ABSTRACT
As the introduction to this volume indicates, the term ‘Methodism’ can be understood in a variety of ways. This chapter offers a summary and assessment of scholarship on the origins and early growth of Methodism understood in the specific sense of the Wesleyan branch of the Evangelical Revival. The dates 173091 refer to specific events in the life of John Wesley: his initial engagement with an Oxford religious society between 1729 and 1730, and his death in 1791. In this period Methodism functioned primarily as a religious movement and not as a separate church or denomination, though by 1784 John Wesley had authorised the formation of a Methodist church in the United States and he had taken measures in the British Isles that, as Frank Baker explained it, had separated the Methodist societies from the Church of England in fact if not in name.1
