I have an Episcopalian friend who remarked that it bothered him that people call the Aldersgate experience Wesley’s “conversion”. He’s absolutely right. This is what I wrote in the comments and I want to share it here.
I always balk and correct people when they call the Aldersgate experience Wesley’s “conversion.” You are absolutely on target, that’s reading Wesley through revivalist eyes. That’s saying he wasn’t really a Christian before then, like he wasn’t really “saved.”
He was in fact quite faithful, studied, and an Anglican missionary in Georgia.
He did not claim that he got “saved” at Aldersgate. His entire theology of the lifelong journey of experiencing prevenient, justifying, and sanctifying grace is in fact what Wesley called “the scripture way of salvation.”
It is far more accurate to say this was a very powerful experience of assurance. “An assurance was given me,” he said, a new peace that he did not have to work so hard. Christian life is about grace. I suppose for some revivalists, this assurance is their definition of “getting saved.” But it wasn’t Wesley’s.
It is important, though, and I would press you back (while completely agreeing about the ridiculous idea that this was his “conversion”) that this experience placed a fire in his belly that became the Methodist movement. It was indeed a turnaround from a perceived sense of failure. He was run off from Georgia, yes, by the family of Sophie Hopky and related legal troubles. But not because he was a general failure as a Christian.
But more fundamentally, it was a vivid personal experience of the “heart religion” he already admired and had seen in the Moravians, and which his brother Charles had experienced the year before.
To use his words, Aldersgate was not an experience of justifying grace (conversion). It was his most vivid experience of sanctifying grace. And that turned his inner light on, with the rest of his life committed to help other people grow in holiness.
