| Wesleys legacy: 300 years of personal, social holiness By Suni Johnson When the clock strikes midnight on December 31 and calendar pages flip to the year 2003, United Methodists and all those across the United States and around the world who look to Methodism as part of their heritage will begin a year of celebrations. It wont be the sort of raucous bash normally associated with ringing in a new year, but a party of a quieter sort, celebrating the 300th anniversary of the birth of John Wesley on June 17, 1703. A pious Anglican priest whose heart was strangely warmed through an experience of Gods grace and mercy, Wesley took the Gospel message to people struggling and suffering with the social dislocation caused by Englands Industrial Revolution. He and his associates preached to coal miners, iron workers, jailed prisoners and all those who would listen, beginning in 1739 and continuing until a few weeks before his death in 1791. He never intended to found a denomination, but rather wished to reform the Church of England and thereby the nation by channeling Methodist converts into small groups where they would be held accountable for their behavior and kept to a series of spiritual disciplines. The beauty and the challenge of Wesleyan theology is his equal emphasis on personal holiness and social holiness. These two poles of the Christian life must be kept in balance, for neither is complete in itself. The ardent believer cannot remain lost in quiet prayer, but must raise his eyes to the suffering and injustice of the sinful world. And the social reformer must spend time on his knees, in communion with the God who instills in him compassion for the weak and oppressed. Wesley believed in the equality of all humans as children of a parental God, be they black or white, rich or poor, male or female. The last letter Wesley wrote before his death was to William Wilberforce, a close friend. He exhorted Wilberforce to persevere in his campaign to end slavery, writing, I was particularly struck by that circumstance that a man who has a black skin, being wronged or outraged by a white man, can have no redress, it being the law in our colonies that the oath of a black against a white goes for nothing. What villainy is this? His righteous indignation still rings across the centuries to engage faithful, God-centered United Methodists in the fight against racism, prejudice, and intolerance in our own day. Suni Johnson is director of archives and history for the Baltimore-Washington Conference. Jane Donovan, a member of Concord-St. Andrews UMC in Bethesda and a member of the conference Board of the Commission on Archives and History and the United Methodist Historical Society contributed to this story. | 
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