of passionate attachment that the world called love. I said I was writing because I believed it was the will of God. I asked whether they thought their daughter was a proper person for the work, and whether they would permit me to make the proposal to her.
The letter I wrote to the young woman herself — a Miss Elizabeth James, a Welsh widow — was equally direct. I asked her whether she could bear the fatigues of being joined to a man who was daily liable to be called out to suffer for Jesus Christ. Whether she could trust God alone for provision. Whether she could help manage a family of perhaps a hundred persons. Whether she could, when she had a husband, be as though she had none when his Lord and Master called him forth to preach. It was, I readily acknowledge, not the most conventionally tender proposal ever made.
What I did not fully communicate in those letters — and what I have come to understand more fully with the passing years — was how deeply I came to love and appreciate Elizabeth. She married me in 1741, a widow about a decade my senior, a woman of genuine faith and remarkable practical competence. And she proved, in the years that followed, to be precisely what God knew I needed and precisely what my imperfectly romantic proposal had not adequately described.
She managed Bethesda with the combination of firmness and warmth that the children there needed and that I, perpetually in motion and perpetually exhausted, could not have provided. She dealt with the staff disputes and the supply shortages and the administrative complexities of running a large household in a colonial frontier environment with a steadiness that I marvel at still. She traveled with me when she could and kept the home fires burning when she could not. She was, in the fullest biblical sense of the word, a helpmeet — not merely an assistant but a partner, complementing my gifts with her own, shoring up my weaknesses with her strengths.
We had one child together — a son, born in October 1743, who lived only four months. That loss was one of the sharpest griefs of my personal life. I had written, in my proposal letter, about the possibility that God might bless us with children. He gave us one, and then He took him. I do not understand it. I do not pretend to understand it. I only know that (Job 1:21 KJV): "The LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD." Elizabeth bore that loss with a grace that humbled me. She was a stronger person than I was in the private places of life, and her strength in those private places held us both when the grief threatened to overwhelm. I loved her, and though I did not always show it with the eloquence she deserved, I hope she knew it.
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The Countess of Huntingdon: An Aristocrat in the Service of Grace
Among the most remarkable and most providential relationships of my later British ministry was my friendship with Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon. She was a woman of high aristocratic birth and considerable personal wealth who had been converted through the influence of her sister-in-law and who, from the moment of her conversion, resolved to put every resource she possessed into the service of the Gospel.
The Countess was not a gentle, background figure in the revival. She was a force of nature. She used her position in aristocratic society as a platform for the Gospel in a way that no one of common birth could have managed — inviting the nobility to hear evangelical preaching in her drawing rooms, building chapels at her own expense throughout Britain, appointing evangelical ministers to the livings she controlled, creating a network of preaching stations and educated ministers that became known as the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion.
She appointed me as her personal chaplain, and in that role I had access to a world that would otherwise have been entirely closed to me — the drawing rooms of the English aristocracy, the London fashionable season, the country houses of the gentry and the nobility. I preached in those settings with the same message I had preached in the fields of Kingswood: you must be born again. The Gospel makes no distinction between a coal miner and a countess. Both stand equally in need of grace. Both are equally welcomed at the cross. Both must come in the same way — with empty hands, in genuine repentance, in living faith.
The aristocratic response to revival preaching was a phenomenon that surprised many observers, including me. The assumption in the evangelical world was that the great and the wealthy would be the hardest to reach — that pride and comfort and social position would constitute a nearly impenetrable barrier to the humbling work of grace. And for many they did. But not for all. The Countess herself was proof that God could reach any soul, however elevated its position. And she was not alone. Through her drawing rooms and her chapels, a genuine movement of evangelical faith spread through the upper echelons of British society in a way that had not been seen since the days of the early church.
The Countess also raised significant funds for Bethesda and for my ministry in America. She was one of the most practically faithful friends I ever had — not merely warm in her personal regard but concrete in her support, putting her resources where her convictions were. I thought of her often as a modern Lydia — the businesswoman of Philippi whom Paul described in (Acts 16:14 KJV): "And a certain woman named Lydia, a seller of purple, of the city of Thyatira, which worshipped God, heard us: whose heart the Lord opened, that she attended unto the things which were spoken of Paul." The Lord had opened the Countess's heart. And the things which were spoken had been received, and acted upon, with a generosity and a faithfulness that put many who had received far less to shame. She was one of God's most effective instruments in building the infrastructure of the evangelical movement in Britain, and the network of chapels and ministers she established outlasted both of us.
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The Wesley Reconciliation: Love That Endures Theology
The separation from John and Charles Wesley that the theological controversy had forced upon me never entirely healed the friendship, but it never entirely destroyed it either. We moved in different orbits for much of the 1740s and 1750s — Wesley building Arminian Methodism with its extraordinary organizational genius and its network of class meetings and itinerant preachers and societies, I building the Reformed Methodist network through the tabernacles and the Countess's Connexion. We disagreed about predestination as thoroughly in 1760 as we had in 1741.
But we never stopped regarding each other as brothers in Christ. We never stopped praying for each other. We never stopped acknowledging that the other's ministry was genuine and fruitful, however much we disagreed about the theological framework within which it operated. In the 1760s, John Wesley and I reached a tentative personal reconciliation — not a theological resolution, because the theological disagreement was too real for that, but a personal one: the acknowledgment that two men who loved the same Lord, served the same Gospel, and were dying in the same cause ought to be able to sit down together and speak as friends.
The most poignant expression of that enduring friendship came after my death — which I am, of course, writing about prospectively from the vantage point of a narrative that has not yet reached its conclusion. But I will say here what I said for years before I died: when people asked me who should preach my funeral sermon, I had one answer, and I never changed it. John Wesley. He was the man. Not because we agreed on everything — we did not. Not because the wound of the separation had fully healed — it had not. But because he was my oldest partner in this work, the man who had been there from the beginning, the man whose love for Jesus Christ I never once doubted even when I disputed his theology. And because I thought that the sight of John Wesley standing over my coffin and preaching the Gospel that had cost us both everything was the most fitting tribute I could imagine.
The strength of Christian fellowship — the bond that holds together even men who disagree — is not sentiment. It is not the comfortable illusion that differences don't matter. It is something much more durable than either of those things: the recognition that we are all, finally, dependent on the same mercy. That none of us comes to the judgment seat of Christ with anything to offer except His righteousness. That the God who chose us chose us in spite of our failings and our errors and our imperfect theologies, not because of our correctness. (Ephesians 4:3 KJV): "Endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace." Endeavouring. Not achieving perfectly. Not pretending disagreements away. Endeavouring — making the genuine, costly, persistent effort to hold together what the Spirit has joined, even when human differences pull at the seams. That is what John Wesley and I tried to do. We did not always succeed. But we tried. And I believe Jesus honored the trying.
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Preaching Election Without Losing the Invitation: A Sermon in Brief
Because so much of this chapter has turned on the doctrinal dispute with Wesley, I want to show you — not just tell you — how the doctrine of election actually lived inside my preaching. Let me walk you through the shape of a sermon I preached many times in the years following the controversy, a sermon that I believed held both the sovereignty of God in salvation and the full, free, genuine offer of the Gospel in a tension that was not contradictory but complementary.
I would begin with the universal condition. 'You are a sinner,' I told every audience, whether they were coal miners or countesses, whether they had heard those words a thousand times or were hearing them for the first time. 'Not a sinner in some vague, theological, abstract sense — but a sinner in the specific, practical sense of a person who has set your will against the will of God and who lives, moment by moment, in a state of alienation from the holy Being who made you and sustains you and to whom you must one day give account.' I pressed that hard. I did not allow comfortable people to slide past it. There was no safe middle ground between conviction and delusion, and I would rather disturb a comfortable conscience than soothe it falsely.
From the universal condition I moved to the universal provision. Here is where the Gospel became, for me, almost too wonderful to preach. Christ has come. The Son of God, the Second Person of the eternal Trinity, took on human flesh in the womb of a virgin in Bethlehem and lived thirty-three years as a man among men — fully human, tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin. And then He went to the cross. He took the sin of His people upon Himself — not merely a sympathy for sin, not merely a solidarity with suffering, but the actual, forensic guilt of actual, named sins — and He exhausted the wrath of a holy God against that guilt in His own body, so that every soul who comes to Him in faith can stand before God clothed not in their own righteousness but in His. This is the Gospel. This is the news so good that the angels proclaimed it at His birth and the disciples could not stop proclaiming it after His resurrection.
Then came the application, and here is where the doctrine of election, rightly preached, found its place. I did not use the doctrine as a reason to withhold the invitation. I used it as the reason I could extend the invitation with absolute confidence. 'Come,' I said to every person in every crowd. 'Come, because Jesus Christ is mighty to save and willing to receive. Come, because He has said, him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out. Come, not because you deserve mercy — none of us deserve it — but because mercy is what He came to give. Come, just as you are, with your sin and your shame and your long history of failure and your empty hands. Come to the only One who can do anything about any of it.'
And then, in the same breath, I would say: 'I do not know which of you God has chosen. That is His knowledge, not mine. What I know is this: every soul in this field who comes to Jesus Christ in genuine repentance and living faith will find Him ready and willing and able to save. No one who comes will be turned away. Not one. The question is not whether He will have you — He will. The question is whether you will have Him. Whether you will stop making excuses and stop deferring and stop hiding behind the comfortable form of religion and come, really come, to the real Jesus Christ, whose cross is the only thing that stands between any of us and the eternal consequences of our sin.'
That was how I preached election. Not as a barrier but as a foundation. Not as a reason for passivity but as the ground of boldness. The doctrine of grace made me a more urgent evangelist, not a less urgent one, because it meant that when I pressed the invitation, I was pressing it on behalf of a God who was actively at work in the very crowd before me, drawing His own to Himself by the inner call of His Spirit working through the outer word of His Gospel. (Romans 8:30 KJV): "Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified." Predestinated, called, justified, glorified — the golden chain of grace, unbroken, from eternity to eternity. I was the instrument of the calling. I was the voice through which the effectual call went out to those whom God had predestinated. That responsibility was not a burden — it was the greatest privilege I have ever known.
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The Personal Cost: A Life Poured Out
I want to be honest with you, in a way that I was not always able to be honest with my public audiences, about what these years of the early 1740s cost me personally. Not to complain — I had chosen this road with my eyes open, and I would choose it again a thousand times. But because I think honesty about the cost of genuine Christian calling is a service to those who are considering it themselves.
The pace of my ministry in those years was not sustainable by any ordinary human measurement. I woke at four in the morning as a matter of discipline and routine. I preached at six, and often again at noon, and again in the evening. I sometimes preached a dozen times in a single week, sometimes more. I traveled by horse and by ship and by whatever other conveyance was available, in all weathers and through all conditions. I ate when there was food and slept when there was opportunity and kept going when there was neither. I crossed the Atlantic thirteen times in my ministry career. By my early forties I was visibly aged far beyond my years — my contemporaries who knew me in the revival's early days, and who met me again in its later decades, were sometimes shocked by how much the pace had taken from me physically.
My health was consistently poor. I suffered from asthma that became progressively worse over the years, and in my later ministry I sometimes preached in such physical distress that my companions feared for my ability to continue. I had recurring fevers. I had periods of extreme exhaustion that would have sent a less driven man to his bed for weeks. I pushed through them, usually, because the alternative — stopping, resting, letting the fields go unharvested for the sake of a body that would soon be clay in any case — felt to me like an infidelity to the One who had called me.
I say 'usually' because there were seasons when I could not push through — seasons when illness forced upon me the kind of stillness that I could never voluntarily impose on myself. And I found, in those forced rests, something I would not have found otherwise: a deeper encounter with Jesus Christ in the quietness than I had ever known in the noise. God uses the sickroom as well as the field. He speaks in the whisper as well as the thunder. And the man who is always running rarely hears what the man who has been stopped by illness is given to hear.
The emotional cost was as real as the physical. I have mentioned the pain of the Wesley controversy. I should also mention the loneliness of an itinerant ministry — the particular loneliness of a man who is always arriving and always departing, who forms deep and genuine friendships in every place he visits and then leaves them, who cannot give any community of people the sustained pastoral attention that they deserve and that he would, in another life, gladly give. I was a father to thousands of spiritual children whom I saw only briefly and at intervals. I was a friend to hundreds of men and women whose letters I treasured and whose faces I often could not recall clearly when their names appeared in the post.
Elizabeth bore the cost of my calling too, and I want to honor her for it here. A minister's wife who is married to an itinerant preacher is, in a very real sense, a single person for large portions of her life. She runs the household alone. She makes the decisions alone. She manages the crises alone. She tends the children — and, in our case, managed a large household of orphan children at Bethesda — alone. Elizabeth did all of this without complaint, at least without any complaint that she directed at me, with a faithfulness and a competence that I could not have manufactured if I had tried. She died in 1768, two years before I did, and her death left a hole in my practical life that never entirely filled. She had been, without my ever quite understanding how fully, the human foundation of everything that the ministry of Bethesda and the household of faith required.
I have been asked, sometimes, whether I regretted the pace, the sacrifices, the cost. The honest answer is: not the calling, never the calling. I regretted, sometimes, specific decisions — moments when I was less kind than I should have been, seasons when I was less attentive to Elizabeth or to my spiritual children than they deserved. I regretted the Wesley controversy in the sense of wishing it had not been necessary, not in the sense of wishing I had been less honest about what I believed. But the calling itself — the open fields, the crying need, the Gospel — no. Never. (Philippians 1:21 KJV): "For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." That was not a sentiment I performed for public consumption. It was the deepest truth of my interior life, tested in the furnace of thirty-five years of the kind of ministry that uses a man up. To live was Christ. Every day, every sermon, every storm-tossed crossing, every fevered night, every fractured friendship — Christ. And to die would be gain. Not an ending but a beginning. Not a loss but the final homecoming. I lived in that hope, and it made the cost bearable — more than bearable. It made it, somehow, a privilege.
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What the Tabernacles Built: A Movement Taking Shape
By the mid-1740s, the shape of the evangelical movement in Britain had been fundamentally altered by everything that had happened in the years since Kingswood. The tabernacles I had built were not merely buildings — they were the institutional expression of a new kind of Christianity that the Awakening had created, and their significance went far beyond their walls.
Consider what the Moorfields Tabernacle represented in the social geography of London. Moorfields was not a fashionable district. It was not a place where the city's religious establishment had planted its finest churches or its most prominent ministries. It was, in many ways, a marginal place — the kind of place where the city's poor and working people lived, where the social systems that organized respectable London life did not reach with any particular attentiveness. And into that marginal place, God had caused to be built a preaching house that was regularly filled with thousands of people, that published sermons and journals and devotional literature, that sent its people out into the surrounding streets with the Gospel, and that became a source of spiritual energy that rippled outward through the whole city.
The tabernacles also trained a generation of preachers. Young men who had been converted in the revival and who felt called to preach found in the tabernacle network a place to develop their gifts, to be tested and mentored, to go out into villages and market towns where no regular evangelical ministry existed and plant the seed that would, in the next generation, produce the Evangelical Revival's great flowering in British social and missionary life. The antislavery movement, the prison reform movement, the great missionary societies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — all of these drew their energy, their personnel, and much of their theological conviction from the soil that the Awakening had prepared. The tabernacles were one of the gardens in which that soil was tended.
I did not build an empire. I deliberately refused to build a denomination in the way that Wesley built Methodism — with its tight organizational structure, its clear hierarchy, its rules and classes and disciplinary systems. That was Wesley's genius, not mine, and God used it mightily. My contribution was different: I lit fires and trusted God to tend them. I preached and planted and moved on, trusting that the Spirit who had drawn the harvest would also sustain it. Some of those fires went out. But many of them burned on, and are burning still, in traditions and institutions and individual lives that trace their spiritual lineage back to the open fields and the plain preaching and the burning conviction of those revival years. (1 Corinthians 3:7 KJV): "So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase." God gave the increase. In the tabernacles, in the fields, in Scotland and Wales and England and America — He gave the increase. And He is giving it still, in every life that has been touched by the inheritance of what He did in that extraordinary generation. To Him be all the glory, world without end.
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Lessons From a Season of Storm
As I look back on those years of the early 1740s — the return from America, the Wesley controversy, the building of the tabernacles, the Scottish revival, the Welsh work, the marriage, the Countess — I see a season that was, by almost any measure, one of the most difficult of my life and one of the most fruitful.
The difficulty and the fruitfulness were not unrelated. They were, in fact, parts of the same story. The opposition that drove me out of the established pulpits built the tabernacles. The theological controversy that separated me from the Wesley’s clarified my own theological convictions in ways that made my preaching more precise and more powerful. The pain of the personal attacks — the threatening letters, the prejudiced former friends, the hostile pamphlets — drove me deeper into the mercy of Jesus Christ and further from any dependence on human approval. Every storm, in the economy of God, was productive.
I have shared in these pages, as honestly as I can, the internal experience of those years — the letters I wrote from the depths of pressure and grief, the moments of doubt and discouragement, the sense of being cast down. I share these things not to invite sympathy but to be useful. There will be readers of these pages who are themselves in a season of storm — whose ministry or calling has been attacked, whose friendships have been fractured by disagreement, whose sacrifices have produced loss rather than the fruit they expected. I want those readers to hear this from a man who has been there: God does not waste storms. He does not allow pressure without purpose. Every trial He permits is calibrated to your growth and His glory. And He never leaves.
I strengthened myself in the Lord my God, I told my friend in that letter of March 1741 from the depths of a very dark season. I did not feel strong. I did not see the way forward. I could not calculate how the orphanage would be funded or how the congregations would be rebuilt or how the friendships would be repaired. But I could strengthen myself in Him. I could go back to the promise that had held me through every previous storm. (Isaiah 41:10 KJV): "Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness." He upheld me. He always upholds those who cast themselves on Him. That is not a theological abstraction. It is the testimony of a man who tested the promise through twenty years of storms, and found it never failed. Not once. Not ever.
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The Voice of the Great Awakening
— George Whitefield —