Martin Wellings

Biographic Data

ID2018270
NAMEMartin Wellings
GIVEN NAMESMartin
FAMILY NAMEWellings
SIGNATUREWELLINGS M
AFFILIATIONSBook Reviews Editor of Wesley and Methodist Studies
VERIFIEDNo
TOTAL WORKS70
TOTAL CITATIONS2
WORKS AS AUTHOR69
WORKS AS EDITOR1
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1991
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX1

  • The Methodist Church in Poland. Activity and Political Conditions, 1945–1989

    Martin WellingsARTICLEWesley and Methodist Studies2026

  • Friends, Neighbours, Sinners

    Martin WellingsARTICLEWesley and Methodist Studies2026

    The passing in 1689 of ‘an Act for Exempting their Majesties’ Protestant Subjects Dissenting from the Church of England from the Penalties of Certain Laws’, better known to history and historians as the Toleration Act, transformed the religious landscape of England and Wales, giving legal status and protection to Protestant Nonconformists for the first time and signalling a crack in the edifice of the English confessional state. As this carefully…

  • Respectable Methodism

    Martin WellingsARTICLEWesley and Methodist Studies2026

  • Enlightened Oxford

    Martin WellingsARTICLEWesley and Methodist Studies2026

    Nigel Aston’s thoroughly researched and elegantly written study of the University of Oxford in the long eighteenth century deserves more than a short notice, but is considered briefly here because the Wesleys and the Methodist movement do not figure prominently in the volume. This is as it should be because the University had more pressing concerns than disgruntled dons and a small group of ‘enthusiasts’! However, Dr Aston’s work does a magnifice…

  • The Routledge Companion to John Wesley

    Martin WellingsARTICLEWesley and Methodist Studies2026

    Methodists have always loved statistics. In the final and longest chapter of this impressive volume, ‘A Quantitative Assessment of the Global Expansion of Wesley’s Methodism’, David Jeremy notes that ‘the legacy of John Wesley’s mind has been sliced and diced into 104 denominations’ (522); in an earlier chapter, Isabel Rivers records the ‘astonishing range’ of Wesley’s publications, running to some 1,570 items in the English Short Title Catalogue…

  • The Battle of the Rubric”

    Open AccessMartin WellingsARTICLEJournal of Religious History2026

    This article takes one facet of the controversy engulfing the Church of England in the mid‐nineteenth century over ritualism—the interpretation of the rubrics in the Book of Common Prayer governing clerical dress—and explores it through the writings of three representatives of very different standpoints. It considers, first, the careful academic scholarship of James Craigie Robertson (1813–82), Professor of Ecclesiastical History at King's Colleg…

  • Pedagogy and Preaching in Edwardian Oxford

    Martin WellingsARTICLEWesley and Methodist Studies2025

    Ernest Ely Genner (1877–1930) and his wife Margaret (1871–1933) exemplified late-Victorian Wesleyan aspirations, benefiting from educational opportunities to achieve academic and professional success. In two ways they pressed beyond the generality of middle-class Wesleyans in this period: Ernest Genner occupied a unique position as an Oxford don who made no secret of his Wesleyan loyalties, combining decades of tutorial teaching with long service…

  • Methodism and External Controversies in Britain, 1800–1900

    Martin WellingsARTICLEWesley and Methodist Studies2025

    Students of Methodist history will be aware of Richard Green’s Anti-Methodist Publications Issued during the Eighteenth Century (1902) and will know too of recent studies by Brett McInelly, Donald Kirkham, and Simon Lewis exploring the vigorous pamphlet warfare that embroiled early Methodism. Polemics did not end at the turn of the eighteenth century, and in this invaluable volume Clive Field offers a bibliography of controversial works published…

  • The Wesleyan Reform Crisis in Mid-Victorian Oxford

    Open AccessMartin WellingsARTICLEStudies in Church History2025

    Between 1849 and 1856, the Reform controversy cost the Wesleyan Methodist denomination an estimated 100,000 members. Triggered by personality conflicts within the Wesleyan ministry, the Reform movement drew on long-standing grievances, including tensions between itinerant ministers and local lay leaders. This case study of Wesleyan Reform in the Oxford Circuit explores the interplay of local and national events, and considers how protagonists in …

  • Methodism and Monasticism

    Martin WellingsARTICLEWesley and Methodist Studies2024

    For more than a decade, twice-yearly Methodist Studies Seminars have offered opportunities for scholars in the Wesleyan and Methodist tradition to present papers and works in progress. During the COVID-19 pandemic in-person attendance was replaced by online engagement, giving the seminars an international membership. Methodism and Monasticism comprises papers given at the December 2020 seminar, hosted by the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church…

  • Heterodoxy and Antiquity

    Martin WellingsARTICLEWesley and Methodist Studies2024

    The late Leslie Barnard published biographies of several noted scholar-bishops of the early eighteenth century—John Potter (1989), Thomas Secker (1998), and Thomas Herring (2006). This book, published posthumously and edited by Daniel Reed, with an introduction by William Gibson, presents Dr Barnard’s work on Joseph Bingham, sometime Fellow of University College, Oxford, and subsequently, following a controversial sermon on the Trinity, incumbent…

  • Rational Dissenters in Late Eighteenth-Century England

    Martin WellingsARTICLEWesley and Methodist Studies2024

    In 1743 John Wesley addressed An Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion, adding a three-part Farther Appeal in 1745. Noting the contemporary absorption in the relationship between reason and religion, Valerie Smith’s detailed and compelling study explores a group of Dissenters—women as well as men—as committed as Wesley to the dialogue, but whose conclusions persuaded them to move away from Dissenting Orthodoxy into beliefs stigmatized by o…

  • The Quest for Love Divine

    Martin WellingsARTICLEWesley and Methodist Studies2024

    Paul Wesley Chilcote is one of the world’s leading scholars of Wesleyan history and theology, perhaps best known for his groundbreaking study John Wesley and the Women Preachers of Early Methodism (1991). The present collection gathers eighteen essays and papers, some hitherto unpublished, and presents them in six sections, each with three chapters: Charles Wesley’s Lyrical Theology; John and Charles Wesley’s Practical Divinity; Early Methodist W…

  • Places of Worship in Britain and Ireland, 1829–1929

    Martin WellingsARTICLEWesley and Methodist Studies2024

    The Rewley House Studies in the Historic Environment have established a track record of publishing the valuable papers given at conferences on architectural history organized by Oxford University’s Department of Continuing Education. This volume, the seventh in a projected series of ten on places of worship, covers the building, restoration, and adaptation of churches, chapels, and synagogues in the British Isles in a period when population growt…

  • Born in Crisis and Shaped by Controversy. The Relevant History of Methodism, Volume 2

    Martin WellingsARTICLEWesley and Methodist Studies2024

    I approached this project with a mixture of anticipation and anxiety: anticipation because John Tyson is a distinguished American scholar, who has written extensively on the early history of the Wesleys’ Methodism, and anxiety because I wondered what might be meant and intended by a ‘relevant history’ of Methodism. Most historians believe that their discipline will offer wisdom and insights to the contemporary world, but most will also be aware t…

  • The History of Christianity in Britain and Ireland

    Martin WellingsARTICLEWesley and Methodist Studies2023

    Gerald Bray is a distinguished church historian—Research Professor of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School, and author or editor of numerous books. His History of Christianity in Britain and Ireland is an assured account of Christianity in the Atlantic archipelago over twenty centuries, written with a strong and explicit Christian commitment and produced to a very high standard by InterVarsity Press. Readers of Wesley and Methodist Studies will be …

  • The Evangelical Quadrilateral. Vol. I

    Martin WellingsARTICLEWesley and Methodist Studies2023

    For more than forty years David Bebbington has been one of the most prolific and influential historians of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British religion. His The Nonconformist Conscience (1982) explored the attitudes and political impact of Nonconformity between Forster’s Education Act of 1870 and the First World War; he has also written extensively on the life and thought of W. E. Gladstone. However, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, publi…

  • With God on Their Side

    Martin WellingsARTICLEWesley and Methodist Studies2023

    Known and widely respected today for its social work, the Salvation Army in the late nineteenth century faced considerable opposition. With God on Their Side focuses on a three-way conflict, between the Army, with its flags, brass bands, military terminology, and provocative methods of evangelism, communities who resisted the Army’s ‘invasions’ with jeers and brickbats, and local authorities trying to keep the peace, whether by suppressing the ri…

  • Every Leaf, Line, and Letter

    Martin WellingsARTICLEWesley and Methodist Studies2023

    Every scholar and student of evangelical Christianity since 1989 has had to engage with the definition of evangelicalism crafted by David Bebbington in his massively influential Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. The ‘Bebbington quadrilateral’ of evangelical characteristics—conversionism, activism, biblicism, and crucicentrism—has been adopted, debated, nuanced, inflected, and sometimes rejected as the study …

  • William Booth

    Martin WellingsARTICLEWesley and Methodist Studies2022

    William Booth (1829–1912), founder and first General of the Salvation Army, left an indelible mark on the religious and social life of the late nineteenth century. Born in 1829 in Sneinton, near Nottingham, Booth became a Wesleyan Methodist local preacher in his teens, an evangelist with the Wesleyan Reformers in his early twenties, and then a minister of the Methodist New Connexion for eight years before resigning in 1862 to pursue the calling o…

  • The Quotable Mr Wesley

    Martin WellingsARTICLEWesley and Methodist Studies2022

    A quick look at the internet will reveal many sayings cheerfully attributed to John Wesley without a shred of historical or literary support, or even remote plausibility. In this little book Stephen Gunter gathers genuine and attested quotations from Wesley’s works to support the work of evangelism. The quotations are arranged in alphabetical order of themes, from ‘Bible’ to ‘World’, and forty-three topics are covered. Given the purpose of the bo…

  • Anglican-Methodist Ecumenism

    Jane Platt, Martin WellingsBOOKAnglican-Methodist Ecumenism2021

  • Protestant Dissent and Philanthropy in Britain, 1660–1914

    Martin WellingsARTICLEWesley and Methodist Studies2021

  • The Temple of Youth

    Martin WellingsARTICLEWesley and Methodist Studies2021

  • The African Methodist Episcopal Church

    Martin WellingsARTICLEWesley and Methodist Studies2021

    On 17 June 2015 a white supremacist invaded Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and opened fire on a Bible study group. Nine members were killed, including the pastor, Clementa Pinckney. Pinckney had been a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives and of the State Senate, as well as an AME minister, and the eulogy at his funeral was given by President Barack Obama. The story of the Charleston atr…