John Wesley

Seven Things You Should Know

By: JIM STOVALL

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

He never intended to start anything. He ended up starting one of the largest religious movements in Christian history.

John Wesley was an anxious young priest who thought he had to earn God's approval through sheer discipline — until a missionary trip to Georgia collapsed into scandal and failure, and a quiet moment on a London street changed the trajectory of his life. What followed was fifty years of outdoor preaching to crowds who'd never set foot in a church, a theology of grace that reshaped Protestant Christianity for the next two centuries, and a legacy far stranger and more human than the stained-glass version most people know.

Seven Things You Should Know About John Wesley covers the childhood fire he never stopped thinking about, the missionary disaster that nearly broke him, the famous moment his heart was "strangely warmed," the outdoor sermon he was ashamed to preach, the ways he was ahead of his century (and the ways he wasn't), the theological method later scholars named after him, and the theology of grace that outgrew Methodism entirely — showing up today in churches that have never heard his name.

Part of the I'm No Expert, But series: short, accurate, accessible books on surprising topics. Readable in under an hour. The kind of book that leaves you thinking: I'm glad I know that now.