Great Churches in History Wesley Chapel

Do you wonder what he most influential in church history in the past 100 years were, and 
what trends did they set and how they expressed their influence?  Can those past churches’ successes help us today?  

Read, The Ten Most Influential Churches in the Past Century, published by Destiny Image Publishers by Elmer Towns.  Order this book from Amazon.com

The New Room – John Wesley Chapel, Bristol, England

In 1973, I led 420 students from Liberty University to several Wesley preaching points throughout England.  The free trip was promised to all students who attended the college that year.  New Room had been built in 1739, and was the first and oldest Methodist Chapel in the world.  Rather than being located on a main street in Bristol, Methodists were known to choose inexpensive out of the way plots of ground to build churches.  New Room was built on a plot of ground between two streets and is approached by a passageway.  

In the original day it would seat around 1000 worshipers, I had over 400 students listening to me as I lectured on the John Wesley Fast and its influence in reaching the world for Jesus Christ. Once a month John Wesley held the conference in that chapel, where all of the circuit-riding preachers attended 2 or 3 days of preaching/teaching sessions.  These preachers were called “plowboy preachers” or “shopkeeper preachers” because they were recruited by John from the ranks of Methodist Chapels to surrender to preach and go out to plant a circuit of 30 to 40 churches. 

Wesley said he would ordain a young man who had the skills of reading, writing and he possessed the Holy Spirit.  These men with very little education created a movement called the Methodist Church that within 50 years became the largest Protestant movement in the world.  During the War of 1776, there were only 243 Methodist churches in the United States.  By the War of 1812, the Methodists had grown to approximately 5,000 Methodist churches.

There were five bedrooms on a second floor balcony called “preacher rooms.”  In these rooms leaders would fast on bread and water for 10 days as they prepared sermons for the circuit-riding preachers.  After they rode their circuits for approximately 23-25 days, they returned home to attend a Methodist conference to hear sermon after sermon from great leaders.  They would write these messages down and preach the same sermon when they returned to their circuit. I preached to the students from Liberty University that we could influence the world as the early circuit-riding preachers. I told them we could create the largest movement in the world. 

Contact us to learn how to build a great church.