Denominational History

When John Wesley was a student at Oxford in 1729, he and his brother Charles, along with George Whitfield, formed “The Holy Club” for the purpose of studying scripture. They were so methodical in their studies that other students mocked them by calling them “Methodists.”

Wesley became a devoted priest in the Anglican Church, but always felt the church needed reform. It was in 1738, while at an Armenian worship meeting, that Wesley felt his heart “strangely warmed” and suddenly felt he understood a personal relationship with Christ. He later identified this as the moment the Methodist movement was born.

Wesley began to set up Methodist Class meetings in London, in Bristol, and eventually throughout England and into Scotland and Ireland. These meetings were meant to supplement Sunday worship, and were connected by preachers who rode a circuit, keeping the Methodist Societies “in connextion.” In time Wesley would come to accept lay preachers as important leaders of the movement.

In 1761, Robert Strawbridge emigrated from Ireland to America – to the Sam’s Creek area of western Maryland. He had become a devoted practitioner of Wesleyan Methodism, even though he had not met, nor had he been appointed by, John Wesley. He began to set up Wesleyan Class meetings – the first in the new world. The first class meeting group met in his home, but others soon followed in neighbors’ homes, and then on the eastern shore of Maryland, in Virginia, and Delaware.

In 1771, Francis Asbury (another lay preacher) responded to Wesley’s call to go to America to preach to the Methodists there. As the American colonies were moving closer to war with England, ministers of the Church of England had begun to leave and there was a great need for preachers. Asbury landed in Philadelphia and began to preach a circuit. He considered it his mission from Wesley to organize the American Methodists into a more governed movement.

In 1772, Asbury and Strawbridge were assigned to the Baltimore circuit and became the appointed first pastors of the Lovely Lane Chapel and Baltimore City Station.

Philip Embry was another of Wesley’s missionaries appointed to establish the movement in America. Settling in New York, he (at the urging of Barbara Heck) formed a Methodist society in 1766, which would become the John Street Congregation – today the oldest continuously worshiping Methodist congregation in America.

In 1767, Captain Thomas Webb, a veteran of the French and Indian War, organized a Methodist Society in Philadelphia. Two years later, the Society bought St. George’s Church – which today still stands as the oldest house of Methodist worship in continuous use in America. The church had been built in 1763 as a Dutch Reformed Church, but was auctioned when the church was unable to borrow enough money to complete the structure. On November 1, 1770, the first Watch Night service in America was held in St. George’s, and a year later, Francis Asbury preached his first American sermon at St. George’s. In 1773, 1774, and 1775, St. George’s hosted the first three conferences of Methodist preachers in America.