Hello, I'm Wilson Pruitt, and you are listening to the History of Methodism Podcast. You can support us online at patreon.com/historyofmethodism. Please rate and review wherever you get your podcasts.
Today’s Episode: The Rise and Fall of the Fetter Lane Society.
John and Charles Wesley didn’t do anything new. They didn’t create a new way to do church or to spread the gospel. They took certain tools they found in different traditions, combined and organized them to an impressive degree. One of the major insights of Clay Christenson’s classic business text, The Innovator’s Dilemma, is that the inventors of a new technology are rarely the ones who innovate within a market. It is the people who take those inventions and then capitalize on market inefficiencies. While I find business analogies to church mostly problematic, the exception here helps us to understand the relation of the Fetter Lane Society to the rest of the Methodist Movement.
We have mentioned them a few times in this podcast, especially with regards to Aldersgate, but as John spends a good portion of the end of 1739 trying to resolve conflicts at Fetter lane, it is important to give the group a full episode.
Fetter Lane itself is a north-south street in London west of Saint Paul’s. On the northern said is Holborn and on the southern side Fleet Street. Fetter comes from the Old French word, faitor which meant lawyer. Fetter Lane is close to bother Lincoln’s Inn and Middle Temple, two of the more ancient court houses in London, as well as a number of modern courts. Modern Fetter Lane is a very corporate section of London, with major banks headquartered nearby.
We call it the Fetter Lane society because it was a society that met on Fetter Lane. If it had met on Holborn, we would call it the Holborn Society.
In Episode 47, The Road to Aldersgate, we went into detail about Peter Böhler, the Moravian missionary so instrumental in John Wesley’s conversion experience. Böhler was also instrumental in the founding of the religious society on Fetter Lane.
In the Spring of 1738, Böhler was preparing for a trip to North America.
As Henry Rack puts it in his authoritative biography of John Wesley:
Before Böhler left, he helped to initiate a significant development. On 1 May, along with Wesley and other Anglican clergy, he founded what Wesley termed ‘our little society…which afterwards met in Fetter Lane.’ He then listed the ‘fundamental rules’ (which were developed further during the next few months). Members would meet weekly to confess their faults and pray. The society would be divided into several ‘bands’ of five to ten people. It would have a conference every Wednesday with singing and prayer. New members would be put in bands on trial. A general intercession would be helped every fourth Saturday and a general lovefeast once a month. Individual members would not be allowed to act in anything ‘contrary to any order of the society.’1
The officially stated rules were the following, though John put a few more in his Journal.
- That they will meet together once a week, to confess their faults one to another, and pray for one another, that they may be healed.
- That any others of whose Sincerity they are well assured, may if they desire it, meet with them for that Purpose.2
The society was not connected to a church, though the members were almost all Anglican at its inception. Fetter Lane was not the society meeting where John heard the Preface to the Romans read on Aldersgate. That was, fittingly, a society meeting on Aldersgate Street. Curnock and Heitzenrater3 contend that that meeting was at Nettleton Court, but Fetter Lane will be much more instrumental over the early years of the movement.
John Wesley maintained leadership over the society for the first year. It is most likely where John put together his Rules of the Band Societies, which he would use tremendously in the coming years. It is the location of the great New Year’s Day revival of January 1, 1739, which propelled so much of George Whitefield and John Wesley’s labor over the next year.
We see how some of that leadership developed in a letter than James Hutton wrote to John while he was away. As Frank Baker makes clear in his notes to the Wesley Works edition of the Letters. Hutton had begun his own society in London around the same time as Fetter Lane, even though he was a layman in the church. As Baker puts it:
When Wesley returned from Herrnhut he strove to reform these and as many other of the older religious societies as would agree to various measures for improving their spiritual efficacy, especially that of incorporating bands as small confessional groups within their organization. When he moved on to Oxford to reform the societies there along similar lines, Ingham and Hutton were left in charge of the London societies. Speedily Hutton, though a layman, became the key administrator, especially as Ingham seemed eager to evangelize his native Yorkshire.4
Baker also points out how it is Hutton who keeps most of the letters in the correspondence with John Wesley. He prioritized this relationship in a way that John did not.
Hutton, in his letter to John, remarks how there is a challenge “by the too familiar intercourse at societies with young women.”5 What this results in is separating bands by gender, which Hutton sees as a useful result, but it also means the separation of women from men during worship and prayer time.
Hutton also remarks how he has been appointed as the register for the society. He also writes that the next day will be a day of fasting and prayer in which they will cast lots for a president of the society. As he puts it, “it having been found that the want of a president at every meeting has been the cause, or seemed to be, of confusion.”6
John writes back the next day with a few remarks about books, then a statement where he says:
I do very exceedingly disapprove of the excluding of women when we meet to pray, sing, and read the Scriptures. I wish it might not be done before we have talked together.7
Two days later, John writes another letter questioning the need for a president because each person is accountable to the others in their band.
The following day, John writes again and articulates a fresh view of church authority.
I believe bishops, priests, and deacons to be of divine appointment, though I think our brethren in Germany do not. Therefore I am tender of the first approach towards ‘pastors appointed by the congregation.’ And if we should begin with appointing fixed persons to execute pro officio one part of the pastoral office, I doubt it would not end there. My dear brother, this may seem of little weight to some of our brethren, especially when urged by one so weak as me; and they may think it deserves no other answer than ‘He hath not the Spirit.’ But our brother Bray hath. I refer you to him and all the brotherhood, or such a number of them as you judge proper.
My brother, suffer me to speak a little more: if as a fool, then as a fool bear with me. I believe you don't think I am (whatever I was) bigoted either to the Ancient Church or the Church of England. But have a care of bending the bow too much the other way. The National Church, to which we belong, may doubtless claim some, though not an implicit, obedience from us. And the Primitive Church may, thus far at least, be reverenced as faithfully delivering down for two or three hundred years the discipline which they received from the Apostles, and the Apostles from Christ.8
Fetter Lane was John’s first attempt to build a religious society based on his experiences of Oxford Methodism, Aldersgate, and Herrnhut. In this letter, we see him working out his ecclesiology as he lives it.
When John moves to Bristol in 1739 at the behest of George Whitefield, we see his letters to James Hutton to be of a circulatory kind. In that they were written to be shared with the rest of the society and not just man to man. The first letter of this kind comes from April 2, 1739, and discusses the huge crowds that he preached to. Wesley’s journal account from this period is almost taken verbatim from the letters to Hutton and Fetter Lane. He continues these letters weekly throughout April, May, and into June.
On June 11, John receives word from London that Fetter Lane is in great confusion and he proceeded to go and settle things. The situation happened again late in August with a similar effect. All seemed well. Phillip Heinrich Molther came to London.
Molther was a Moravian from the Alsace region of what is now France. He had a conversion experience and began to travel as a French tutor, eventually connecting to Zinzendorf at Herrnhut. Molther was sent to Pennsylvania as a Moravian missionary but he was stuck in London waiting for a boat. Arriving on October 18, 1739, James Hutton invited Molther to the Fetter Lane Society and the place would never be the same again.
Molther’s conversion experience took place in a country influenced by Quietist practices. Quietism was influenced by the work of Fénélon and Madame Guyon in France and Miguel de Molinos in Spain. It was a set of Christian practices that found actions of religious enthusiasm abhorrent.
As Heitzenrater notes in Wesley and the People Called Methodists, “Molther’s argument was that there are no “means of grace” but Christ and that therefore, until persons have true faith in Christ, they should refrain from the so-called means of grace, especially the Lord’s Supper.” In recommending the avoidance of communion, Molther follows the logic of Antoine Arnaud, the Jansenist Philosopher, in his mammoth text, On the Frequency of Communion. Arnauld’s Port Royal Logic was a text in Wesley’s library, and so he could have already been familiar with Molther’s argument before he met him.
A good example of the consequences of Molther’s presence at Fetter Lane is found in John Wesley’s journal from November 1, 1739.
I left Bristol, and on Saturday came to London. The first person I met with there was one whom I had left strong in faith and zealous of good works. But she now told me Mr. Molther had fully convinced her she ‘never had any faith at all’, and had advised her, till she received faith, ‘to be still, ceasing from outward works’…in the evening Mr. Bray also was highly commending ‘being still before the Lord’. He likewise spoke largely of ‘the great danger of people that keep running about to Church and Sacrament.’9
Thus begins the fall of Fetter Lane. It will conclude in the summer of 1740 when John “plainly told our poor, confused, shattered society wherein they had erred from the faith.”10
We will go more into those details as we delve into the happenings of 1740, but before then, in the fall of 1739, the revival continues and grows, and their is a new name of Methodism being used. Next time on the History of Methodism.