In Virginia and North Carolina, 1794

Methodism was not a denomination but only a revival movement in the Church of England until the end of the Revolutionary War. In 1771, John Wesley sent Francis Asbury from England. He became the most important factor in winning converts, enlisting workers, setting up the system of circuits and itinerant preachers, and organizing the church. By 1784, about 15,000 members were enrolled in Methodist societies 42 in Virginia and the adjacent states. But these societies were not churches. They had no ordained ministers and therefore could not have the sacraments. Asbury himself was still a lay preacher. The Virginia Methodist preachers voted to break away from the Anglican Church, but Asbury, backed by Wesley, resisted. The end of the war and the independence of the American colonies changed the situation. Wesley sent over, by the hand of Dr. Coke, a letter which has become a famous document. Part of it has been quoted in another connection. In conclusion Wesley wrote:

As our American brethren are now totally disentangled from the state and from the English hierarchy, we dare not entangle them again either with the one or the other. They are now at full liberty simply to follow the Scriptures and the primitive church. And we judge it best that they should stand fast in that liberty with which God has so strangely made them free.

(It seemed strange to Wesley that God should wish the American colonies to be free from Great Britain, an outcome to which he himself had been bitterly opposed.)

Wesley’s letter was read to a conference which met on Christmas Eve, 1784, at Baltimore. The conference declared the independence of Methodism, adopted the name “The Methodist Episcopal Church,” and ordained Asbury as deacon, elder, and superintendent. James O’Kelly and twelve others were ordained as elders. Simultaneously with counseling the American brethren to follow the primitive church and stand fast in their liberty, Wesley had appointed Asbury and Coke to be “superintendents” of American Methodism. Coke soon returned to England, and 43 Asbury changed his own title to that of “bishop” and assumed such powers as no Anglican bishop or Methodist superintendent in England ever had. For one thing, Asbury assigned every preacher to his field, every presiding elder to his district, and from his assignments there was no appeal.

James O’Kelly had become a Methodist lay preacher in 1775, when he was about forty years old. He had been one of “Asbury’s Ironsides,” and had been the leader of those who urged an earlier separation from the Anglican Church. He had also led the futile protest against Asbury’s assumption of the title of “bishop.” Asbury had made him a presiding elder, but he continued to be the head and front of the resistance to the bishop’s autocracy. When a demand for the “right of appeal” was voted down by a general conference in 1792, O’Kelly and a number of other preachers withdrew. A year later they organized the “Republican Methodist Church,” with about thirty ministers and 1,000 members. This stage of the independent movement lasted only seven months.

On August 4, 1794, the Republican Methodists met in conference at Old Lebanon Church, in Surry County, Virginia, and adopted as their name “The Christian Church.” This name was suggested by Rice Haggard, formerly a Methodist lay preacher and one of O’Kelly’s partners in protest from the beginning. The members of the conference resolved, further, to take the Bible as their only creed. They had discovered, as one of them put it, that “the primitive church government, which came down from heaven, was a republic, though ‘Christian Church’ is its name.” All preachers were to be on an equal footing. Ministers and laymen were to have liberty of private judgment. Conferences were to be merely advisory, and each congregation 44 should “call its own pastor and enjoy the greatest possible freedom.” It is to be noted that this secession from the Methodist Church involved no dissent from Methodist doctrine. It grew solely out of dissatisfaction with that church’s system of government. The type of religious thought and preaching in the separated group remained substantially Methodist.

The new movement started with a staff of experienced and zealous ministers, under whose influence a considerable number of Methodist churches now became “Christian.” The Methodist Church in Virginia and North Carolina suffered a net loss of 3,670, in spite of its vigorous evangelism, during the first year of the “Christian” church. Fifteen years later it was estimated that the Christian Church had 20,000 members “in the southern and western states.” This doubtless includes Kentucky and Tennessee.