ABSTRACT
The first decade of the eighteenth century saw not only the birth of John Burton and Charles Wesley but the beginning of the Protestant missionary era. Catholic missions to people beyond Europe began to be established earlier, as Spain and Portugal in particular embarked on the colonial enterprise. It was under the auspices of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) that John and Charles Wesley, the former in his early thirties and the latter in his late twenties, worked briefly in Georgia. John Prickard wants to go to missions work to America, American Indians' wrote one of John Wesley's associates, Walter Churchey, to another, Joseph Benson, in 1774. The first Methodist class meeting and preaching place outside the British Isles were established in the colony of Antigua by the planter and lawyer Nathaniel Gilbert, who was a member of the island's House of Assembly and was to be its Speaker between 1763 and 1769.
