Methodist vs Protestant: Methodists Are Protestants Who Follow John Wesley

Methodists are Protestants. Methodism began as John and Charles Wesley’s revival inside the Church of England and became separate churches in America in 1784 and in Britain after John Wesley died in 1791. It differs from other Protestant churches mainly in Wesley’s teaching on grace offered to all, assurance and Christian perfection, and in government by conferences that place ministers.

So Methodism is a Christian denomination, not a separate religion. The World Methodist Council, which in 2026 listed 80 Methodist, Wesleyan and united member churches in 138 countries, describes it as “a movement of Protestant Christianity made up of a number of denominations.” Among them are the United Methodist Church, the Global Methodist Church, formed in 2022, and the Methodist Church in Britain. All of them trace back to one evening in London, when an Anglican priest heard Luther on Paul’s letter to the Romans and felt his heart “strangely warmed.”

Methodists and other Protestants side by side

Are Methodists Protestant?

Yes, by their history and by their own documents. The Methodist Articles of Religion are the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles, cut down by John Wesley himself. He reduced them to twenty-four, “editing out much of their Calvinist emphasis,” as the United Methodist Church puts it, and sent them to America, where the Christmas Conference of 1784 adopted them and added one more. What remains is the teaching of the Reformation. Article IX says: “We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, by faith, and not for our own works or deservings. Wherefore, that we are justified by faith, only, is a most wholesome doctrine, and very full of comfort.” Article V keeps the Reformation rule for Scripture: what “is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man that it should be believed as an article of faith.”

Methodists say so themselves. A former President of the British Methodist Conference, writing Britannica’s article on Methodism, notes that Methodist churches “follow the historical creeds and believe that they are part of the tradition of the Protestant Reformation.” The Global Methodist Church’s Articles of Faith declare that justification “comes to us by grace alone through faith alone in Jesus Christ alone,” the old watchwords of the Reformation.

People ask the question because Methodism came about two centuries after Luther, and out of a church that was already Protestant. Methodists never broke from Rome; they grew out of the Church of England. With every other Protestant church they confess what Paul wrote: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8). That shared core is the subject of Christianity: What Christians Have Believed for 2,000 Years, a free course of short lessons.

What is Methodism?

Methodism is the family of churches that grew from the Wesleys’ revival. In 1729 John Wesley, a priest of the Church of England, joined and soon led a group of Oxford students, among them his brother Charles. They took Communion often, studied the Bible and visited the prisons, and their methodical devotion earned them the name Methodists.

The turn came on 24 May 1738. At a society meeting in Aldersgate Street, London, someone was reading Martin Luther’s preface to Paul’s letter to the Romans, and Wesley wrote in his journal:

About a quarter before nine, 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.

John Wesley, journal, 24 May 1738

“Even mine.” Grace for each person, and the assurance of it, are folded into those two words. Some months later, at George Whitefield’s invitation, Wesley began preaching in the open air near Bristol, and the revival spread among people who felt neglected by the Church of England. Charles Wesley wrote more than 6,000 hymns for it. John Wesley wished his societies never to leave the Church of England. But in 1784, when the Bishop of London would not ordain ministers for the new United States, Wesley ordained them himself, and that December the Methodist Episcopal Church was organized at Baltimore. In Britain the definite break came in 1795, four years after his death.

The United Methodist Church descends from that American church. The Global Methodist Church launched on 1 May 2022, formed, in its own words, to “preserve the doctrinal integrity of the historic Christian faith—especially the authority of Scripture”. By the end of 2023 more than 7,600 American congregations had received approval to leave the United Methodist Church, many of them for the new church.

How did Methodism come to Japan?

It came with missionaries from the United States and Canada, beginning with R. S. Maclay of the American Methodist church in 1873. The Japan Methodist Church was formed in 1907, and before 1941 it was one of the three largest Protestant denominations in the country. Its missions founded schools that still carry their names: Aoyama Gakuin in Tokyo, which grew from a girls’ school opened in 1874 by a missionary of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and Kwansei Gakuin in Kobe, founded in 1889 by Walter Russell Lambuth of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. In 1941 the Methodists joined more than thirty other Protestant denominations in the United Church of Christ in Japan, the Kyodan, and they stayed in it after the war. How that union shaped Methodists and Presbyterians in Japan is told in Methodist vs Presbyterian.

What makes Methodists different from other Protestants?

From the Anglicans of his day Wesley differed, in Britannica’s phrase, “not in doctrine but in emphasis.” From the other Protestant families the differences run further, and four of them set Methodists apart. The first is a real difference of doctrine with the Reformed churches.

Grace offered to everyone

Wesley insisted that the love of God is universal, and he parted from Whitefield over Whitefield’s belief in double predestination. Methodists still teach that no one can come to God unaided. Article VIII says a person “cannot turn and prepare himself, by his own natural strength and works, to faith, and calling upon God.” But God’s grace goes first, to everyone. United Methodists call it prevenient grace, which “prompts our first wish to please God, our first glimmer of understanding concerning God’s will.” Before we ever reach for God, he has reached for us.

That grace can be refused. Wesley said of such people that God “would save them, but they will not be saved.” A believer can also turn away, for the Methodist Articles say that “we may depart from grace given, and fall into sin, and, by the grace of God, rise again and amend our lives.” The Reformed churches teach instead that God’s choice of the elect cannot fail. Lutherans stand with Methodists on the offer: the Formula of Concord says that Christ “calls to Himself all sinners” and rejects the teaching “that God is unwilling that every one should be saved.”

Assurance

Wesley’s words at Aldersgate, “an assurance was given me,” became Methodist teaching. United Methodists hold that “we can expect to receive assurance of our present salvation as the Spirit ‘bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God,’” and the words are Paul’s: “The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God” (Romans 8:16). Britannica counts this among the two doctrines Wesley claimed to have restored. For Methodists, no believer need wonder all their life whether God has received them.

Christian perfection

The second was perfect love. Wesley taught that the Holy Spirit can fill a believer with love for God and neighbor in this life, and United Methodists describe the gift, in his words, as a heart “habitually filled with the love of God and neighbor.” The Global Methodist Church teaches that “entire sanctification is a state of perfect love, righteousness, and true holiness,” which “should be sought earnestly by every child of God.” It adds that this does not deliver anyone “from the infirmities, ignorance, or mistakes common to all, nor from the possibility of further sin.”

Here Methodists stand furthest from other Protestants. The Augsburg Confession condemns “those who contend that some may attain to such perfection in this life that they cannot sin,” and the Westminster Confession calls sanctification “imperfect in this life.” Methodists answer that perfect love is not sinlessness, which is why the Global Methodist article keeps the possibility of further sin. The heart that was warmed can go on being filled.

Government by conference

A Methodist congregation does not stand on its own. It belongs to one body governed by conferences, which Methodists call the connexion. Wesley himself appointed a Conference to govern the Methodists after his death, and British Methodism grew around its annual Conference, which sent ministers to circuits of congregations. In the United Methodist Church, bishops are responsible for “appointing persons in ministry,” so a congregation receives its pastor rather than calling one. The Global Methodist Church also has bishops, who serve at most two six-year terms. The Methodist Church in Britain has no bishops: its Conference elects a President for one year at a time.

Is the Methodist church an evangelical church?

In Brazil, yes. There “evangelical” is the ordinary name for every Protestant church, and the national census of 2022 counts the Methodist church among the mission evangelical churches, the historic Protestant churches founded by missions, with the Lutheran, Presbyterian, Baptist, Congregational and Adventist churches. Pentecostal churches such as the Assemblies of God have a category of their own. The Methodist Church in Brazil has governed itself since it proclaimed its autonomy on 2 September 1930.

It differs from the Pentecostal churches around it in teaching and order. Its canons keep the baptism of children, and they open its orders of presbyters and deacons to men and women alike. The Assemblies of God teach that baptism in the Holy Spirit “is witnessed by the initial physical sign of speaking with other tongues”; the Methodist Articles of Religion contain no such teaching. It is also a different body from the Wesleyan Methodist Church of Brazil, a Pentecostal-leaning church that broke away from it in Rio de Janeiro in the late 1960s.

The same answer holds across Latin America, where, the Pew Research Center found, “‘Protestant’ and ‘evangelical’ often are used interchangeably.” A Methodist church there is an evangelical church in the everyday sense. Elsewhere “evangelical” names a movement within Protestantism rather than every Protestant church, as Evangelical vs Protestant explains.

Where does the “Wesleyan Quadrilateral” come from?

The name is twentieth-century; the method, the scholar who coined it believed, is Wesley’s. Albert C. Outler used the phrase for four sources of Christian teaching, Scripture, tradition, reason and experience, with Scripture first. In a 1985 essay, “The Wesleyan Quadrilateral in Wesley,” he admitted that the term does not occur anywhere in Wesley’s works, and that he had more than once regretted coining it, because it had been so widely misunderstood. He still argued that Wesley used a distinct theological method, with Scripture as its preeminent norm, sharing its place with tradition, reason and Christian experience.

What did Wesley mean by “social holiness”?

He meant holiness lived with others rather than alone. The phrase comes from his preface to Hymns and Sacred Poems (1739): “The Gospel of CHRIST knows of no Religion, but Social; no Holiness but Social Holiness.” He was answering mystical writers who taught what he called “Solitary Religion,” and in the same paragraph he says that “Holy Solitaries” is a phrase “no more consistent with the Gospel than Holy Adulterers.”

Methodists have kept that care for the world. The United Methodist Book of Discipline says that “scriptural holiness entails more than personal piety; love of God is always linked with love of neighbor, a passion for justice and renewal in the life of the world.” Wesley’s Oxford group was already visiting prisoners, and Britannica counts “a concern for the underprivileged and the improvement of social conditions” among the marks of Methodism.

The warmed heart of Aldersgate was never meant to stay indoors. Wesley went on in that preface: “Faith working by Love, is the length and breadth and depth and height of Christian Perfection.” And that love, he wrote, shows itself “by doing good unto all Men; especially to them that are of the Household of Faith.”

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