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                                                                                                  The Methodist movement was founded in the eighteenth century by John Wesley (1703 - 1791). There have been several different forms of Methodism to which individual churches and chapels have belonged, such as Wesleyan, Primitive, Methodist New Connexion and the United Methodist Free Church. Methodist churches are grouped into circuits, which organise worship for congregations and pastoral care.

John Wesley began his missionary career in 1735, an employee of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, bound for General James Oglethorpe's Georgia colony. Here on the precarious southeastern edge of British America, wedged between South Carolina and Spanish Florida, the colony's frontier dissolving into an interior controlled by powerful southeastern woodlands tribes, Wesley was directed by the SPG to serve as parish priest for Georgia's heterogeneous settler population and to convert the Chickasaws. Instead, with the support of his younger brother Charles, the colony's secretary of Indian affairs, Wesley first experimented with what would become the essential ingredients of his religious movement: the introduction of intensive prayer meetings, the resorting to female church officers, the practices of hymn singing, itinerating, preaching out-of-doors, and ministering to the poor and outcast, including African slaves.

Before he left the colony in late 1737, less than two years later, Wesley had published the first Methodist psalm book and begun the process of formulating his own peculiar brand of Arminian theology, one that would stress the free will of the believer, the universal availability of salvation, and the palpability of religious conversion. Shortly after their return to Britain, Wesley and his brother Charles founded the Methodist movement, comprising a "connexion" of itinerant preachers and a network of "united societies." By the end of the 1740s, Methodism would expand into a realmwide phenomenon, sustained by increasing numbers of lay itinerants, by the Wesley brothers' massive literary output, and by John Wesley's lifelong charismatic leadership

Charles Wesley (1707-1788) was born at Epworth in Lincolnshire, the son of a poverty-stricken clergyman. He was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he was one of the founder members of the Holy Club or Oxford Methodists, a small Christian group which included the Wesley brothers, and their fellow Evangelists George Whitefield and Benjamin Ingham. After his ordination and a brief period spent as a missionary in Georgia, Charles Wesley underwent a conversion experience in London in May 1738, a few days before John Wesley’s famous Aldersgate experience

For seventeen years after his conversion Charles Wesley was one of the central figures in the great Evangelical revival which saw the birth of the Methodist Church. He travelled constantly in England, Wales and Ireland, suffering frequent harassment, which was often instigated by fellow clergymen. While his brother John was without doubt the leader of the Methodist movement, Charles was his most trusted colleague, and often exercised a restraining influence on those Methodists who wished to break away from the Church of England.

Charles Wesley’s greatest legacy to Methodism is his hymns which are regarded as among the finest ever written. The Methodists gave hymn-singing a central place in worship, contrary to contemporary Anglican practice. Wesley’s hymns formed the basis of the Methodist hymn-books of the 18th and 19th centuries, and are still sung all over the world by Christians of every denomination.