Thomas Coke was born on September 9, 1747, in Brecon, Wales, the son of a prosperous apothecary. He studied at Oxford and followed the ecclesiastical career expected of a young man of his class, becoming a clergyman of the Church of England, with no idea that he would become one of the greatest mission organizers in Christian history.
In 1776 he met John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, and soon became one of his closest collaborators. His involvement with Wesleyan methods, open-air preaching and informal meetings, cost him his parish: he was removed from his post in 1777 due to the disapproval of local Anglican leadership.
In 1784, Wesley consecrated him superintendent to organize Methodism in the newly independent America. At the Christmas Conference in Baltimore, Coke and Francis Asbury led the founding of the Methodist Episcopal Church, though the title of bishop, later adopted by the Americans, displeased Wesley himself.
Two years later, a storm in the Atlantic drove his ship, bound for Nova Scotia, to the island of Antigua. There Coke found a Methodist community that had already been established for decades, begun by the planter Nathaniel Gilbert in the 1760s and expanded by the preacher John Baxter from 1778 onward. Coke decided to support this work with the first formal sending of missionaries and resources organized by British Methodism, laying the foundations of the Methodist mission system outside Europe and America.
In the following decades, he crossed the Atlantic nine times and repeatedly visited the West Indies, creating the first annual subscription system to support missionaries sent out by Methodism. He financed much of these journeys and of the missionary work with his own resources and, later, with his wife’s fortune.
His leadership also had setbacks. In 1791, without consulting Asbury or the American Conference, he secretly proposed a union between the Methodists and the Protestant Episcopal Church; when the correspondence came to light years later, it shook the confidence many American leaders had placed in him.
At 66, already twice widowed, he used much of his fortune to finance one last expedition, bound for Ceylon, present day Sri Lanka. He died at sea on May 2, 1814, and was buried in the Indian Ocean, without reaching his destination.
Coke is remembered as the father of Methodist missions: the organizational impulse he gave to the work in the Caribbean multiplied into mission societies that today reach dozens of countries, a sign that a late calling, sustained with personal sacrifice, can bear fruit for generations.
