The name Methodist began as an insult about regularity and turned out to describe the movement exactly. What Wesley built was a structure. Converts were gathered into societies; each society was divided into classes of about a dozen who met weekly under a leader to give an account of their conduct and their state; smaller bands went further into mutual confession. Membership was renewed by a quarterly ticket, which could be withheld. Preaching was largely by laymen, licensed by Wesley and moved from circuit to circuit on his instruction, and the whole was co-ordinated by an annual Conference and by his own travelling, traditionally reckoned at a quarter of a million miles on horseback.
His theology was Arminian and he defended it in a magazine he named for the purpose: Christ died for everyone, grace can be resisted, and assurance is available to the ordinary believer. He also taught Christian perfection, that a person may in this life be so filled with love that sin no longer reigns, which he defended against ridicule for forty years and which remains the distinctive Methodist doctrine.
He intended none of it to become a separate church. He was ordained in the Church of England, communicated in it, and told his preachers repeatedly not to leave it. But in 1784 he registered a deed defining the Conference as his legal successor, and in the same year ordained preachers for America himself, knowing that only a bishop could do so. Separation followed his death in 1791, and he had made it possible.