Methodist Episcopal Church

The Methodist Episcopal Church was the first major Methodist denomination in the United States, organized in 1784 under the leadership of John Wesley and Francis Asbury.

Christmas Conference: The 1784 Baltimore gathering that organized American Methodists as an independent church and ordained its first elders. Delegates at this conference established the denomination and elected its first bishops.
Circuit rider: An itinerant Protestant preacher who travels a designated route to serve dispersed congregations. Circuit riders carried the church’s preaching and pastoral care beyond settled towns.
Second Great Awakening: A Protestant revival movement that spread through the United States from the late eighteenth into the mid-nineteenth century. Methodist itinerant preaching helped carry revival religion into frontier communities.
Wesleyan Methodist Church: A Methodist denomination formed in the United States in 1843 by antislavery members who opposed slavery and episcopal governance. Its abolitionist founders left before the larger 1844 division over slavery.
John Wesley: An English Anglican priest whose preaching and organizational work launched the Methodist movement. Wesley authorized the American church’s organization and supplied its foundational doctrines and liturgy.
Episcopal polity: A form of church governance in which bishops exercise oversight over clergy and congregations. Bishops appointed ministers and supervised the denomination’s expanding network of conferences.
United Methodist Church: A Protestant denomination formed in 1968 through the union of the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren Church. It inherited part of the Methodist Episcopal Church’s institutional lineage after several mergers.
African Methodist Episcopal Church: An independent Black Methodist denomination founded in Philadelphia in 1816 under the leadership of Richard Allen. Its formation followed Black Methodists’ exclusion and unequal treatment within white-led congregations.
Francis Asbury: An English-born Methodist preacher who became a leading organizer and bishop of American Methodism. Asbury became the church’s most influential early bishop and expanded its circuits across the new nation.
Annual conference: A regional governing assembly of Methodist clergy and, in some periods, lay representatives. Annual conferences organized local work and connected circuits to the denomination’s central leadership.

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Phoebe PalmerRelated: Palmer worked within this denomination while pressing against limits on women’s public ministry.