Methodist

The Wesleyan revival within Anglicanism, become a connexional church with bishops or conferences.

Includes the historically Black Methodist bodies (AME, AME Zion, CME), which are Methodist in doctrine and polity and separate in origin.

The Wesleyan revival grown into America's church of the crossroads: grace offered to absolutely everyone, organization applied to absolutely everything, and a hymnal doing half the teaching.

Heritage

John and Charles Wesley's revival within the Church of England — Aldersgate, 1738; field preaching to miners and mill towns — became an American church at the Christmas Conference in Baltimore, 1784, with Francis Asbury its tireless circuit-riding bishop. Following the frontier, Methodism became for a season the largest Protestant family in the nation. Black Methodists, denied dignity in white congregations, formed their own connections: the African Methodist Episcopal Church under Richard Allen (1816), the AME Zion Church (1821), and the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (1870) — Methodist in doctrine and polity, separate in origin. The United Methodist Church (1968) and the Global Methodist Church (2022) now carry the largest stream, recently divided.

Theological family

Arminian evangelicalism: prevenient grace reaching everyone, salvation genuinely offered to all, and holiness of heart and life as grace's goal — doctrine sung in Charles Wesley's hymns as much as stated in the Articles.

Who decides what

Connexional — the family's own word: congregations bound together in conferences, most streams under bishops, with pastors appointed and moved by the conference rather than hired by the congregation. Conference votes, not congregational ones, decide doctrine and discipline.

What a first-time visitor would find

From camp-meeting warmth to settled liturgy: hymn-heavy services, an open communion table as a family signature, altar calls in the revivalist streams, and in the Black Methodist connections a preaching and musical tradition of its own depth and power.

What it has always cared about

Sanctification; the class meeting — Wesley's small groups, the ancestor of every church small-group system since; social holiness, building hospitals, colleges and reform movements wherever it went; missions; and the open table.

Its gift to the wider church

The small group as a discipleship technology the whole church now uses; Charles Wesley's hymns — "O for a Thousand Tongues," "And Can It Be" — sung far beyond Methodism; the conviction preached to the frontier that no one is beyond grace; and the Black Methodist connections' twin institutions of faith and freedom — Allen's Mother Bethel, and an AME Zion church that counted Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass among its members.

Commonly confused with

With the Wesleyan-Holiness bodies, its own children — Nazarene, Wesleyan, Free Methodist — which this taxonomy files as a separate family; "Methodist Episcopal" on old cornerstones with today's body divisions; and the AME and CME with each other by outsiders reading initials.

Range of views inside it

The UMC–GMC division over marriage and ordination is the family's live fault line, and this record describes it without scoring it; the historically Black connections govern themselves and are not parties to that division; individual congregations range from progressive to traditionalist within single conferences.

A note from the mapmakers: Which Methodist body a congregation belongs to has been changing rapidly since 2022, and our data may lag reality — assert nothing of a specific congregation's affiliation or convictions. Sentences drawn from this record hedge as "Methodist churches typically…" and yield to the congregation's own materials.

Sources: Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America (John H. Wigger, Oxford University Press) · The Black Church in the African American Experience (C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, Duke University Press) · Handbook of Denominations in the United States (Abingdon Press)

Where Methodist churches are on the map

25,985 Methodist congregations appear on The Church Map, across 52 states.

Bodies and networks in this family

Moments that formed this family

  • 1735–1741 — Moravians: the first great missionary church

    Moravian settlers arrived in Georgia in 1735 and founded Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1741 as a base for missions to Native Americans and enslaved Africans — the first sustained Protestant missionary effort in the colonies. On the crossing to Georgia, their calm in a storm unsettled a young Anglican priest named John Wesley, whose heart-warming conversion at a Moravian meeting in 1738 lit the fuse of Methodism.

    A tiny refugee church discipled the founder of another tradition entirely — the traditions have been passing gifts to each other from the beginning.

  • 1784 — Methodism organizes at the Christmas Conference

    Some sixty preachers met at Lovely Lane Chapel in Baltimore in December 1784 and organized the Methodist Episcopal Church, with Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke as its first superintendents. Asbury rode an estimated quarter-million miles on horseback; within two generations Methodism was the largest movement in America.

  • 1787–1816 — Richard Allen and the birth of the AME Church

    Richard Allen, a formerly enslaved Methodist preacher, walked out of St. George's Church in Philadelphia around 1787 after Black worshipers were pulled from their knees during prayer, founded Bethel Church in 1794, and in 1816 organized the African Methodist Episcopal Church — the first Black denomination in America — becoming its first bishop. The AME Church kept Methodist doctrine whole; what it refused was humiliation.

    The AME Church was born from the white church's failure, yet chose to remain unmistakably Methodist — a severed branch that kept the family's faith better than the family did.

  • 1796–1821 — The AME Zion Church

    Black Methodists in New York, facing the same indignities Richard Allen's people faced in Philadelphia, formed their own congregation in 1796 and organized the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in 1821. It became known as the freedom church: Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth all belonged to it.

    The church that slavery's defenders dismissed became the spiritual home of the people who ended slavery.

  • 1801 — Cane Ridge: the frontier at communion together

    Perhaps twenty thousand people — in a Kentucky whose largest town held two thousand — gathered for a week-long communion at Cane Ridge, with Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist preachers exhorting from stumps and wagons at once. The camp meeting became the engine of frontier Christianity.

    The greatest revival of the frontier era was a communion service that no single denomination owned.

  • 1816 — The American Bible Society

    Delegates from dozens of local Bible societies — Presbyterian, Episcopal, Reformed, Baptist, Methodist, Quaker — founded the American Bible Society in New York in 1816 with a single object: Scripture for everyone, without doctrinal note or comment. It became one of the longest-running cooperative ventures in American church history.

    The traditions found they could not share a pulpit, but they could share a Book — and they have, for two centuries.

  • 1824 — The American Sunday School Union

    Laymen from a half-dozen denominations founded the American Sunday School Union at Philadelphia in 1824, and its 1830 "Mississippi Valley Enterprise" resolved to plant a Sunday school in every western settlement — thousands of them, many becoming congregations of whatever denomination arrived next. For decades it was the largest publisher of children's literature in America.

    Before most denominations could reach the frontier, an interdenominational society taught its children to read Scripture — and handed the resulting congregations to whoever came.

  • 1831–1865 — The Underground Railroad runs through the churches

    The network that moved fugitives from slavery to freedom ran substantially through congregations: Quaker meetings and homes, AME and AME Zion churches (Harriet Tubman's church home), free Black Baptist congregations, and antislavery Congregational and Presbyterian churches. The Reformed Presbyterians (Covenanters) had barred slaveholders from communion since 1800.

    Decades before the denominations could agree about slavery in their assemblies, believers across a dozen traditions were already agreeing at midnight, at the river crossings.

  • 1844–1845 — Methodism breaks over slavery

    The Methodist Episcopal Church — then the largest church in America — split at its 1844 General Conference over a slaveholding bishop, James O. Andrew. The southern conferences organized the Methodist Episcopal Church, South the next year. The largest Protestant family in the country had divided over slavery a decade and a half before the nation did, and observers at the time read it as an omen of the war to come.

    The wound stood open for 95 years — and it did close: the northern and southern churches reunited in 1939, and their heirs are one church today.

  • 1857–1858 — The Prayer Meeting Revival: a noon hour in a borrowed room

    On 23 September 1857 a lay missionary named Jeremiah Lanphier opened a noon prayer meeting on Fulton Street in New York. Six men came. Within six months daily prayer meetings filled halls, theatres and counting houses in cities across the North and South, and the press carried the tallies city by city. Estimates of those converted run from five hundred thousand to a million — in a nation of thirty million.

    It was led by laypeople, not clergy, and it belonged to no denomination: merchants and clerks kept the hour in rented rooms, and the churches received the result.

  • 1865–1900 — After emancipation: the Black church builds

    In the decades after emancipation, freedpeople built the independent Black church at astonishing speed — Baptist congregations by the thousands, the AME and AME Zion churches sweeping south, schools and colleges and mutual-aid societies rising alongside every sanctuary. The Black church became, as its historians put it, the one institution African Americans wholly owned.

    Out of the nation's deepest wound came institutions of extraordinary endurance — churches that would later supply the moral leadership the whole country needed.

  • 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.

  • 1870 — The CME Church: freedpeople claim their own house

    Formerly enslaved Methodists who had remained within the southern church organized their own denomination at Jackson, Tennessee in 1870 — the Colored (since 1954, Christian) Methodist Episcopal Church — negotiating the transfer of church buildings and ordaining their own bishops, William H. Miles and Richard H. Vanderhorst.

  • 1875–1899 — D. L. Moody and citywide revivalism

    Dwight L. Moody — a shoe salesman turned Congregationalist evangelist — ran citywide campaigns organized jointly by the churches of each city, from Brooklyn to Boston to London. His Northfield conferences seeded the Student Volunteer Movement, and the Chicago institute bearing his name trained workers for every evangelical denomination.

    Moody made the citywide, all-churches-together campaign the standard form of American mass evangelism — the template Billy Graham inherited.

  • 1886–1920 — The Student Volunteer Movement

    At D. L. Moody's 1886 summer conference at Mount Hermon, one hundred students pledged themselves to foreign missions, and the Student Volunteer Movement that grew from that pledge sent over twenty thousand American students overseas under the watchword "the evangelization of the world in this generation." Nearly every denomination's mission board was fed by it.

    For a generation, the shared missionary cause did what nothing else could: it put Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists and Episcopalians on the same boats, toward the same work.

  • 1908 — The Federal Council of Churches

    Thirty-three denominations — Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Reformed, and the Black Methodist and Baptist churches among them — formed the Federal Council of Churches in Philadelphia in 1908, adopting a Social Creed on labor conditions in its first act. It was the first standing body through which American denominations spoke together.

    For the first time since the colonies, the divided churches built themselves a common table — imperfect, argumentative, and permanent.

  • 1916–1970 — The Great Migration replants the Black church

    Six million African Americans moved from the rural South to northern and western cities, and the Black church moved with them — historic congregations swelled, storefront churches by the thousands opened, COGIC became a national church, and in Chicago Thomas A. Dorsey fused blues and sacred song into gospel music, which reshaped the worship of the whole American church.

    Gospel music — born in the migrating Black church — may be the most widely shared gift any American tradition has given the others.

  • 1939 — Methodism reunites — with a compromise it would repent of

    After 95 years apart, the northern and southern Methodist churches and the Methodist Protestants reunited at Kansas City in 1939 into one Methodist Church of nearly eight million members. The price of southern agreement was the Central Jurisdiction — a separate, segregated structure for Black Methodists — which the church lived with, protested, and finally abolished in the 1968 merger.

    The 1939 reunion tells both truths at once: reunion is possible after generations, and a reunion purchased by excluding someone carries its own wound. The church confessed and undid it — 29 years later.

  • 1946 — Church World Service and the relief table

    Seventeen denominations pooled their postwar relief work into Church World Service in 1946 — "help where help is needed, without regard to creed" — and the CROP hunger walks that followed put Methodists, Presbyterians, Catholics and Mennonites on the same country roads carrying the same signs.

  • 1946 — The Evangelical United Brethren

    Two German-speaking American denominations of Wesleyan conviction — the Evangelical Church and the Church of the United Brethren in Christ — united at Johnstown, Pennsylvania in November 1946. Both had begun among Pennsylvania Germans around 1800, preaching a Methodist message in a language Methodism did not use. The union set up the larger one twenty-two years later.

    Two bodies that existed largely because of the language their founders preached in stopped needing to be separate.

  • 1950 — The National Council of Churches

    Twenty-nine denominations — mainline Protestant, Orthodox, and the historic Black churches — merged the Federal Council and seven other cooperative agencies into the National Council of Churches at Cleveland in 1950. Its education division produced the Revised Standard Version and later the NRSV, the Bibles of half of American Protestantism.

  • 1955–1968 — The civil rights movement leads from the pulpit

    The Montgomery bus boycott was organized in Holt Street Baptist Church; the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was founded by pastors in 1957; and the movement's language — beloved community, redemptive suffering — was sermon language carried into the streets. The cost was borne in church buildings too, most terribly the four girls killed in the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist in Birmingham in 1963. In 1961, ministers committed to the movement, King among them, formed the Progressive National Baptist Convention after the National Baptist Convention's leadership resisted direct action.

    King lamented that eleven o'clock Sunday morning remained the most segregated hour in America — an indictment the church has been answering, unevenly, ever since. The movement itself was the Black church calling the whole American church back to its own gospel.

  • 1965–1978 — A Bible in common: the NIV

    Begun by initiative of the Christian Reformed Church and the National Association of Evangelicals, the Committee on Bible Translation drew scholars from dozens of denominations across the English-speaking world; the New International Version they produced in 1978 became the best-selling modern English Bible, read each Sunday in Baptist, Pentecostal, Presbyterian and non-denominational pulpits alike.

    Traditions that share no bishop and no assembly now share sentences — the same words, memorized across every border in this taxonomy.

  • 1968 — The United Methodist Church

    The Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren united at Dallas on 23 April 1968 to form the United Methodist Church — around eleven million members, the largest Protestant merger in American history. The same union finally dissolved the Central Jurisdiction, the segregated structure the 1939 reunion had accepted as its price.

    The largest Protestant union the country has seen, and the act that undid the compromise the previous Methodist reunion had made over race.

  • 1970 — Asbury 1970: the chapel service that did not end

    A required chapel service at Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky on 3 February 1970 gave way to confession and testimony and simply continued — 185 hours without a break. Students carried it outward to something like a hundred and thirty campuses and churches that spring. It is the direct precedent for what happened in the same chapel in 2023, and the reason anybody recognised what they were looking at.

    Nobody scheduled it, nobody owned it, and its spread was students going to other people's campuses at their invitation.

  • 1971 — The common songbook

    From Maranatha! Music in the Jesus Movement, through the hymns of Keith and Kristyn Getty, to the catalogs of Hillsong, Bethel and Elevation: American congregations of nearly every tradition now draw Sunday music from one shared, living repertoire. A Baptist church, a Catholic youth group, a Pentecostal storefront and a Methodist chapel can all sing the same three songs in the same week without anyone planning it.

    The traditions never merged their pulpits — but they have very nearly merged their singing, and singing is how most people carry their faith through the week.

  • 1973 — Key 73: a continent called to Christ together

    More than 140 denominations and church bodies — evangelical, mainline, and dozens of Catholic dioceses — undertook simultaneous evangelism across North America in 1973 under the theme "Calling Our Continent to Christ." It was the broadest formal evangelistic cooperation in American history, and Catholic participation in a joint evangelistic year was without precedent.

    For one year, nearly the whole width of this taxonomy knocked on doors at the same time, on purpose.

  • 1976 — Habitat for Humanity

    Millard Fuller founded Habitat for Humanity in 1976 out of Koinonia Farm — Clarence Jordan's interracial Christian community in south Georgia, planted by a white Baptist preacher in 1942 at real personal cost. "The theology of the hammer": people who disagree about nearly everything can drive nails side by side.

    Fuller's phrase says the whole thing: whatever divides the traditions, the hammer does not ask.

  • 1990–1997 — Promise Keepers fills the stadiums

    Football coach Bill McCartney's men's movement filled stadiums through the 1990s — over a million men at "Stand in the Gap" on the National Mall in 1997 — drawing Baptists, Pentecostals, Catholics and mainliners to the same field, with racial reconciliation preached as a core promise rather than a side theme.

    For one decade, the most visible gatherings of American Christian men were deliberately cross-denominational and deliberately cross-racial.

  • 1997–2009 — The healing documents

    On Reformation Day 1999 at Augsburg, the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, declaring that the sixteenth century's church-dividing condemnations on justification no longer apply — the World Methodist Council joined in 2006, and Reformed and Anglican bodies have since associated themselves with it. In the same years American churches signed full-communion agreements in a lattice: ELCA with the Presbyterians, Reformed and UCC (1997), with the Moravians (1999), with the Episcopal Church (2001), and with the United Methodists (2009).

    The argument that broke Western Christianity in 1517 was declared, by its own heirs, no longer church-dividing. Unity here arrived not as merger but as mutual recognition — churches remaining themselves and calling each other true.

  • 2019–2023 — The Methodist parting of 2022

    The United Methodist Church's long dispute over sexuality ended in structured separation: about a quarter of its US congregations — more than 7,600 — disaffiliated between 2019 and 2023, many joining the Global Methodist Church launched in May 2022. Both bodies carry the Wesleyan inheritance forward; the parting was grievous and, unusually, largely orderly, with property questions settled by negotiated process rather than by decades of litigation.

    The newest wound in the story. It is recorded here the way the 1844 split is: honestly, and with the long record showing that Methodist wounds have closed before.

  • 2023 — The Asbury outpouring

    A routine chapel service at Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky on February 8, 2023 simply did not end: students kept praying and singing for sixteen days, tens of thousands drove in from every state and stream — Baptist deacons, Catholic students, Pentecostal grandmothers in the same pews — and the university kept the platform deliberately low: no celebrity preachers, no branding, phones discouraged.

    The most-watched American revival in a generation belonged to no denomination, promoted no one, and was handed off — on purpose — before anyone could own it.

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