How do you become known as the mother of a world-changing religious movement without ever preaching a sermon, founding a church, or publishing a single book in your lifetime? Susanna Wesley managed exactly that, quietly engineering the discipline and structure that her sons John and Charles would scale into a global faith.

This episode tells the story of a fiercely intellectual woman who survived staggering hardship and exerted absolute mastery over the one domain she could control: the minds of her children. From her radical homeschool curriculum to the packed services she led from her parlor, Susanna emerges as a theologian and teacher in her own right, the ultimate behind-the-scenes producer of a movement.

• Born the youngest of 25 children, she independently left her father’s dissenting congregation for the Church of England at just 12 years old
• She bore 19 children, lost nine as infants, and endured a husband jailed twice for debt who once abandoned the family for over a year
• Her ironclad teaching system: no lessons before age five, then a six-hour day to learn the entire alphabet, with daughters taught Latin and Greek alongside the boys
• The nightly one-on-one spiritual discourse rotation with each child that her sons later copied as Methodist class meetings
• How she drew over 200 townspeople to Sunday services in her living room while the official preacher’s congregation dwindled