your heart to the bottom.”38 These meetings were significant in establishing later Methodist practice, formulating the voluntary, lay-driven nature of Methodism, and particularly stressing the importance of forming a spiritually supportive, elective family.
Organized Women
Women were at the center of this nascent Methodist practice in colonial Georgia, becoming active as laity and as leaders. John Wesley appointed at least three female lay leaders in Georgia: Margaret Burnside, Mrs. Robert Gilbert, and Mary Vanderplank.39 Yet, the impetus for Wesley’s formation of the band structure and supporting female authority was planted well before his mission in America.
As a child, Wesley witnessed household religious meetings, and in these meetings he also observed his mother, Susanna Wesley, exercising domestic religious power. When her husband, Samuel Wesley Sr., was absent from the house on extended business, Susanna Wesley pulled her children together for religious meetings, consisting of prayers and reading sermons. When members of their parish began to attend as well and she preached to them, Samuel objected, saying it was improper for a woman to lead a congregation.40 Susanna defended her right to lead them, arguing that, “as I am a woman, so I am also mistress of a large family. And though the superior charge of the souls contained in it lies upon you, as head of the family, and as their minister yet in your absence I cannot but look upon every soul you leave under my care as a talent committed to me, under a trust, by the great Lord of all the families of heaven and earth.”41 Susanna Wesley drew the ideas of home meetings from the missionary pamphlet Propagation of the Gospel in the East.42 She saw herself as head evangelical of her family and thus instituted weekly meetings with her children to interview them about their spiritual well-being.43 There is no doubt that John and Charles Wesley absorbed this strong, elemental example of women’s religious authority being rooted in the family, particularly as they began to formulate social groups at the basis of Methodist practice. It is particularly striking that Susanna Wesley’s basis for authority combined the religious inspiration of mission work with the mother’s duties in the household. Through her example, this concept of evangelizing through the household was planted in Wesley’s mind well before his time in Georgia. In addition, Welsh revivalists had been meeting in select groups by the mid-1730s, and Wesley would have been aware of this practice.44
The American experience sparked the creation of Methodist bands in that Wesley consciously synthesized these precedents and the religious structures of the Georgia Moravian community. In organizing the Anglican community of Georgia, John Wesley drew specifically from Moravian models, which had single-sex groups. The Methodist band was almost certainly inspired by the Moravian organization of “choirs.” The Moravian family order was based in these choirs, which divided members according to sex, marital status, and age. In this sex segregation, Moravian women had considerable power overseeing other women.45 Moravian women held various leadership offices: nurse, deaconess, eldress, and chief eldress. Wesley followed this innovation of appointing female leaders, which abraded local colonial sensibilities. The colonists complained that Wesley appointed “Deaconesses, with sundry other Innovations, which he called Apostolick Constitutions.”46
Wesley’s proto-Methodist family model was based on the Moravians, but there were also significant differences between the family order that Methodists adapted and the Moravian model. In contrast to Methodists, Moravians lived in self-contained societies and shaped their communities around their religious order.47 The Moravian choir system became the basis for community organization in their settlements throughout the Atlantic Moravian world, starting in the late 1730s.48 In 1741, American Moravians formed their largest community in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where choirs, not individual families, were the basic unit of social, religious, and economic organization.49 The community lived in sex-segregated units, divided into groups designated as “Single Brethren,” “Single Sisters,” and “Married People.”50 The reasons for this segregation were practical and spiritual. All of the members slept, ate, worshipped, and worked within these units. By keeping individual members oriented toward the community and curtailing any inclination to pair off into couples or separate from the community into distinct nuclear families, Moravians kept individuals focused on their religious goals. As with other designed religious communities, the devolution of individual families contributed to the evolution of a higher religious family.
The Moravian model radically limited the influence of particular families, assigning child rearing to the larger community. Even before children were born, they were assimilated into the larger religious structures. Moravian leader Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf wrote, “When the marriage has been consecrated to the Lord and the mother lives in continuous interaction with the Saviour, one may expect that already in the mother’s womb the children form a choir, that is, a grouping of the community consecrated to the Lord’s work.”51 The community assumed responsibility for children at their weaning, when communal supervisors took charge of raising the children’s choir. Parental authority was curtailed in this system, deferring to the broader group authority. Moravian marital and sexual practices diverged from those in mainstream Protestant groups. Matrimony was not solely an individual or family concern, but a decision in which the community had the primary stake and interest.52 Historian Aaron Fogleman’s work confirms that even the act of conjugal sex was part of Moravian religious teachings, making marital sex a holy and radically guilt-free activity. Moravians saw marriage and sexual acts as healthy contributions to their religious community.53
Methodists never separated themselves from society and never instituted any sort of community order as the Moravians did, but they shared some of the same ideals and practices regarding the religious family, social religious goals, and divine authority. Like the Moravian choir, the Methodist band was a place for intense spiritual sharing and growth. Both Methodists and Moravians presumed that the greatest growth would occur among like-minded individuals, who were at the same stage in their life and could support each other. After Wesley returned to Europe following his Georgia mission, he continued to draw from Moravian ideas, talked extensively with Moravian leaders, and even stayed in their community in Herrnhut. Even though Methodists and Moravians would eventually part ways, the two religious groups shared a common genetic component following this contact in America.
The Moravians also affected John Wesley on a personal level. As the Moravians in Georgia promoted the religious benefits of sex and family formation, Wesley also began to think about his own marital possibilities. At the start of Wesley’s mission in Georgia, he was thirty-two, overripe for forming a romantic attachment. Propriety called for him to be married in order to claim respectability as a religious leader and as an upper-middleclass man. In 1736, John Wesley started a relationship with a younger woman in the Savannah congregation, Sophy Hopkey. Wesley and Hopkey visited various congregations around Georgia together, evangelizing together and planning a future together. However, as Wesley’s own account confirms, he was ambivalent about his intentions toward Hopkey and about marriage in general.54 He wrote that she was his soul mate and that they shared a physical and spiritual bond, but he also wrote that he was not sure he would ever marry.55 When Hopkey accepted a proposal of marriage from another man, Wesley was hurt and confused.56
This failed relationship would have been a simple romantic misstep (and not Wesley’s last one), but what unfolded after the dissolution of their relationship became much more complex, implicating the Anglican mission in Georgia and Wesley’s career. Wesley proceeded to exclude Hopkey from communion on the grounds that her marriage had been improperly publicized.57 Once he attempted this revenge, her family got involved and had Wesley arrested on charges of defaming Hopkey and failing to give her communion. He was also tried for “ecclesiastical innovations” and for being a “Jesuit, a spiritual Tyrant, a Mover of Sedition.”58 The essential maneuver that got Wesley in trouble was his legalism regarding Hopkey’s apparently improper marriage. While the core of his mission in Georgia was to “regularize” the colonists’ religious practices and sacraments, including marriage, baptisms, and communion, his
