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- For individual churches named Methodist Episcopal Church, see Methodist Episcopal Church (disambiguation)
The Methodist Episcopal Church, sometimes referred to as the M.E. Church, was a development of the first expression of Methodism in the United States. It officially began at the Baltimore Christmas Conference in 1784, with Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke as the first bishops. Through a series of divisions and mergers, the M.E. Church became the major component of the present United Methodist Church.
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Origins
Circuit riders, many of whom were laymen, traveled by horseback to preach the gospel and establish churches until there was scarcely any crossroad community in the United States without a Methodist presence.
The earliest forms of Methodism were not originally referred to as a "connexion" because members were expected to seek the sacraments in the Church of England or Anglican Church. By the 1770s, however, they had their own chapels. In addition to salaried circuit riders (who were paid just over one-quarter what salaried Congregationalist ministers earned at the time), there were also unsalaried local ministers who held full-time jobs outside the church, class leaders who conducted weekly small groups where members were mutually accountable for their practice of Christian piety, and stewards who often undertook administrative duties.
The earliest Episcopal Methodists in North America were often drawn from the middle-class trades, women were more numerous among members than men, and adherents outnumbered official members by as many as five-to-one. Adherents, unlike members, were not publicly accountable for their Christian life and therefore did not usually attend weekly class meetings. Meetings and services were often characterized by extremely emotional and demonstrative styles of worship that were often condemned by contemporary Congregationalists. It was also very common for exhortations — testamonials and personal conversion narratives distinguishable from sermons because exhorters did not "take a text" from the Bible — to be publicly delivered by both women and slaves. Some of the earliest class leaders were also women.
Divisions and mergers
The church split over the question of slavery in 1844 with the Methodist Episcopal Church, South being formed in southern states. Former slave Henry Bibb was particularly strident in his confrontations of churchmen who served as slave masters through letters he sent to Episcopal Methodist church members. Bibb called on them to confront their pasts and account for their dual roles as slave owner and religious persons. Several of Bibb's letters appear in John W. Blassingame's volume, "Slave Testimony," (LSU Press).
In the late 1840s, separate Conferences were formed for German-speaking members of the Methodist Episcopal Church who were not members of the Evangelical United Brethren (EUB). Among these was the St. Louis German Conference, which in 1925 was assimilated into the surrounding English-speaking conferences, including the Illinois Conference.
In 1895, during the 19th century Holiness movement, Methodist Episcopal minister Phineas F. Bresee founded the Church of the Nazarene in Los Angeles with the help of Joseph Pomeroy Widney. The Church of the Nazarene separated over a perceived need to minister further to the urban poor, the origins of its Nazarene name. Several other churches, roughly 15 holiness denominations that had also split from the Methodist Episcopal Church, joined the Church of the Nazarene in 1907 and 1908, and it became international soon thereafter. The new Church of the Nazarene retained the Methodist Episcopal tradition of education and now operates 56 educational institutions around the world, including 8 liberal arts colleges in the United States, each tied to an "educational region". Ironically, around the time of the first General Assembly, the Nazarene Church would claim to be Congregational, similar to the Methodist Protestant Church, but has retained much of its Episcopal character to this day.
In 1939, the Methodist Protestant Church united with the northern and southern branches of the Methodist Episcopal Church to form The Methodist Church.
In 1968 the Methodist Church united with the Evangelical United Brethren (EUB) church, created by German-speaking Methodists, to form the United Methodist Church.
There are many offshoots of the original Methodist Episcopal Church in the US. For more detail see: Methodism.
See also
External links
- Board of Child Care of The United Methodist Church (previously known as Kelso Home)
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 30 October 2008, at 16:15.
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