Methodism is the revival tradition of John and Charles Wesley, joining justification by faith to the disciplined pursuit of holiness, organized in small accountable groups and carried by hymn, class meeting, and itinerant preaching.
Methodism began in the 1730s as a renewal movement inside the Church of England: John Wesley's 'Holy Club' at Oxford, his Aldersgate experience of a heart strangely warmed in 1738, and the field preaching that carried the revival to miners and factory hands. Charles Wesley's thousands of hymns sang its theology into the people. Separated from the Church of England after Wesley's death, Methodism became a world family of churches.
Ultimate Reality
God's grace is universal and prevenient: it goes before every human response, awakening and enabling the will that sin has bound. Against both Roman merit and Calvinist decree, Wesley taught that Christ died for all and that the Spirit's witness assures believers of adoption — God known not only above them but within them.
The Human Condition
Original sin is real and deep, but grace restores a measure of freedom: persons can respond to the gospel's call, resist it, or grow in it. The human problem in Wesley's analysis is finally a sickness of the heart's affections, disordered loves that only a reordering love can heal.
Knowledge and Truth
Scripture is primary, read with tradition, reason, and experience — the pattern later named the Wesleyan quadrilateral. Experience is not private feeling enthroned; it is the Spirit's testimony tested in community by Scripture and fruit. Wesley was a relentless editor and publisher: truth should be plain, printed cheaply, and put in every hand.
Right and Wrong
Methodism is a method: the General Rules (do no harm, do good, attend the ordinances of God) and the class meeting's weekly mutual accountability turned converts into disciples. Its doctrine of Christian perfection — perfect love to God and neighbor, attainable in this life by grace, without claim to infallibility — remains its most distinctive and debated teaching, and the root of the later Holiness and Pentecostal movements.
Human Destiny
Wesley kept the classic Protestant hope — resurrection, judgment, heaven, and hell — and preached it with revival urgency. The assurance of the Spirit belongs to this life: believers may know they are God's children now, and the dead in Christ are with him in paradise awaiting the resurrection.
The Conversation
Methodism asks Reformed neighbors whether a grace that cannot be resisted or lost is good news to the person who fears both, and it asks Lutherans whether justification without a doctrine of sanctification's goal leaves the gospel half-preached. It presses every tradition on small accountable community: whether doctrine survives contact with a weekly question — how is it with your soul?