METHODISTS are preparing to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the birth of John Wesley with a string of special events.

John Wesley's talents were essential in the founding of the Methodist Church, which now has 300,000 members in Britain alone.

The tercentenary will be marked by the Malvern and Ledbury Methodist Circuit on Sunday, June 15. A special service will be held at Lansdowne Crescent Methodist Church, Malvern, at 10.30am, conducted by the minister, the Rev Catherine Campbell-Hyde. It will be followed by a picnic lunch.

On June 14, Bromyard Methodist Church will host a day of celebration from 9am to 4pm. It includes an exhibition on John Wesley and local Methodist history in Brom-yard, readings of Wesley's sermons and hymn singing. Refreshments will be served all day.

On August 24, the Rev Dr Leslie Griffiths, a broadcaster, writer and past president of the Methodist Conference, will be preaching at Lansdowne Crescent.

Later in the year there are plans to plant a commemorative tree and on October 8, the singer NIA will give a concert at Lansdowne Crescent. Tickets are available on 01684 569098 or from the Lyttelton Well bookshop, Church Street, Malvern.

John Wesley was born in 1703 at Epworth in Lincolnshire, the son of a clergyman. His brother Charles is also a central figure in Methodist history and author of some 6,000 hymns over 50 years.

John studied at Oxford and joined a Bible study and prayer group, which included George Whitefield, who was to become the greatest preacher of his day.

After a spell as chaplains in the American colonies, the Wesleys returned to England in 1738 and joined a religious society in London, where they underwent a profound spiritual experience. "I felt my heart strangely warmed," was how John Wesley described it.

It was John's organisational talents, which turned a spontaneous evangelical movement into the Methodist Church of today.

In 1739, Whitefield invited Wesley to preach to working class people in Bristol and field meetings became a key feature of the movement.

As Methodist societies sprang up, Wesley toured the country preaching. Although he never visited Malvern, Ledbury or Bromyard, there is a record of a visit to Upton, marked with a plaque on a former Methodist chapel.

The first Methodist Conference, the body at the heart of the structure of the church, was held in 1744. On his death in 1791, Wesley left behind a church of 70,000 members and some 400 publications, which he either wrote or edited.