Aldersgate

Aldersgate

English

Etymology

(religious experience): Short for Aldersgate Street, the site of a Moravian meeting at which John Wesley had a religious experience.

Proper noun

Aldersgate

1. A ward of the City of London
2. (historical) A religious experience undergone by John Wesley in May 1738.
   • 2000, Jan Shipps, Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years Among the Mormons:

     Aldersgate is the expression Methodists use to refer to the powerful spiritual experience in which, in Wesley's own words, his "heart was strangely warmed."

   • 2004, Methodist History, volume 43-44, page 268:

     Consequently, Aldersgate is perceived as one more spiritual experience along the way of salvation

   • 2007, John Fremont Beeson, John Wesley and the American Frontier, page 150:

     J. Earnest Rattenbury, in his book, Wesley's Legacy in the World, quotes a man by the name of Riggs, author of The Churchmanship of John Wesley, as saying that: the Wesley before Aldersgate was not the same man as after Aldersgate.

3. A similar experience among his followers.
   • 1938, Edward Laird Mills, Christian Advocate, volume 87, Pacific Edition edition, page 565:

     Must our Aldersgate experience help us meet the needs of common men ?

   • 1943, Michigan Christian Advocate, volume 70, page xxii:

     Now we know that only the road ahead can be our Aldersgate. And it can happen there, albeit, that road may lead through new battlefields of moral struggle for a Christian society before it emerges upon the heights of spiritual ecstasy.

   • 1962, Motive, volume 23, page 16:

     We will not have had our Aldersgate until we can, on the one hand, confess with incredible joy that Christ has taken away our sins and then, on the other hand, plunge into the work of his kingdom