Methodist church history began as an eighteenth-century spiritual revival movement within the Church of England led by brothers John and Charles Wesley. Reaching America in the 1760s, Methodism was formally organized at the 1784 Christmas Conference in Baltimore, expanding rapidly through frontier circuit riders to become the largest Protestant body in nineteenth-century America.
Oxford roots and the evangelical revival: When was the Methodist church founded?
To understand when was the Methodist church founded and how the movement took shape, historians look back to 1729 at Oxford University. There, a small circle of earnest students led by Charles Wesley and joined by his older brother John formed a campus fellowship dedicated to methodical Bible study, regular fasting, devout prayer, and weekly communion. Fellow students mockingly dubbed them the "Holy Club" or "Methodists" because of their strict, disciplined method of spiritual life.
Both Wesley brothers were ordained Anglican clergymen who initially struggled with personal assurance of salvation. In May 1738, during an evening prayer meeting on Aldersgate Street in London, John Wesley listened to the reading of Martin Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans. Wesley famously recorded in his journal that around a quarter before nine, "I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death."
Following this transformative conversion, the Wesleys began preaching in open fields, mining camps, and public squares across Britain. Because the Anglican establishment barred them from many parish pulpits, John Wesley organized converts into local "societies," subdivided into intimate "class meetings" of ten to a dozen people who met weekly for mutual confession, pastoral accountability, and financial support. Charles Wesley gave voice to the revival by composing more than 6,000 hymns, including timeless classics like "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" and "O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing." To examine the theological legacy of the movement's founder, read our detailed profile on John Wesley and Methodism.
The 1784 Christmas Conference: Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke
Methodist immigrants carried the movement across the Atlantic in the 1760s, establishing initial societies in Maryland and New York. When the American Revolutionary War erupted in 1775, ties with the mother country were severed. Most Anglican clergymen fled to Britain, leaving hundreds of American Methodist societies without ordained pastors to administer baptism and Holy Communion.
In response to this pastoral crisis, John Wesley took an extraordinary canonical step. Convinced by church history that presbyters and bishops shared equal authority in the early church, Wesley ordained Thomas Coke as superintendent for America in 1784, sending him across the ocean to ordain preacher Francis Asbury. In December 1784, sixty young circuit riders assembled at Lovely Lane Chapel in Baltimore, Maryland, for the historic "Christmas Conference."
Over ten days of prayer and deliberation in the unheated chapel on Lovely Lane, the delegates formally established the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC—he first independent national denomination organized in the newly formed United States. Significantly, Asbury refused to accept Wesley's appointment unless the gathered circuit riders freely elected him. The preachers voted unanimously, establishing a democratic, conference-based tradition that remains foundational to American Methodism.
The conference consecrated Asbury through successive ordinations as deacon, elder, and superintendent over three days. The delegates adopted twenty-four Articles of Religion adapted by Wesley from the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles, endorsed a revised liturgical Sunday Service, and instituted the Doctrines and Discipline to regulate church governance, itinerancy, and ministerial conduct. To understand the doctrinal foundations established at this conference, consult our overview of what Methodists believe.
Circuit riders and camp meetings: Becoming America's largest denomination
Following the Christmas Conference, the history of methodism became the defining story of American frontier religion. While established liturgical denominations waited for communities to construct meetinghouses and fund educated clergy, Methodists dispatched traveling preachers known as "circuit riders."
Mounting their horses with Bibles, hymnals, and saddlebags, circuit riders traversed vast territories of hundreds of miles. They preached in log cabins, tavern common rooms, barns, and forest clearings, visiting isolated pioneer families who rarely saw an ordained minister. Chief among them was Bishop Francis Asbury, who traveled an estimated 270,000 miles on horseback over forty-five years, crossing the Allegheny Mountains more than sixty times and ordaining thousands of frontier preachers.
Methodism's rapid growth was accelerated by the Second Great Awakening and the frontier camp meeting movement. At massive gatherings like the Cane Ridge Revival in Kentucky in August 1801, thousands of pioneers gathered under brush arbors for days of fervent preaching, weeping, and singing. Methodism's Arminian theolog—reaching that God loved all people, Christ died for all humanity, and salvation was freely available to anyone who chose to believ—esonated powerfully with the democratic ethos of the young American republic.
By 1850, the Methodist Episcopal Church had grown into the largest and most influential denomination in the United States, claiming over 1.2 million members across more than 12,000 congregations. Methodist colleges, printing presses, and academies dotted every newly admitted state.
The birth of independent African Methodist churches
From its earliest days, Methodism attracted thousands of African Americans, both free and enslaved, drawn to its message of universal grace and enthusiastic worship. However, white racial prejudice soon created deep injustices within the church.
In November 1787, at St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, white ushers attempted to physically pull Black preacher Richard Allen and his colleagues from their knees during prayer after they inadvertently sat in a newly designated segregated balcony. Refusing to tolerate this humiliation, Allen and his companions walked out in unified protest. In 1794, Allen dedicated the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, and in April 1816, representatives from regional Black congregations met to establish the African Methodist Episcopal Church, electing Allen as the first consecrated Black bishop in America.
Prior to founding the church, Allen and Jones had established the Free African Society in Philadelphia in 1787, providing vital mutual aid to widows, orphans, and the sick while cultivating principled civic leadership among free Black citizens.
A similar movement in New York City, led by James Varick and Peter Williams Jr., established the African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AME Zion) Church in 1821. Later, in 1870, newly freed African Americans in the South organized the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (now the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, or CME). These independent Black Methodist bodies became foundational institutions of African American freedom, civil rights advocacy, and education, operating renowned universities like Wilberforce and Livingstone College.
The 1844 split over slavery and the 1939 reunion
While John Wesley was an outspoken opponent of human bondag—enning his fiery tract Thoughts Upon Slavery in 177—he American Methodist church gradually accommodated slaveholders as it grew in the South. Tensions erupted at the 1844 General Conference in New York City, when northern delegates demanded that Bishop James Osgood Andrew of Georgia resign his episcopal office because his wife owned enslaved domestic servants.
Southern delegates protested that the conference had no constitutional authority to discipline a bishop over property legally held under state laws. In May 1845, southern delegates met in Louisville, Kentucky, to establish the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. For nearly a century, American Methodism was divided by regional bitterness, each side maintaining separate bishops, colleges, publishing houses, and overseas mission fields.
Healing came slowly. In May 1939, after decades of patient negotiation, three bodie—he Methodist Episcopal Church, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and the Methodist Protestant Churc—et in Kansas City to form a reunited body of nearly 8 million members, named simply The Methodist Church. However, this reunion included a painful moral compromise: to appease southern delegates, the new church organized its jurisdictions along racial lines, placing all African American congregations into a segregated "Central Jurisdiction" that lasted until the late 1960s.
The 1968 merger and the United Methodist Church
On April 23, 1968, delegates gathered in Dallas, Texas, for a milestone event in modern Christian history. The Methodist Church merged with the Evangelical United Brethren Church (EUB) to create the United Methodist Church (UMC). The EUB brought its own storied history tracing back to early German-speaking revivalists: Philip William Otterbein (a German Reformed pastor) and Martin Boehm (a Mennonite preacher) who founded the United Brethren in Christ in 1800, along with Jacob Albright who organized the Evangelical Association in 1803. Sharing identical Arminian theology, circuit-riding zeal, and episcopal governance, the EUB had ministered to German-speaking pioneers across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and the Midwest for more than a century.
The 1968 merger formally abolished the racially segregated Central Jurisdiction, integrating all regional annual conferences. Adopting the iconic Cross and Flame insignia, the United Methodist Church became a dominant force in mainline Protestantism, operating extensive global mission agencies, disaster relief networks (UMCOR), and prestigious universities like Duke, Emory, and Southern Methodist University.
To examine the broad spectrum of denominations that trace their lineage to Wesley's movement, review our taxonomy of Methodist denominations in America.
The 2019-2024 disaffiliations and the Global Methodist Church
Beginning in the 1970s, the United Methodist Church experienced growing internal debate regarding the authority of Scripture and human sexuality. In 1972, the General Conference added a sentence to the Book of Discipline stating that homosexuality was "incompatible with Christian teaching," prohibiting the ordination of self-avowed practicing homosexuals and barring clergy from officiating same-sex weddings.
Over the subsequent decades, theological progressives and moderates advocated for full inclusion, leading to widespread pastoral disobedience against church law in western and northeastern annual conferences. At a Special General Conference in St. Louis in 2019, delegates voted narrowly to maintain traditional standards and passed Paragraph 2553, a temporary legal mechanism permitting local churches to disaffiliate with their church property through December 31, 2023.
Between 2019 and 2023, more than 7,600 congregation—epresenting roughly 25 percent of all United Methodist churches in the United State—oted to disaffiliate. Many of these traditionalist churches joined the newly organized Global Methodist Church (GMC), which launched on May 1, 2022. The departing congregations quickly formed regional annual conferences across the United States, Africa, and the Philippines, maintaining traditional Methodist doctrine and accountability. Subsequently, at the postponed General Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, in May 2024, remaining United Methodist delegates voted overwhelmingly to remove all restrictive language regarding sexuality from the Book of Discipline. To understand the details and aftermath of this division, read our full report on the United Methodist Church split.
Methodism today and finding a congregation
Despite recent structural realignments, the Methodist tradition remains one of the largest and most influential Christian families in the United States. Today, millions of Methodists gather weekly in United Methodist, Global Methodist, AME, AME Zion, Free Methodist, and Wesleyan churches across all fifty states. For detailed state-by-state population figures, consult our geographic study on Methodist churches by state.
Methodist worship is known for its warm congregational singing, thoughtful preaching, and an open communion table where Christ's invitation is extended to all who love Him. If you are preparing to attend a service, consult our visitor resource on what to expect at church, or locate welcoming congregations near you in our nationwide directory of Methodist churches.