Methodist Breakthrough in Bristol–Part One

Methodist Breakthrough in Bristol–Part One 2026-10-08T09:32:13-04:00 Ben Witherington Without question, Bristol was a crucial city for the Methodist movement. And really it started in 1739 when George Whitefield introduced John Wesley to ‘field preaching’, in this case at Hanham Mount, which Whitefield had preached at before. The crowd that gathered consisted of colliers (coal miners) the poor and the uneducated, with an estimated crowd of 3,000. In his journey Wesley said that Whitefield had pointed to the Sermon on the Mount as a ‘rather remarkable precedent for field preaching’ and so John ‘submitted to become more vile’ in order to reach the largely unchurched for Christ. He could not have known then that this would lead to: 1) the building of the New Room preaching house, 2) the Kingswood school and orphanage, 3) Charles Wesley moving to Bristol. And yet Bristol being a port was the very center of the slave trade, and John Wesley was an ardent abolitionist. Indeed his very last letter he wrote in 1791 before he died was to William Wilberforce urging him to continue to pass a law abolishing the slave trade which he dubbed ‘the execrable sum of all villainies, that Bristol merch...