John Wesley's Failed Georgia Ministry, and What Came After It

John Wesley arrived in Savannah in 1736 as the colony's Anglican parish priest, not yet the founder of anything called Methodism, and his eighteen months there are usually remembered as a failure rather than a beginning. He alienated much of his small congregation with a rigid, high church style of ministry, and his personal life became a public scandal when he refused communion to a woman named Sophia Hopkey he had unsuccessfully courted and who had since married another man, a decision that led to a court case against him and forced him to flee back to England in 1737 rather than face trial. It was only after that failure, at a meeting on Aldersgate Street in London in 1738, that Wesley experienced the conversion he later described as his heart being strangely warmed, the moment that actually launched the Methodist movement he is remembered for.

Georgia's religious founding held other threads that succeeded on their own terms even as Wesley's did not: Lutheran Salzburgers, refugees from persecution in Europe, settled Ebenezer the year after Savannah's 1733 founding, and two centuries later Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. and his father both preached, became the civil rights movement's spiritual center. The state remains heavily Evangelical Protestant today, thirty three percent of adults per Pew's 2023-24 study, in a religious landscape Wesley's own Georgia years never predicted.