Free Methodist Church USA

Heritage

Benjamin Titus Roberts, a young minister in the Genesee Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in western New York, was expelled in 1858 after publishing criticism of pew rental — which priced the poor out of worship — and of the denomination's spiritual compromises, slavery among them. In 1860, at Pekin, New York, he and his allies organized the Free Methodist Church. The "free" was a platform: free seats for the poor, freedom for the enslaved, freedom of the Spirit in worship, and freedom from secret societies. The church became a mainstay of the Wesleyan-holiness movement, and today the great majority of its members are outside the United States.

Theological family

Wesleyan-holiness: the historic Methodist doctrines of grace with entire sanctification — a heart made perfect in love — at the center. Classification sources split the Free Methodists between the Methodist and Holiness families, and both are right; this record files it with its Methodist origin.

Who decides what

Episcopal and connectional in a light form: elected bishops, annual conferences, and appointed pastors, with substantial congregational participation; women have been ordained since the twentieth century and serve as bishops.

What a first-time visitor would find

A visitor will find worship ranging from traditional hymns to contemporary bands depending on the congregation, prayer taken seriously, and preaching that expects grace to change people; the old austerity has relaxed, the earnestness has not.

What it has always cared about

Free seats as economic justice in the sanctuary; abolition in its founding platform; entire sanctification preached and expected; higher education — Seattle Pacific University, Roberts Wesleyan, Greenville and Spring Arbor universities; and world missions that outgrew the sending church.

Its gift to the wider church

The insistence, built into its own name, that access to worship is a justice issue: no church body has said more plainly that a gospel the poor cannot afford a seat for is not Wesley's gospel. Its colleges and its global communion carry that conviction outward.

Commonly confused with

With the United Methodist Church (a separate and much larger body), The Wesleyan Church (a sister holiness denomination of similar roots), and the "free church" label in general, which describes state-church independence in Europe and something quite specific here.

Range of views inside it

Congregations range from traditional holiness chapels to contemporary church plants; positions on secondary matters vary by conference and culture across a genuinely global communion. Doctrine, including sanctification, is held in common.

Where Free Methodist Church USA churches are on the map

239 Free Methodist Church USA congregations appear on The Church Map, across 31 states.

• Michigan — 35
• Pennsylvania — 29
• New York — 26
• Washington — 19
• Indiana — 19
• California — 16
• Oregon — 13
• Ohio — 12
• Illinois — 11
• Kansas — 9

Moments this body was part of

• 1867–1894 — The holiness revival

  A renewed hunger for Wesley's "entire sanctification" — stirred for decades by Phoebe Palmer's Tuesday meetings in New York — organized itself at a camp meeting in Vineland, New Jersey in 1867. Over the next generation the holiness movement spread through and then beyond Methodism, birthing the Church of God (Anderson), the Church of the Nazarene, the Wesleyan and Free Methodist streams, and the Salvation Army's American work.