Jul
25
2018
After 1800 the Methodist Episcopal Church continued to grow rapidly and expanded westward. It was organized around circuits of local churches to which travelling pastors were assigned. The pastors of a given area would meet in an annual conference each year. Soon the area from which the pastors met was also known as an Annual Conference. Every four years each Annual conference would send delegates to a General Conference which would make decisions about church law and organization (published as the Book of Discipline). This organizational structure was formalized by the 1808 General Conference.
But throughout the century issues of slavery and inclusion of African Americans continued to cause contention. In 1800 the General Conference formalized the permissibility of ordaining freed slaves for ministry. This was never published in the discipline because of the objection of delegates from slave-holding areas. A similar situation occurred in an 1808 decision to condemn slavery.
In 1803 an organization of German speaking pastors was formed by Jacob Albright. Albright had been a licensed ME preacher for 9 years, but felt that the German speakers needed a more specialized leadership. Informally known as “Albright’s People” This group would eventually form the Evangelical Association. Again it was organized along the same lines as the ME Church, but was exclusively made up of German speaking congregations.
In 1817 the first “foreign” missionary work was begun when a pastor is appointed to work in Texas (which was still a part of Mexico). In 1820 the ME Church formally established a “ Missionary Society” to support work among the Wyandot Indians in Ohio. This was a shock to many Methodists, since all preachers had thought of themselves as missionaries since they were often reaching out to those who had no religious background.
In 1821 friction between African Methodist Episcopal (AME) churches in New York and Philadelphia led to the formation of a new denomination, the AME Zion Church. In the ME church a reform movement had been growing mainly trying to limit the power of bishops. There are disciplinary measures taken against many of the preachers who took part in any of the meetings to support such change. So in 1830 5,000 of the reformers officially formed the Methodist Protestant Church. Instead of bishops, there were “Presidents” who made appointments. These were elected for a four year term by their Annual Conference.
In 1840 the issue of inclusion of African Americans comes to a head when Silas Comfort, a presiding elder in Missouri, allowed a black man to offer testimony publically, which was against state law. Though his actions were declared right, the church sided with the Southerners who demanded that this be prohibited in the future. By 1844 those who favored abolition withdrew from the ME Church and formed the Wesleyan Methodist Connection, which began with 15,600 members. In 1845 the ME church was split again when the 15 southern Annual Conferences withdrew and formed the ME Church, South. The primarily black southern churches were spun off into the Colored ME Church. Thus in just over 50 years there were 10 Methodist or Methodist inspired denominations in the US.
