The Development of American Methodism
Methodism emerged only in the mid-18th century and therefore arrived late on the colonial scene, but its techniques produced growth as rapid and geographically widespread as that of the Baptists.
The denomination began as a renewal movement within Anglicanism led by John Wesley (1703–91), who as an Oxford student joined a prayer and Bible study group called “Methodist” because of its methodical conscientiousness and discipline. He later began open-air preaching and organizing small lay-conducted “societies” and smaller classes for prayer, study, emotional fellowship, mutual discipline, and the cultivation of personal holiness. Lay preachers coordinated the groups, traveling regular circuits and meeting in an annual conference led by Wesley. The movement spread in England and Ireland—worrying the Anglican church—and then, in the 1760s, to the colonies.
Methodism found particularly fertile environments in Maryland and Virginia, where the effects of the Great Awakening were being felt and the Anglican laity, if not clergy, provided a ready audience for revival; in the middle colonies, which lacked resisting establishments; and in urban areas, where population density promoted organization. Maryland especially became an early stronghold. New Yorkers formed a society in 1766 and built Wesley Chapel in 1768, while Philadelphia Methodists formed a class in 1768 and in 1769 purchased a church. After Wesley sent a corps of preachers to the colonies between 1769 and 1773, revivals flared in Virginia. The most notable agent was Francis Asbury (1745–1816), who arrived in 1771, established headquarters in Baltimore, helped erect two churches there, was named “superintendent of the American Colonies” in 1772, and eventually logged some 250,000 miles of circuit riding. By 1773, when colonial Methodist ministers convened their first conference in Philadelphia, they counted 1160 members in Maryland (with nearly half), Philadelphia, New York, New Jersey, and Virginia.
During the American Revolution, the departure of Methodist preachers sharing Wesley’s loyalism left Asbury and native patriot evangelists to develop the movement, and the departure of loyalist Anglican clergy left many practicing Methodists without the sacraments.
Wesley opposed attempts by unordained American Methodist preachers to administer the sacraments, but eventually approved both their ordination and the formation of an independent American church when confronted by the lack of colonial clergy, popular American suspicion of Anglicanism, and independence sentiment. The Methodist Episcopal Church, led by Asbury, was formed in Baltimore in 1784.
Old Yellow Meeting House, Inlaystown, New Jersey, built 1766.
Methodism’s emphasis on personal growth, self-discipline, and lay leadership attracted many Americans, particularly in new areas of settlement, and its facility of organization and use of circuit riders prepared it for success on the sparsely settled Western frontier. It therefore experienced explosive numerical and geographic growth. In the 1780s, Methodists began evangelizing South Carolina and New England, and pushing westward to western Pennsylvania, western North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Circuits existed in all of these places before the decade ended. Itinerant preachers in the isolated settlements of the frontier accentuated Methodism’s emphasis on enthusiastic prayer and Bible study and jettisoned Wesley’s sacramentalism—but those who swelled Methodist membership from 8,504 in 1780 to nearly 60,000 a decade later (and would soon join in much larger numbers) did not seem to mind.
