Aldersgate or Fetter Lane?

Photo by Cullan Smith from Unsplash

Prior to 1738, John Wesley was a (very!) hard-working clergyman with a fair share of more or less successful ministry both in England and America. Despite this,  Wesley questioned his faith, most famously in conversations with the Moravian Peter Böhler. Furthermore, Wesley saw little evidence, inward or outward, of the manifest work of the Holy Spirit in his life. In his summary text, The Supernatural Occurrences of John Wesley, pastor and evangelist Daniel Jennings could identify no clearly supernatural events recorded in Wesley’s journal prior to Aldersgate. 

Then on May 24, 1738, Wesley felt his heart “strangely warmed,” an event that is rightly celebrated in Methodism. In this conversion experience, he was like any number of pious Anglican clergymen. Yet what brought this pious clergyman into the center of a revival that would “reform the nation, especially the church,” was an event that has received much less attention within the denominations that stem directly from this movement. This event, which included outward as well as an inward manifestation of the Holy Spirit’s power, took place seven months after Aldersgate at a New Year’s watchnight service at Fetter Lane. Here, Wesley proclaimed, “The power of God came mightily upon us.” Judging from Wesley’s journal account of the fourteen months after Aldersgate, it was actually this communal experience of the Holy Spirit at Fetter Lane on January 1, 1739, that was the real catalyst for the encounters of Spirit power that came to typify the Methodist Revival. 

Wesley After Aldersgate 

Aldersgate was inward evidence of the Spirit’s work. It brought Wesley into the fold of evangelical Anglicanism. But judging from the seven months between Aldersgate and Fetter Lane, Aldersgate was not the turning point that Methodists often make it for the movement as a whole. Manifest outward signs and wonders by the Holy Spirit, which became characteristic of the Wesleyan Methodist Revival, were still sparse.  

In the seven months remaining in 1738 after his Aldersgate experience, Wesley mentions only two events that might fall into the category of outward signs and wonders. On November 20, he was awakened “greatly troubled in dreams,” only to discover that one of his students had taken his own life that very night. Then, a few weeks later, on December 5, a young woman who was “raving mad, screaming and tormenting herself continually” became calm when Wesley told her, “Jesus of Nazareth is able and willing to deliver you.” Even seeing this, Wesley continued to question the present power of God, praying, “Why are these poor wretches left under the open bondage of Satan?” 

Throughout those months, Wesley also continued to struggle with doubt. Albert Outler noted in his compilation of Wesley’s writings, John Wesley, that one of the curiosities of Wesley’s Aldersgate experience is that “in the first six months after ‘Aldersgate’ he reports numerous instances of acute spiritual depression, equal in severity to anything preceding.” Examples from Wesley’s journal include: “My soul continued … in heaviness” (May 26); “I waked in peace, but not in joy” (May 28); “[I] felt a soreness in my heart” (June 6); “I cannot find in myself the love of God or of Christ. Hence my deadness and wanderings in public prayer” (Oct 14); “This witness of the Spirit I have not, but I patiently wait for it” (Oct 30); and “I was troubled. … I opened my Testament on those words, ‘My hour is not yet come’” (Nov 23). 

The Fetter Lane Love Feast

But then something seems to change in his journal accounts. On January 1, 1739, seven months after his Aldersgate experience, Wesley attended a love feast of the Fetter Lane society. He recounts the event as follows:

Mr. Hall, Kinchin, Ingham, [George] Whitefield, Hutchings, and my brother Charles were present at our love feast in Fetter Lane, with about sixty of our brethren. About three in the morning, as we were continuing instant in prayer, the power of God came mightily upon us, insomuch that many cried out for exceeding joy, and many fell to the ground. As soon as we were recovered a little from that awe and amazement at the presence of his majesty, we broke out with one voice, ‘We praise thee, O God; we acknowledge thee to be the Lord.’

George Whitefield, who was twenty-four at the time, wrote regarding the Fetter Lane society meetings of that time:

It was a Pentecostal season indeed. Some times [sic] whole nights were spent in prayer. Often have we been filled as with new wine. And often have I seen them overwhelmed with the Divine Presence, and cry-out, ‘Will God, indeed, dwell with men upon earth! How dreadful is this place! This is no other than the house of God, and the gate of Heaven!’

Wesley continued to recognize the power of the Holy Spirit at that January 1 meeting when he wrote about another Fetter Lane meeting on June 16:

In that hour we found God with us as at the first. Some fell prostrate upon the ground. Others burst out, as with one consent, into loud praise and thanksgiving. And many openly testified, there had been no such day as this since January the first preceding.

On January 1, 1739 at Fetter Lane, the Holy Spirit poured out on Wesley and the others as on Pentecost. 

Wesley After Fetter Lane 

Judging from the next seven months in his Journal, it is evident that the manifest power of the Holy Spirit played an increasingly central role, and that the Methodist Revival had begun.  Those seven months after Fetter Lane were spiritually quite remarkable. First, Wesley’s spiritual struggles diminished, at least in terms of his dwelling on them in the Journal. A single entry on January 4 where he wrote “joy in the Holy Ghost I have not” is a reference to past history rather than a present feeling. Wesley titled this section in his journal, “Prayer, writ account of myself,” who “many years ago wrote the following reflections.” The frequent spiritual angst Wesley documents after Aldersgate ends with the communal experience of the Holy Spirit at Fetter Lane. Second, the seven months following the Fetter Lane meeting saw no less than thirty-one recorded supernatural occurrences in his ministry. The first was a healing on January 21. A “well-dressed, middle-aged woman suddenly cried out as in the agonies of death.” She suffered for three years in psychological torment with no improvement through physicians’ care. That night, upon hearing Wesley speak, she began to heal! 

Between February 9 and February 17 Wesley reports the partial healing of an eleven-year-old boy who “runs about beating and tearing himself,” bites, pinches, and “lays his hands on the fire and sticks pins in his flesh.” Wesley reports that “a few of us prayed with him, and from that time (as his parents since informed us) he had more rest (although not a full deliverance) than he had had for two years before.” 

On May 2 and May 21, Wesley conducted what could be described as two demonic deliverances. In the first instance, John Haydon fell raving mad at home and “then roared out, ‘O thou devil! Thou cursed devil! Yea, thou legions of devils! Thou canst not stay. Christ will cast thee out.’” Wesley and others “betook ourselves to prayer” and “both his body and soul were set at liberty.” In the second instance, Thomas Maxfield “began to roar out and beat himself against the ground, so that six men could scarcely hold him. … Except [John Haydon], I never saw one so torn of the evil one.” Again, after they continued in prayer, “the greater part found rest to their souls.”

Supernatural encounters became one of the distinguishing marks of the Methodist Revival. On April 17 Wesley notes, “So many living witnesses hath God given that ‘his hand is still stretched out to heal, and that signs and wonders are even now wrought by his holy child Jesus.’” He who had witnessed few if any signs and wonders in his previous years of ministry notes this less than four months after Fetter Lane! 

Even persons vehemently opposed to these outpourings were dramatically affected (see Wesley’s journal entries for March 8, April 30, May 1, May 2, July 1, and July 30). “One of the most surprising instances of [God’s] power” occurred on March 2 with a woman who was “enraged at ‘this new way’ and zealous in opposing it.” When she agreed to pray with Wesley, “she fell into an extreme agony, both of body and soul, and soon after cried out …, ‘Now I know, I am forgiven for Christ’s sake.’”

Even though present at the Fetter Lane meeting, Whitefield had his own objections to “those outward signs which had so often accompanied the inward work of God.” A day after voicing such objections, Wesley wrote in his journal on July 7 that Whitefield “had an opportunity of informing himself better. For no sooner had he begun … to invite all sinners to believe in Christ, than four persons sunk down close to him, almost in the same moment.” Each of the four had a different response: the first lay without motion, the second trembled exceedingly, the third groaned, and the fourth convulsed with strong cries and tears. Whitefield was able to witness for himself four different manifestations of the Spirit to which he had previously objected. Wesley quipped, “From this time, I trust, we shall all suffer God to carry on his own work in the way that pleaseth him.” 

Outward signs of revival became so numerous that their validity was questioned. Wesley writes on May 20: “During this whole time I was almost continually asked … concerning this strange work …, ‘How can these things be?’ and innumerable cautions were given me (generally grounded on gross misrepresentations of things) not to regard visions or dreams; or to fancy people had remission of sins because of their cries or tears, or bare outward professions.” He responds, “You deny that God does now work these effects; at least, that he works them in this manner. I affirm both, because I have heard these things with my own ears and seen them with my eyes.”

Most of the early outward manifestations occurred privately or in society meetings prompting critics to explain them away as resulting from rooms that were too warm. “Why were they not done in the face of the sun?” his critics asked. God answered dramatically on May 21 at an open-air meeting of roughly two thousand attendees. “[O]ne and another and another was struck to the earth, exceedingly trembling at the presence of his power.” By the end of the day, twenty-nine “had their heaviness turned into joy this day.” All of these supernatural events occur prior to Wesley beginning his open-air preaching in Bristol on April 2, another important turning point for the Wesleyan Methodist revival. On that day, Wesley “submitted to ‘be more vile’, and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation.” The Scripture he used? “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel …” (Luke 4:18). Wesley now saw himself as a Spirit-anointed leader of the Methodist Revival!

Methodist of a Very Old-Fashioned Kind

Comparing the seven months following Aldersgate (May 24 to December 31, 1738) to the seven months following the Fetter Lane love feast (January 1 to July 31, 1739), it is evident that relatively little changes for Wesley after Aldersgate in terms of ministry. His spiritual angst continues, and there are no significant manifestations of the Holy Spirit. Following Fetter Lane, however, the angst diminishes, and the Holy Spirit appears in force. Signs and wonders came to be associated with the Methodist Revival.

In Adam Bede, written in 1859, novelist George Eliot captures the general public opinion of Methodism in her day. “To my readers Methodism may mean nothing more than low-pitched gables up dingy streets, sleek grocers, sponging preachers and hypocritical jargon—elements which are regarded as an exhaustive analysis of Methodism in many fashionable quarters.” However, Eliot goes on to describe the characters Seth and Dinah as Methodists, “who were of a very old-fashioned kind. They believed in present miracles, in instantaneous conversions, and in revelations by dreams and visions.” A reappraisal of the centrality of Fetter Lane cannot help but bring this aspect of Methodism into clearer view. It is time for us to once again be Methodists of “a very old-fashioned kind,” Methodists like John Wesley! Maybe we have come to the time when the popular opinion of Methodism will change, from a declining mainline denomination that does some good, to a movement led by God’s Spirit.

Dr. Douglas Fox is an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church and is the Senior Pastor of First United Methodist Church of Irving, Texas.