Portal

Photo at right of the three figures over the main entrance.

At the portal, or main entrance, seven stone statues surround the oak doors. Above is John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. To the left are three great Christian reformers: Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican friar; Martin Luther, father of the Protestant Reformation; and John Wycliffe, thought to be the first to translate the Bible from Latin into English. To the right are three “great men of the American South”: Thomas Jefferson, Robert E. Lee, and Sydney Lanier, a Southern poet who was popular at the time the Chapel was built.

Above the portal are three more stone figures, meant to portray leaders of American Methodism in Wesley’s day: Thomas Coke, a Methodist bishop and missionary; Francis Asbury, general superintendent of Methodism in the Colonies; and George Whitefield, an evangelist and missionary. However, in a case of mistaken identify, the image on the left is not the 18th-century clergyman Thomas Coke, but the 17th-century English Lord Chief Justice Edward Coke.

You can learn more these parts of the Chapel by clicking on the corresponding image: