Susanna Wesley: Faithfulness in the Ordinary

Her Story

Susanna Annesley was born in London in 1669, the twenty-fifth child of a Nonconformist minister named Samuel Annesley. She grew up in a home where theological seriousness was normal and where the Scriptures were taken as the governing authority for faith and life. As a young woman she made her own considered decision to leave Nonconformity and join the Church of England, a choice she arrived at through careful study rather than social pressure.

In 1688 she married Samuel Wesley, an Anglican clergyman who would eventually become rector of Epworth in Lincolnshire. Their life together was marked by both genuine partnership and considerable difficulty. Samuel was away from home for extended periods and was not always a steady financial manager. The family faced debt, hardship and the regular grief of infant mortality. Of the nineteen children Susanna bore, nine survived to adulthood. The demands on her were relentless.

And yet within those demands she built something remarkable. Susanna understood the formation of her children's faith and character as one of the central responsibilities of her life. She did not treat it as a background concern to be addressed when convenient. She approached it with the same intention and method she brought to everything else.

Her approach to education in the home was structured and deliberate. She began teaching each child to read as soon as they turned five, always starting with Genesis. She set aside time each week to speak individually with every child about their spiritual condition, their questions and their progress. She took each one seriously as a soul in God's care and in her care. This was not merely good parenting practice in a general sense. It was theology made domestic. She believed each child stood before God and that her task was to help them come to know Him.

Her practice of personal prayer was equally disciplined. In a house full of children and constant noise she would draw her apron over her head as a signal to the household that she was not to be disturbed. It was a simple arrangement born of necessity but it pointed to something deeper. She regarded her time with God as non-negotiable. The demands of the day would not crowd it out. Whatever else could wait, prayer could not.

She also wrote extensively. Her notebooks contain reflections on Scripture, on the nature of the Christian life and on the education of children. These were not writings prepared for an audience. They were the working thoughts of a woman who took her own spiritual life seriously enough to examine it in writing. Her letters to her children, particularly to John as he studied at Oxford, show a woman of real theological substance who could engage her son's questions with both warmth and precision.

It was Susanna who, when John Wesley was at Oxford leading the small group of disciplined Christians who would be nicknamed the Methodists, wrote to him with the observation that whatever strengthens and confirms your faith in God, and love to God, is of God, regardless of what form it takes. She had lived long enough and thought deeply enough to know that the inner life of faith matters more than its outward shape. She was not merely a pious woman passing on comfortable religion. She was a thoughtful believer who had worked things through.

The household at Epworth was not an easy one. There was the fire of 1709 that destroyed the rectory and nearly claimed the life of young John, an event he later recalled as being a brand plucked from the burning. There was the ongoing financial strain. There were disagreements between Susanna and Samuel. There was the weariness that comes with years of unrelenting domestic responsibility. Susanna did not have a romanticised life. She had a real one.

What is striking is how she carried it. She did not abandon her habits of prayer and study when life was hard. She maintained them precisely because life was hard. Her discipline was not a performance of piety. It was the structure that held her together through difficulty. She had learned that the soul needs regular tending just as the body does and that irregular attention to God tends to produce an irregular and unstable faith.

Her influence on her children was profound. John Wesley later credited his mother explicitly. He wrote of her habits of instruction and prayer with deep respect. Charles, whose hymns shaped the devotional life of generations of Christians, grew up in a home where Scripture was spoken, sung and lived. Whatever Susanna's limitations, and like every person she had them, she gave her children a serious and affectionate encounter with the faith that shaped them for life.

She lived long enough to see something of what her faithfulness had produced. She attended one of John's meetings in London in her later years and sat quietly under his preaching. The woman who had taught him to read the Bible now heard him declare its message to a room full of people. Something that had begun at the kitchen table in Epworth had gone far beyond anything she could have planned or predicted.

Susanna Wesley died in 1742 at the age of seventy-three. Her last recorded words to her children were to charge them, as soon as they saw her released from the body, to sing a psalm of praise to God. Even at the end, her instinct was to direct others toward worship.

She matters today for reasons that do not depend on the fame of her children. She matters because she was an ordinary believer who took her ordinary responsibilities with extraordinary seriousness. She prayed when she had no space. She taught when she had little time. She kept at it when the results were not immediately visible. She trusted that faithful planting and faithful watering were genuinely worthwhile even when the fruit was slow to appear.

Her life is an argument that the quiet and unseen work of Christian faithfulness in the home, in prayer and in patient instruction of the young is not marginal to the work of God's kingdom. It may be closer to the centre than we think.