Methodist Breakthrough in Bristol–Part One

Last updated on: October 26, 2026 at 1:56 am by Ben Witherington

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Methodist Breakthrough in Bristol–Part One 2026-10-08T09:32:13-04:00 Ben Witherington

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Without question, Bristol was a crucial city for the Methodist movement. And really it started in 1739 when George Whitefield introduced John Wesley to ‘field preaching’, in this case at Hanham Mount, which Whitefield had preached at before. The crowd that gathered consisted of colliers (coal miners) the poor and the uneducated, with an estimated crowd of 3,000. In his journey Wesley said that Whitefield had pointed to the Sermon on the Mount as a ‘rather remarkable precedent for field preaching’ and so John ‘submitted to become more vile’ in order to reach the largely unchurched for Christ. He could not have known then that this would lead to: 1) the building of the New Room preaching house, 2) the Kingswood school and orphanage, 3) Charles Wesley moving to Bristol. And yet Bristol being a port was the very center of the slave trade, and John Wesley was an ardent abolitionist. Indeed his very last letter he wrote in 1791 before he died was to William Wilberforce urging him to continue to pass a law abolishing the slave trade which he dubbed ‘the execrable sum of all villainies, that Bristol merchants should wax rich from the buying and selling of human beings as if they were mere chattel’. Bristol became the place as well from which John sailed to the south coast of Ireland, and established Methodist temperance buildings and preaching houses, in towns like Kinsale, which I have visited and seen for myself. In short, other than London, Bristol became a major center for the Methodist movement, and continues to be a presence there today.

Here are some shots from Hanham Mount—-

The reason Wesley ironically said ‘all the world is my parish’ is because once the Methodist movement got going, he had no local parish to pastor, and when he began field preaching and building preaching houses like at Bristol, while he did not deliberately try to upset Anglicans and their bishop, he realized that the top priority was saving souls, not satisfying bishops.

From Hanham mount we moved on to the New Room, and found it as full of Methodist things as Wesley’s Chapel in London.

I could not resist, as a Methodist minister, giving a little homily on this mount on a Wesleyan theme, for instance Justification by Faith.

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