John Wesley's Attitudes Towards Women

If it weren't for John Wesley's mother, Susanna Wesley (pictured at right), Wesley and his influence on the place of women in the church might have been dramatically different. She was a strong, intelligent, spiritually mature woman, who was married to a rector of Epworth in Lincolnshire (Women and Wesley's Times 1). The family lived in a parsonage, and a formative experience for the child was being plucked out of the second story of the house when the home burned, leading his mother to say that he was a "brand plucked from the burning" (Women and Wesley's Times 1). Susanna was active in her husband's ministry. She ran prayer meetings herself, not the usual thing for women of the time. It is the purpose of this paper to discuss Wesley's attitudes towards women and the influence it had on the place of women in the church.

John Wesley was born in 1703, one of two sons who both came to be active in the church. He studied at Christ Church, Oxford, and in 1725, he was ordained, becoming a Fellow of the Lincoln College and a member of the Holy Club (Lane 155). He worked for a time as a missionary but was unsuccessful. He developed a style of preaching in the open air, riding on horseback as many as 5,000 miles a year, talking to people who gathered to listen to him. He rode as many as 18 hours a day and developed a technique of reading while in the saddle in order to make good use of his time. Sometimes he met with a hostile opposition, including stoning, but he min

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, the status of Methodist women was, until recently, subordinate to that of men. From the earliest years, however, women performed or shared in important functions relating to worship and other areas of Church life (Sources 2). One of the factors in the activity of women in the early Methodist movement was that it was not considered a separate church until very late in Wesley's life. It was a movement within the church, a particular group of people who wanted to attain a direct, close relationship with God within the context of Wesley's organization. From as early as 1742 women were appointed at the Foundery Chapel in London, and they were encouraged to speak of their spiritual life in public, worship, and in bringing others to the Methodist faith. They played a leading role in the education (especially the Sunday School movement) and visiting the sick. The wives of the traveling preachers were held in high regard as they had an active supporting role in their husbands' ministries (Hughes 2). A part of Wesley changing his mind about what women could do in the church was the fact that they were needed for pragmatic reasons. People were needed to give the sacrements and assist the circuit ministers, in the class meetings an

Category: Psychology - J