John William Fletcher - Early Life

Early Life

He was educated at Geneva, but, preferring an army career to a clerical one, went to Lisbon and enlisted. An accident prevented his sailing with his regiment to Brazil, and after a visit to Flanders, where an uncle offered to secure a commission for him, he went to England in c.1740/50. He had harbored a secret desire to travel to England, and had studied the English language prior to his arrival in London. In the autumn of 1751 he became tutor to the sons of Thomas and Susanna Hill, a wealthy Shropshire family, who spent part of the year in London. On one of the family's stays in London, Fletcher first heard of the Methodists and became personally acquainted with John and Charles Wesley, as well as his future wife, Mary Bosanquet. In 1757 Fletcher was ordained as deacon (6 March 1757) and priest (13 March 1757) in the Church of England, after preaching his first sermon at Atcham being appointed curate to the Rev. Rowland Chambre in the parish of Madeley, Shropshire.

In addition to performing the duties of his curacy, he sometimes preached with John Wesley and assisted him with clerical duties in Wesley's London chapels. As a preacher in his own right, but also as one of Wesley's coadjutors, Fletcher became known as a fervent supporter of the Evangelical Revival. Fletcher perceived a vocational call from God to parochial ministry, and being led by this calling rather than by the temptation to wealth and influence, he refusing an offer to be presented to the wealthy living of Dunham, accepting instead the humble industrializing parish of Madeley in Shropshire. He had developed a sincere religious and social concern for the people of this populous part of the West Midlands where he had first served in the Christian ministry, and here, for twenty-five years (1760–1785), he lived and worked with unique devotion and zeal, described by his wife as his "unexampled labours" in the epitaph she penned for his iron tomb. Fletcher was devoted to the Methodist concern for spiritual renewal and revival, and committed himself to the Wesley's by correspondence and by coming to their aid as a theologian, while maintaining a never wavering commitment to the Church of England. Indeed, much of Fletcher's controversial theological writings claimed their foundation was the 39 Articles, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Homilies of the Church of England. Yet, for all his support of John Wesley's and his Methodist societies which in many cases came into tension with the parish clergy, John Fletcher believed the Methodist model functioned best within the parochial system, and himself implemented his own brand of Methodism in his own parish.