A complete history of the Methodist movement, told one episode at a time.

The History of Methodism Podcast began in 2017 as an attempt to tell the story of the Methodist and Wesleyan movements in full — beginning before the Reformation and continuing into the present day. Most accounts begin with John Wesley and end at Aldersgate. This one doesn’t.

The podcast is hosted by Wilson Pruitt, pastor of Covenant UMC in Austin, Texas. Each episode is researched from primary sources where possible — Wesley’s journals and letters, the published works, contemporary correspondence, archival minutes — and supplemented with the best modern scholarship. The aim is to make serious historical work accessible without flattening it.

What started as a podcast has grown into a small set of connected projects, all published under the Wroot Press imprint and gathered under this domain:

• The podcast itself — all episodes, free.
• Wesley’s Notes — the King James Version of the Bible, side-by-side with John Wesley’s Explanatory Notes Upon the Old and New Testament.
• The Wesley Corpus — a searchable archive of John Wesley’s published works, with embeddings for thematic search.
• Wroot Press books — the print volumes of The History of Methodism and related titles, including a five-volume edition of Wesley’s Oxford dissertations.

The host

Wilson Pruitt is an elder in The United Methodist Church and pastor of Covenant UMC in Austin, Texas. He writes and translates from the broader Wesleyan, Patristic, and Catholic traditions — work that appears on Wroot Press and at wilsonpruitt.com.

How to support

Every episode of this podcast is free, and will stay free. If the work has been valuable to you, the best way to support it is on Patreon. Patron support funds research, transcription, and the time it takes to keep this project going.

You can also help by leaving a rating or review wherever you listen, by sharing an episode that mattered to you, or by buying one of the books.