Appreciating What Suffering Teaches – Part 12: Readings – 4
John Wesley wanted other people to have this feeling too. Whitefield had it. They had both become ministers of the Church of England and began preaching in the churches about the new birth, but the religious life of the Church had grown so cold that the members were blistered by the heat of this preaching and closed the pulpits to the Methodists. What then? “If the churches are closed, we will preach out of doors,” said Whitefield and Wesley. They went to the people … at the mouths of the coal pits as the miners went down or came up from work, to the villages of England. …
The common people heard them gladly, and sometimes the audiences were as many as twenty and thirty thousand. But hoodlums tried to break up the meetings, by blowing horns, ringing bells, or hiring the town crier to bawl in front of the preacher. Sometimes cattle were driven into the congregation. Once a mob burst into the house where Wesley was staying. He walked into the thickest of them and called for a chair. “My heart was filled with love,” he writes, “my eyes with tears, and my mouth with arguments. … They were amazed, they were ashamed, they melted down, they devoured every word. What a turn was this!” Wesley thanked God for getting together such a congregation of drunkards, swearers, arid Sabbathbreakers.
Sometimes the bullies got caught in their own traps. Once a man in the crowd lifted his hand to throw a stone when another thrown from behind caught him right between the fingers. Another came with pockets full of rotten eggs. Wesley writes, “A young man coming unawares clapped his hands on each side, and mashed them all at once.” And sometimes the bullies were themselves overcome by the man they were trying to crush. When a mob was nearly on the point of killing Wesley and a stout club had just missed his head, he began quietly to pray. Suddenly then the leader of the mob turned and said, “Sir, I will spend my life for you: follow me and not one soul here shall touch a hair of your head.” They got out safely and that man became a leader in Methodism.
Wesley rode up and down England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, preaching in the fields and visiting the jails. He always traveled on horseback. In seven months he covered 2,400 miles and during his life 225,000 miles. Sometimes he made 90 miles in one day. He rode with a loose rein—that was the best way, he said, to keep a horse from stumbling, and as he rode he read history, poetry, philosophy, in English, in Latin, and in Greek.
By and by the tide turned and people began to admire him. Mayors offered him the freedom of the cities in which he had been mobbed. In his eighty-fifth year on visiting a certain town he wrote: “The last time I was here … I was taken prisoner … but how is the tide turned! High and low now lined the street, from one end of the town to the other, out of stark love and kindness. …”
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The Church of Our Fathers, Roland H. Bainton, Charles Scribner’s Sons, pages 192-193.
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Sunday’s coming. Do you have your sermon ready? Is it relevant? Will it effectively motivate your congregation to walk more in step with the Master? What about that Sermon Series you’ve been thinking about?
Or, if you’re someone who plans well ahead, have you asked yourself what you will preach for your Easter Sermon, your Advent Sermon, your Christmas Sermon?
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