John Wesley a bag of contradictions

Stephen Tomkins generally known for his satirical creation Rev Gerald Ambulance has now written a biography of John Wesley, after developing a fascination and admiration for a passionate leader who was full of contradictions. He has a PhD in Church History from London Bible College.

You are known as the man behind Gerald Ambulance and his regular contributions to Ship of Fools as well as his book. I am intrigued how you moved from satire to biography.

It came out of the first book I wrote which I haven’t actually got published, that was the whole history of the church, which is an incredibly arrogant thing to write for your first book. The two things that grabbed me in that story were the crusades and John Wesley, both fascinating, bizarre subjects. Of course if you are going to do the crusades you need Medieval Latin, Medieval German, Medieval French and Medieval Arabic. Where if you are going to do John Wesley all you need is English really, so that swung it.

I first got the idea as a fantasy. I thought, "it would be great to write the biography of John Wesley". I was talking to a friend and he said "well it’s his anniversary isn’t it coming up -what a great marketing opportunity!" I would never think of that sales approach but I thought that’d be a cool idea.

Wesley might be a popular subject with his tercentenary this year, but what makes him of interest outside Methodism?

I think an incredibly introverted man, who just wanted to spend the whole of his life in Oxford University, who then started up a little Methodist fellowship with similarly anal friends, and then died decades later leaving a following of tens of thousands. Simply because he believed so passionately in what he had to say, he’d get on a horse and go anywhere in the country and stand in a market place preaching at passers by. He was a phenomenal person, an incredibly complex person and you don’t have to believe in what he said to be fascinated about what he said and what drove him to say it and drove so many people to seize on it so passionately.

As well as riding around Britain he also visited America, what did he hope to achieve?

Wesley went to Georgia in his 30s for two reasons. Firstly he wanted to evangelise the natives - though as he was also employed as minister of Savanna he got little chance, apart from a couple of conversations. The second reason was his own spirituality - to save his soul, basically. He thought in the back-to-basics life of the settlement he could live like the early church, forget all the distractions of life in Oxford and put his female entanglements behind him. It was an unmitigated catastrophe. It pretty much destroyed his faith obviously not permanently - and he came back a broken man.

Is that why he came back?

He was in love with a woman called Sophie Hopkey. And she loved him, but he just couldn't commit - as one might say these days. Apart from anything he believed in celibacy. In the end she married someone else, he barred her from communion, she miscarried, his congregation deserted him, he was arrested for defamation of character, and he jumped parole, fleeing Georgia at night across swampland. It was about then that he started to wonder "whether the Lord did not call me to return to England".

I guess this story helps his murky reputation with women; certainly some biographers have taken great delight portraying him as a bit of a philanderer – is this fair?

He had hugely complicated relationships with women. The one in America led to him fleeing through marshes to escape Georgia back to England because they were after him with lawsuits. The marriage was equally disastrous. [His wife] Mary couldn’t bear all the travelling and all the hardships, which he didn’t even think about. She hated Methodism, hated Methodists. Wesley loved to have this harem of evangelical women around him. But to take a step and accuse him of adultery – I think that there really is no evidence for that at all. When he did slip up he was absolutely knifed by his Methodist public who were very willing to turn on him when he let them down. So if he had been caught in a closet with a woman or anything he would have been destroyed. He was a man who achieved a great deal and he was a man who achieved that despite having some very interesting personality traits.

What have we most misunderstood about Wesley?

I suppose that one thing is when you call him a Methodist you think of Methodism as a denomination. He hated dissent, what he wanted was to revive the Church of England, the last thing he wanted to do was to set up its most successful rival denomination.

So why did he leave was it pragmatism or a tantrum?

This was the thing that separated him from his brother Charles; for John the most important thing was revival, whereas for Charles yes he wanted to revive the Church of England but being in the church was more important than reviving it. So if they had to choose between the two, which in the end they did, Charles chose the church and Wesley chose revival. It was a matter of ultimate priorities and John’s was his commitment to the spiritual revival.

It’s bizarre looking back that Wesley was such a passionate son of the Church of England and so devoted to his church, but by the end of this life was willing to ditch it for the sake of the Methodist Revival. Though if he were reborn today in 21st Century England I have no doubt at all that he would be a charismatic evangelical Anglican, he would find all that he was looking for in the same church that he left, although he didn’t technically leave the Church of England. Everything he started up the Methodist Church to achieve has since been made available in the Church of England.

What would people today be most surprised to discover about Wesley?

Possibly his wholehearted embracing of charismatic phenomena, which is something that has not been given full coverage by writers on Wesley. He was absolutely committed to healing and exorcism throughout his life. Right from the start of the Methodist Revival his congregations were seized with convulsions and screaming. There was a small amount of speaking in tongues, he once seems to have thought that he raised the dead and they even had their own Toronto blessing, there was a bit of laughter, though he personally interpreted that as an attack from Satan. All that kind of thing was very important to Wesley; he interpreted it as God’s seal of approval.

What would he think of churches in general now?

On one hand he would be horrified by what he would see as the moral standards of evangelical Christians today - his descendants, and their relaxed attitude to religion. But on the other hand he would be pretty thrilled that the gospel he preached about the importance of being born again before you call yourself a proper Christian and the importance of feeling in religion, has survived since then.

Isn’t it strange that a man who was quite right wing, anti American Independence as well as against various forms of democracy should inspire a following that spawned not only one of the most democratic churches but also the wider labour movement? For example British Unions owe their existence to the Tolpuddle Martyrs who were Methodist.

He was a whole bag of contradictions. He believed absolutely in the status quo in the hierarchy and his own absolute authority over the Methodist movement and yet on the other hand he despised the wealthy classes and he loved the poor, but not simply out of a condescending charity. He lived on an income of £30 a year, which is what an ordinary working man would have. He was making up to £1400 a year from his writings but he would give it all away so he could live in poverty because he absolutely hated wealth. He believed that anyone could preach the gospel, and so he gave a voice to the working classes by making them his preachers, a voice which they had never had before.

He wasn’t a reformer . . .but he was more interested in small-scale local philanthropy, he set up a kind of station where he would buy a load of spinning wheels so poor Methodists could come and do some work and earn some money. He [also] set up the first free medical dispensary.

You obviously admire Wesley but would you want him as your own Minister?

Oh God no! He was absolutely certain he was right. If there was a difference of opinion he would say "this is how it is, this is plain demonstrable fact." He didn’t grasp the idea that 2 people could see things differently and both could be very sincere in their valid opinions. The kind of things he disapproved of would be very hard to stomach today. The idea that working people couldn’t play football on a Sunday when they had been working six days a week for instance. One of his converts was a fiddle player and as soon as he became a Christian smashed up his fiddle, because it was inappropriate.

I am fascinated by a person who is so full of contradiction, a revolutionary Tory, and Anglican Methodist and I am fascinated by the charismatic phenomena and also that he was such a rationalist, he believed so totally in the power of reason to sort out everything yet it was he more than any other who was so responsible for introducing religion of the heart to eighteenth century religion. Those kinds of complexities make him a fascinating person. I am also in awe of his passion and commitment, stamina that kept him going absolutely non stop for decades and decades, preaching four or five times a day every day. It’s an astonishing story and I simply want to tell the story.

John Wesley: A Biography by Stephen Tomkins is published by Eerdmans in the US and Lion in the UK
My Ministry Manual by Rev Gerald Ambulance by Stephen Tomkins is published by SPCK .
Gerald Ambulance and excerpts of Wesley’s journal selected by Stephen Tomkins can be found on www.shipoffools.com