T&T Clark Companion to Methodism

Begun as a “Holy Club” with Christ College, Oxford, in eighteenth-century England, other students jeered John and Charles Wesley’s attempts to systematize the Christian life by calling them “Methodists.” The name stuck and ever since “Methodism” has come to encompass a range of denominations and movements in every corner of the globe. The World Methodist Council estimates there to be seventy-five million people around the world who consider themselves to be Methodists and many more who have been influenced by the ideas and practices expressed in Methodism.