John Wesley's Feast Day: March 3 and Aldersgate Day, May 24

On the evening of May 24, 1738, John Wesley walked into a small religious meeting on Aldersgate Street in London where someone was reading aloud from Martin Luther's preface to Romans. He had been ordained for years, had sailed to Georgia as a missionary, had failed, had come home discouraged and unsure whether he possessed the faith he preached to others. Then, as he wrote in his journal that night, "I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation." That sentence, more than any sermon, is why John Wesley has two days on the church calendar instead of one, and why both are worth keeping.

When is John Wesley's feast day kept?

John Wesley is commemorated on two different days depending on which household is keeping the calendar. The Episcopal Church and other bodies in the Anglican family keep March 3, honoring John together with his brother Charles Wesley. Methodist churches worldwide keep May 24 as Aldersgate Day, sometimes called Wesley Day, marking the anniversary of the Aldersgate experience rather than a death date. Neither day is older or more authentic than the other; they answer different questions. March 3 asks when the church lost him. May 24 asks when the fire in him became unmistakable.

Why two dates, and why March 3 for a man who died March 2

John Wesley died on March 2, 1791, at his house next to City Road Chapel in London, but his commemoration in the Anglican calendar falls a day later. The reason is a scheduling conflict rather than a puzzle about his death. March 2 already belonged to Chad of Lichfield, an ancient bishop of the English church with his own long-standing feast, so when the Episcopal Church added the Wesleys to its calendar it placed them on the nearest open day, March 3. John and Charles are commemorated together on that date because they were never really separable in the movement's founding. Charles wrote the hymns that carried the theology into ordinary mouths and memories; John organized the societies, rode the circuits, and held the whole enterprise together for over half a century. The Church of England and the Episcopal Church both remember them as priests of that church who never left it, not as founders of a rival denomination. That separation came only after John Wesley's death, when his followers in America and then in Britain organized into churches of their own.

May 24 belongs to the Methodist side of the family and to no one's death at all. It is the anniversary of Aldersgate, and Methodists keep it as Aldersgate Day or Wesley Day precisely because it marks an experience rather than an ending. Some United Methodist congregations also keep Heritage Sunday, usually the Sunday nearest May 21, which is a broader observance of the denomination's whole founding story, Aldersgate included alongside the Christmas Conference of 1784 and other formative events. Aldersgate Day is the narrower and older of the two, fixed on the single evening; Heritage Sunday is the wider frame around it.

How the two days are kept

March 3 is kept liturgically, with a collect and appointed readings, most often in parishes that follow the Episcopal Church's calendar of saints and holy people. The appointed readings and collect echo the theme of hearts warmed or burning within as the scriptures are opened and zeal is kindled, a deliberate connection to Wesley's own words; the propers ask that the same Spirit who warmed his heart still warm the church's. Some Episcopal and United Methodist congregations mark the day jointly, in recognition of the shared inheritance and of decades of formal dialogue between the two churches aimed at closer communion.

Aldersgate Day is kept far less by fixed liturgy and far more by testimony and revival. United Methodist and other Wesleyan congregations often hold an evening service echoing the original meeting, with hymns, personal accounts of assurance, and preaching on grace received rather than merely believed. It is less a saint's day in the old sense than an altar call built into the calendar, a yearly invitation to ask whether one's own faith has moved from the head to the heart.

Is John Wesley a saint, and what to read for his day

Methodist churches do not canonize saints in the way Rome or the Eastern churches do, and Wesley himself would have been wary of the language. But the Anglican calendar's inclusion of him among its "holy men and holy women" functions much the same way: a public act of the church saying this life is worth remembering and worth imitating. Wesley never asked to found anything separate from the Church of England, and he kept its calendar himself, famously calling All Saints' Day one of the festivals he loved best.

For either day, the fullest way in is still his own story, told from the beginning. Brand from the Burning opens with the fire, literal and otherwise, that shaped him from childhood. The World His Parish carries the story through Aldersgate itself and into the open-field preaching that followed. Go On to Perfection takes up the theology he left behind, the doctrine of holiness that still shapes Methodist, Wesleyan, and Nazarene churches. All three make up The World His Parish: A Life of John Wesley, and the first volume can be read free as an Invitation. Readers who keep both his days, and the lives of the saints and reformers who share the calendar with him, will find the whole shelf through membership.