1 JHRP 3 (2017) – 1 ISSN: 24 Methodists and Money in the Long Eighteenth Century 1 Clive Murray Norris A. Introduction John Wesley’s Methodist Connexion began as a small and informal grouping of Anglican clergymen and ‘lay brethren’ sharing a vision of a revitalised Church of England. 2 Its first (1744) Conference gave detailed consideration to matters of theology but also to discipline and organisation, especially how the religious societies associated with the movement should be run. From the outset there was a concern that its preachers should lead exemplary lives, and in particular an anxiety to avoid any appearance that they were profiting from their ministry. The preachers were told: “Take no money of anyone. If they give you food when you are hungry, or clothes when you need them, it is good. But not silver or gold. Let there be no pretence to say, we ‘grow rich by the gospel’.” 3 In the succeeding years and decades the movement grew. Its membership multiplied, exceeding 70,000 by the time of Wesley’s death in 1791; 4 it spread across the British Isles and beyond; it acquired hundreds of staff, and hundreds too of chapels and other buildings; and it established foreign missions, and a flourishing commercial book publishing operation. 5 All of this required the raising and expenditure of funds on a large scale. A simple doctrine of apostolic simplicity of life was 1 This is a revised version of a paper presented at the University of Tübingen workshop ‘What Would Jesus Fund? Financing religious enterprises in the long eighteenth century’, 9-10 February 2017. I am grateful to workshop participants, and to Dr. Peter Forsaith and Professor William Gibson of the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History, for comments on the original text. 2 As recorded in the Minutes of their first Conference in 1744: H.D. Rack (ed.), Bicentennial Edition of the Works of John Wesley, vol. 10: The Methodist Societies. The Minutes of Conference, Nashville, TN 2011, 120-46. 3 Rack (ed.), Bicentennial Edition, vol. 10, 141. 4 71,568 members in the British Isles were reported to the July 1790 Conference: Rack (ed.), Bicentennial Edition, vol. 10, 728. Wesley died in March 1791. 5 This financial history of Wesleyan Methodism is the subject of C.M. Norris, The Financing of John Wesley’s Methodism c.1740-1800, Oxford 2017, on which this article draws.