This book offers a revealing overview of the history of Methodist missions.Part one begins with an introduction to John Wesley's formation in a Lincolnshire backwater.While this terrain has been well travelled the author provides surprising background information about Wesley's exposure to the wider world through a variety of fascinating sources.These include the impact of testimonies from missionaries serving in Tamil Nadu on Susanna's personal sense of vocation to her children, Samuel's vision to serve in Ethiopia and India, and the general cultivation by the Wesley family of a global intellectual culture in the Epworth wilderness.This account of Wesley's formation is then situated in relation to the wider eighteenth-century missionary context.All this serves to demonstrate that John Wesley's early horizons were much broader than we might first imagine.
A 2026 study studied this question.