The World Is My Parish

And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. MARK 16:15

On 2 April 1739 a fastidious Oxford clergyman, who had once thought it almost a sin to save souls outside a church building, stood on a little rise of ground near Bristol and preached to some three thousand people in the open air. It was the beginning of fifty years of itinerant preaching that took Wesley across England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, into market squares, graveyards, mining villages and the yards of inns. When he was challenged for intruding into other ministers’ parishes, his answer, recorded in his Journal, became the motto of the movement: “I look upon all the world as my parish.” This chapter asks what lay behind that sentence, and what it asks of us.

Plain truth for plain people

Wesley’s field preaching was not only a change of place. It was a change of audience, and it required a change of style. In the preface to his published sermons he explains that he had written them for the ordinary reader. “I design plain truth for plain people.” Of set purpose, he says, he abstained from all nice and philosophical speculations and intricate reasonings, and as far as possible from even the show of learning, and laboured to avoid all words not used in common life, especially the technical terms of the theologians, which to common people are an unknown tongue.

And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power. 1 CORINTHIANS 2:4

This was costly for a man of his education. Wesley was a genuine scholar who read widely in several languages. But he laid it aside, or rather put it to work, so that miners and labourers could hear the gospel in words they understood. The same preface gives his reason in one of the most moving passages he wrote: he is a creature of a day, passing through life as an arrow through the air, and he wants to know one thing, the way to heaven. God has written it in a book. “O give me that book! At any price, give me the book of God!”

The gospel for those outside

Why did Wesley go to the fields? Because the people were there, and they were not in church. The industrial and mining communities growing up in England were often far from any parish church, or unwelcome in it. Many had never heard the gospel preached with any urgency. The respectable clergy, with some honourable exceptions, did not go to them. Whitefield did, and Wesley followed.

Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in hither the poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind. LUKE 14:21

In Salvation by Faith he had already argued that the poor have a peculiar right to have the gospel preached to them. Field preaching was that conviction put into practice. It was also, often, dangerous. Wesley was stoned and struck, dragged through mobs, and threatened with death. His Journal records these things with a strange calm, and many of those who came to mock stayed to pray.

Christianity spreading

Wesley’s hope for the gospel was large. In his sermon Scriptural Christianity, preached before the University of Oxford in 1744, he describes Christianity in three stages: as beginning in individual hearts at Pentecost, as spreading from one to another, and as finally covering the earth. It is a picture of a whole society transformed by love. Then, in a plain, practical application, he turns on his hearers and asks, in tender love, whether Oxford is a Christian city at all. He was never invited to preach there again.

For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea. HABAKKUK 2:14

Late in life, in The General Spread of the Gospel, he looked at the world as it then was, largely unreached, and refused to despair. He traces how the little leaven of living religion had spread from a handful at Oxford across Britain, Ireland and America, and he looks forward to its spreading further still. And he describes how God works: not usually by sudden spectacular means, but as the kingdom “will silently increase, wherever it is set up, and spread from heart to heart, from house to house, from town to town, from one kingdom to another.”

Lay preachers

The call of the world as parish also led Wesley to one of his most controversial decisions. Ordained clergy who shared his views were few, and most were settled in parishes. The work was growing beyond what they could do. And so he began, at first reluctantly, to allow laymen to preach. In On God’s Vineyard he describes how, when no clergyman dared to help, one and another, though not ordained, offered to assist, and God gave a signal blessing to their word. Some were learned and some unlearned, most were young, but it pleased God to own them all.

Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men, they marvelled; and they took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus. ACTS 4:13

These lay preachers, travelling in circuits and moved every year or two, carried Methodism into every corner of the land and eventually across the Atlantic. Wesley’s willingness to trust ordinary men, and in some cases women, with the gospel was one of the reasons the revival lasted.

Where to read with care

The world as parish carried Wesley across church boundaries in ways the Church of England found hard to accept, and in the end it led, after his death, to separation. He himself never intended to leave the Church, and he told his people to attend their parish churches and receive the sacrament there. But his ordinations for America in 1784, and the independence of his societies, made the separation almost inevitable. Readers will judge that history differently. What is clear is that his first loyalty was to the souls of those the church was not reaching, and that the church he loved often made it hard for him to serve them within it.

It should also be said that the romance of field preaching can hide its cost to those at home. Wesley’s constant travelling was one of the causes of his unhappy marriage. Zeal for the world is no excuse for neglecting those nearest to us.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Where are the people in your town who would never come to church? Pray for them by name or by place this week.

2. Is there a preference or habit that keeps you from going where people are? Ask God whether He wants you to lay it down.

3. Practise plain truth for plain people: try to explain the gospel in a few sentences without any religious jargon.

4. Pray for the spread of the gospel from heart to heart and house to house in your neighbourhood.

5. Read the preface to Wesley’s Sermons on Several Occasions and Scriptural Christianity in the Ochorus library.

A PRAYER

Lord of the harvest, You sent Your disciples into all the world. Give me Your love for those who are outside, who have never heard, or who have heard and never cared.

Make me willing to go where people are, and to speak plainly of Your grace in words they understand.

Raise up ordinary men and women to carry Your gospel, and let it spread silently from heart to heart and house to house.

Keep me faithful to those nearest me, even as You send me to others. Amen.