Methodist Protestant Church

Heritage

In the 1820s, reform-minded members of the Methodist Episcopal Church — the "mutual rights" movement — pressed for lay representation in church government and against the powers of the episcopacy; expelled or departing, they organized the Methodist Protestant Church in Baltimore in 1830, with no bishops and with laymen seated alongside ministers in its conferences. For a century it was the third major branch of episcopal-lineage Methodism, and in 1939 it joined the Northern and Southern churches to form The Methodist Church — bringing lay representation with it into the united body. Congregations that declined the reunion, concentrated in Mississippi and nearby states, continued the Methodist Protestant Church, which persists today as a small conservative connection.

Theological family

Wesleyan-Arminian doctrine identical to the parent church — the 1830 quarrel was about government, not the gospel — held today in a conservative, revival-shaped Southern key.

Who decides what

Conference-governed without bishops, its founding principle: annual and general conferences where laity and clergy sit with equal voice, presidents elected rather than bishops consecrated, and congregations close to the center of gravity.

What a first-time visitor would find

A visitor will find plainspoken Southern Methodist worship — hymns, prayer, and direct preaching for conversion and holy living — in mostly small congregations where everyone will know a guest has come.

What it has always cared about

Lay rights as a spiritual principle a century before it was common; the dignity of the small conference; and continuity — a body that has now carried the Methodist Protestant name far longer as a remnant than the original carried it before the reunion.

Its gift to the wider church

Its founding cause won: lay representation, the reform it was expelled for advocating, became standard equipment in the reunited Methodism of 1939 and remains so in the United Methodist Church today. Few protest movements can point to so complete an adoption of their platform by the body that once expelled them.

Commonly confused with

With the historical Methodist Protestant Church of 1830–1939, which mostly lives on inside the United Methodist Church — this continuing body is its unmerged remainder; also with the Congregational Methodist and Southern Methodist churches, fellow small Southern connections of different origins.

Range of views inside it

A small connection with modest internal range — congregations differ in style and size more than in conviction; the published record is thin and this record stays within it.

Where Methodist Protestant Church churches are on the map

1 Methodist Protestant Church congregations appear on The Church Map, across 1 states.

• Mississippi — 1