It is customary and certainly appropriate to consider our founders, John and Charles Wesley, as a team. Surely the two of them worked together, utilizing their separate, considerable talents to build the infrastructure for Methodism around the world. These two tireless evangelists crisscrossed England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and the Atlantic to proclaim the gospel as they understood it. The effectiveness of their teamwork cannot be denied.
    However, it would be a mistake to think these two brothers did not have their disagreements and open arguments. Let’s look at a couple of those disagreements.  In his WORKS, John readily tells the story of their disagreements over authority and money.  
Charles Wesley seemed at times to tire of John's authoritarian manner in the direction of the societies. In the following letter to Charles, John deals with two issues about which it seems the younger brother had complained.
    “In what respect do you judge it needful to ‘break my power,’ and ‘to reduce my authority within due bounds’?  I am quite ready to part with the whole or any part of it. It is no pleasure to me, nor ever was.”
    Then John Wesley turned his attention to the more delicate issue of money. Charles earned 100 pounds a year from their joint publications income, and another 50 pounds as an allowance for clergy services. John writes to Charles: “There is another tender point which I would just touch on. The quarterly contribution of the classes (sometimes more than two hundred a year) is to keep the preachers, and to defray all the expenses of the house. But for this it did never yet suffice. For you, therefore (who have an hundred and fifty pounds a year, to maintain only two persons) to take any part of this, seems to me utterly unreasonable. I could not do it, if it were my own case — I should account it robbery … [from the poor]. I have often wondered how either your conscience or your sense of honour could bear it, especially as you know I am almost continually distressed for money.”
    Brotherly love?  Yes, for sure, they did love each other and worked together as a magnificent team. But like all brothers, they had their differences.