As we approach the bicentennial of our founding in 2023, we will share the story of the Diocese of Georgia. This week we remember John Wesley and his exit from Georgia.
Though his legacy as the founder of the Methodist movement has born so much good fruit for almost three centuries, John Wesley’s ministry in Georgia went catastrophically wrong. Wesley arrived to a Savannah that was still a village of just two hundred houses. In less than two years, a 44-person grand jury, making up a significant percentage of the population, would approve a 10-count indictment against their idealistic minister.
John had been felled by a rigid faith and a broken heart. One colonist described John’s spiritual leadership as “religious Tyranny.” To make matters worse, John had fallen for Sophia Hopkey who he tutored in French on the ship from England and continued to see regularly. She even nursed the pastor through a fever. But John became convinced that marriage would get in the way of his ministry and he told the apparently equally infatuated 18-year old that he could not marry until he accomplished his mission to the Indians. Wesley’s words did not strike the young woman as the words of a soul mate. Sophia married William Williamson. John’s diary on the day he heard the news says only, “Could not pray. Tried to pray—lost—sunk.”
The pastor excommunicated Sophy a few months later citing “falseness and inconsistency of life,” creating a stir in the gossipy colony. Nine more charges flowed from his rigid religiosity.
Wesley wrote, “I shook off the dust of my feet, and left Georgia, having preached the Gospel there with much weakness indeed and many infirmities, not as I ought but as I was able.” He added, “This have I learned in the ends of the earth, that I am fallen short of the glory of God, that my whole heart is altogether corrupt and abominable.”
We know that in the fall of 1738, less than a year after he left Georgia in disgrace, John Wesley found his life transformed by grace. He heard someone read Martin Luther’s introduction to Paul’s letter to the Romans at a meeting he had attended unwillingly. He would write that as he heard the words “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.”
Wesley who had afflicted others with a rigid approach to religion was surprised by the grace of a God who knew John’s heart was altogether corrupt and abominable and yet loved the imperfect parson anyway. John would go on to travel a quarter of a million miles on horseback, delivering more than 40,000 sermons, and founding the Methodist Movement boasting 541 preachers and 135,000 members in his lifetime. There are 80 million Methodists around the world today who have found their hearts warmed by the grace John Wesley experienced.
Pictured above: Frank Logue’s photo of the monument of John Wesley in Reynold Square in Savannah; John Wesley preaching on his father’s grave on June 6, 1742
