This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
John and Charles Wesley, sons of an Anglican rector, formed a small, disciplined devotional group at Oxford in 1729, nicknamed the Holy Club and, mockingly, the Methodists for its methodical rule of prayer, Bible study and prison visiting. The name stuck to it, and to the much larger movement it eventually grew into, but that movement's own decisive turn came nearly a decade later, not at Oxford at all.
At a meeting on Aldersgate Street in London on 24 May 1738, John Wesley felt his heart, in his own words, strangely warmed, an evangelical assurance of salvation he treated for the rest of his life as his own conversion. Open air field preaching to the labouring poor followed from 1739 onward, carrying the movement far beyond the university circles where it had begun and reaching people the parish system rarely touched. Wesley insisted throughout his life that Methodism was a renewal movement within the Church of England, never a separate church of its own.
What this changed for Christianity's spread was the creation of a mass evangelical movement operating inside, rather than against, an existing established church, reaching working people through open air preaching that a settled parish clergyman would not have attempted. The tension in that arrangement, a movement its own founder called a renewal and never a schism, would only be resolved later, on the far side of the Atlantic, once political circumstances made staying inside the Church of England impossible.