they spread across Bohemia after the marriage of Anne of Bohemia and Richard II of England. Methodism is not an idiosyncratic eighteenth-century development within Christianity which sprang fully formed from John Wesley’s head; it stands in what may be called a non-conformist tradition. It is important to affirm right at the beginning that Methodist theology is not sectarian. Methodism did not seek to be an ecclesial body, but rather to be a style of spiritual life within an existing body, the Established