Editing St. Simons, Georgia (section)

=== Wesley brothers ===
[[File:Wesley Oak marker, St. Simons, GA, US.jpg|thumb|Historical marker about the Wesley Oak]]
In the 1730s, St. Simons served as a sometime home to [[John Wesley]], the young minister of the colony at Savannah. He later returned to England, where in 1738, he founded the evangelical movement of [[Methodism]] within the Anglican Church. Wesley performed [[missionary]] work at St. Simons but was despondent about failing to bring about conversions. (He wrote that the local inhabitants had more tortures from their environment than he could describe for [[Hell]]). In the 1730s, John Wesley's brother [[Charles Wesley]] also did missionary work on St. Simons.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.glynncounty.com/cgi-bin/oaktree.pl?dbf=data.txt&ID=00012851|title=Wesley Oak (historic marker), Historical Markers|website=www.glynncounty.com}}</ref> In the late eighteenth century, Methodist preachers traveled throughout Georgia as part of the [[Great Awakening]], a religious revival movement led by Methodists and Baptists. A significant impact of the revival was to convert [[Slavery in the colonial history of the United States|enslaved African-Americans]] in Georgia (as well as those in the rest of the [[Thirteen Colonies]]) to Christianity.

On April 5, 1987, fifty-five St. Simons United Methodist Church members were commissioned, with Bishop Frank Robertson as the first pastor, to begin a new church on the north end of St. Simons Island. This was where John and Charles Wesley had preached and ministered to the people at [[Fort Frederica]]. The new church was named Wesley United Methodist Church at Frederica.