05/25/2026
The Night a Heart Was Strangely Warmed
And nothing was ever the same.
He almost did not go.
It was the evening of May 24, 1738, and John Wesley had every reason to stay home. He was 34 years old, exhausted, and quietly falling apart. Two years earlier he had sailed to the colony of Georgia as a missionary, full of zeal and theological certainty, convinced he was going to set the American frontier on fire for God. Instead, he had stumbled badly… mishandling a romance, alienating his congregation, and fleeing the colony under threat of legal action before his work was even finished.
He returned to England in February 1738 a broken man. Not broken in the way that produces humility. Broken in the way that produces despair. He had followed every rule. He had fasted, prayed, studied,served. He had done everything a serious Anglican priest was supposed to do. And none of it had produced the one thing he most desperately wanted…the assurance that he was actually known and loved by God.
“I went to America to convert the Indians,” he wrote bitterly in his journal, “but oh, who shall convert me?”
On the evening of May 24, a friend persuaded him to attend a small religious society meeting on Aldersgate Street in the heart of London. The room was modest. The gathering was ordinary. A handful of believers meeting to read scripture and pray together, the kind of meeting that happened in dozens of London homes every week. Wesley went reluctantly, describing himself as going “very unwillingly.”
Someone began reading aloud from Martin Luther’s preface to the book of Romans. Words about what God does in the human heart through faith in Christ alone. Not through effort. Not through discipline. Not through religious performance. Through simple, trusting faith.
Wesley listened.
And then something happened.
“About a quarter before nine… I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation.” -- John Wesley, May 24, 1738
“About a quarter before nine,” he wrote in his journal that night, “while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”
The meeting lasted perhaps another hour. Wesley walked home through the London streets. He was, by every outward measure, the same man who had walked to Aldersgate Street that evening. Same coat. Same worn shoes. Same tired face.
But he was not the same man.
What Happened Next
That night, Wesley went directly to find his brother Charles. It was an urgent visit because Charles had experienced his own moment of conversion just three days earlier, on May 21, lying sick in bed, suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of God’s grace and peace. The two brothers sat together that night, barely able to explain what had happened to them.
Charles, a poet by instinct, reached for his pen. Within days he had written what would become one of the most beloved hymns in the English language, “And Can It Be That I Should Gain?” a direct response to his own experience and his brother’s. Its opening question captures everything the Wesley brothers were feeling in those extraordinary days,
“And can it be that I should gain An interest in the Savior’s blood? Died He for me, who caused His pain? For me, who Him to death pursued? Amazing love! How can it be That Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?”
John Wesley would live another 53 years after that evening on Aldersgate Street. In those five decades he rode more than 250,000 miles on horseback across Britain, enough to circle the earth ten times. He preached an estimated 40,000 sermons, wrote and edited hundreds of books and pamphlets, organized thousands of small groups he called class meetings and band meetings, and built a movement that stretched from the coal mines of Wales to the frontier settlements of America.
He never stopped moving. He never stopped preaching. He delivered his last sermon at 87, standing in a friend’s home, his voice barely above a whisper. He died in 1791 with friends gathered around him. His final coherent words, by every account, were these: “The best of all is, God is with us.”
From One Room to the World
From that single evening on Aldersgate Street grew a movement that would eventually encircle the globe. Wesley’s emphasis on personal salvation, disciplined community, and what he called social holiness (the conviction that holiness must be pursued together, in accountable fellowship with others, through the class meetings and band meetings that became the backbone of the Methodist movement) transformed not only the church but the broader culture.
Methodist-influenced movements fueled the abolition of slavery on both sides of the Atlantic, the reform of England’s brutal prison system, and the founding of schools and hospitals in communities that had none. The movement crossed oceans. It took root in the American wilderness, spreading through circuit riders who covered impossible distances to carry Wesley’s message to settlements that had never seen a church.
It planted itself in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, in the islands of the Pacific. It grew and subdivided and grew again, until today hundreds of millions of people on every continent trace some part of their spiritual heritage to a discouraged priest who sat in a small room on a London street and felt something shift.
All of it….every sermon, every hymn, every class meeting, every act of mercy done in the name of Christ by someone who called themselves Methodist or Wesleyan traces back to a quarter before nine on the evening of May 24, 1738.
Pentecost and Aldersgate
It is worth pausing, on this particular May 24, to notice what else today is.
Today is Pentecost Sunday. the day the church celebrates the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples gathered in Jerusalem, the moment described in Acts 2 when tongues of fire appeared, when ordinary frightened people were suddenly filled with extraordinary courage, when Peter stood up and preached and three thousand people were added to the church in a single day.
Pentecost is the birthday of the church. Aldersgate Day is the moment that set the Methodist movement on fire. That they fall on the same Sunday in 2026 is the kind of coincidence that does not feel like a coincidence at all.
Both stories are about the same thing, the moment when a human heart (cold or frightened or hollow or lost ) is suddenly and inexplicably warmed by something it did not manufacture and cannot fully explain. Both stories insist that this warming is not the end of something but the beginning. Both stories point forward to what happens next, to what a warmed heart goes on to do in the world.
Wesley understood this. Pentecost was not a museum piece to him. It was a living promise. The same Spirit that fell in Jerusalem could fall in London. Could fall in a small room on Aldersgate Street. Could fall anywhere, on anyone, at any moment.
He spent the rest of his life acting like he believed that. By every measure, he was right.
“The best of all is, God is with us.” - - John Wesley’s final words, 1791
The Flame Is Still Burning
Two hundred and eighty-eight years have passed since that evening in London. The room on Aldersgate Street is gone. The building is gone. The street itself has changed beyond recognition. But the movement that began there is very much alive. In every congregation gathering this Pentecost Sunday to worship, in every circuit rider still covering impossible distances to reach people who need to hear that God is with them, in every heart that has felt, in some quiet moment, something shift
The heart, Wesley discovered, can be strangely warmed. And once it is, it is very difficult to cool.
