Methodist Episcopal Church
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The Methodist Episcopal Church, sometimes referred to as the M.E. Church, officially began at the Baltimore Christmas Conference in 1784. Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke were the first bishops.
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 originally referred to not 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.
The church split over the question of slavery in 1844 with the Methodist Episcopal Church, South being formed in southern states. Slave Henry Bibb was particularly virulent 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 1939 the northern and southern branches, together with the Methodist Protestant Church, united 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.
