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American Methodism expanded dramatically in the 1780s, built on the consolidation Asbury brought to the movement after the war. Membership rose from 8,500 in 1780 to 57,600 in 1790 and the number of preaching circuits increased from twenty-one to ninety-eight. To provide leadership and the sacraments for American Methodism, John Wesley began ordaining preachers in 1784. He ordained Thomas Coke a superintendent for America, much to the chagrin of Charles Wesley. Coke then ordained Asbury at the so-called Christmas conference in December 1784, where the American preachers voted to create the independent Methodist Episcopal Church in America. The Christmas conference also voted to expand the rules against Methodists holding slaves, though these rules were rolled back six months later. The church also sent unsuccessful antislavery petitions to the Virginia Assembly. Coke and Asbury meanwhile began the process of constructing Cokesbury College in Abingdon, Maryland.

After the Civil War, population growth, industrialization, and urbanization significantly affected evangelical congregations. As many established congregations decided to move away from their original downtown locations and build churches in the new suburbs, church mission, location, and architectural style became intertwined. The trend toward medievalism and the widespread adoption of the Richardsonian Romanesque architectural style underscored the domestic or member‐focused internal mission of congregations while at the same time indicating their perception of the risky nature of outreach and evangelizing missions in heterogeneous urban neighborhoods. Resembling armories, these buildings articulated middle‐class ambivalence toward urban life, at once safely sheltering members yet also providing a redoubt from whence forays into the broader community could be launched. This chapter uses a case study approach to investigate congregations and their church buildings, and includes Lovely Lane Church in Baltimore, designed by architect Stanford White, and Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church in Denver, designed by Robert S. Roeschlaub among several buildings examined.

This chapter examines how Kansas became a bastion of Protestant Republican conservatism. The 1850s saw the first alliances between Republicans and Methodists in Kansas. The relationship of religion to politics that emerged in those years continued through the end of the nineteenth century—and shaped much of what happened in the twentieth century. The relationships between churches and public affairs in Kansas were complicated because Kansans were divided about the state being free or having slavery. Nearly all these complications were evident as Kansas moved toward statehood. The chapter first considers Abraham Lincoln's visit to the Kansas Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church in Atchison during his presidential campaign in 1859 before discussing the role of the churches in establishing civic order in the region's towns and farming communities. It also explores public religion, how abolition and temperance brought church leaders and politics together, and church expansion in Kansas.

Henry McNeal Turner and Ida B. Wells-Barnett were pioneers of the black social gospel, both as militant anti-lynching activists and within the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Turner paved the way for new abolition movements and organizations that he did not join, and Wells-Barnett had embattled relationships with them.

When Reconstruction brought legal recognition of black citizenship and civil and political rights, causing stronger reactions from white southerners, Black and white Christians articulated divergent concepts of Christian citizenship. Black citizens argued that Christian citizenship united their religious and political identity behind their claims to equal civil and political rights. Their independent churches supported Republican politicians, and Black clergy argued that religious and civic duty demanded political engagement. At the same time, white southerners reimagined Christian citizenship as a white-run paternalism, rooted in proslavery ideals, that promised an apolitical path to godly social order. The creation of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church attempted to bring these distinct models of black and white Christian citizenship together in a tenuous partnership.

This chapter explores the diverging conceptions of holy living in Simpson and Roberts in depth. The chapter argues that Simpson was most concerned with growing and expanding the Methodist Episcopal Church, often compromising on what had been core commitments of Methodism in the hope of gaining a broader audience and expanding the institution. Roberts, on the other hand, believed that these same compromises were leading to a sacrifice of Methodism’s mission to “spread scriptural holiness.” The chapter outlines disagreements about how holiness should be expressed in the lives of Methodists, focusing in particular on differences in church buildings, dress and personal wealth, secret societies, and slavery. The chapter concludes by discussing the different visions for the future of American Methodism that Simpson and Roberts had, as a result of these different understandings of the importance of holiness and how it should be expressed in the lives of Methodists.

This chapter examines how developments reshaping New York in the 1840s and 1850s affected evangelical congregations. Evangelical competition in a dynamic and expansive spiritual marketplace, aggressive church-building strategies, and an embrace of a new rhetoric of domesticity contributed to the growth of the city and the experience of life within it. In turn, the city provided the financial, social, and organizational resources that allowed evangelical congregations to thrive and expand their reach locally, nationally, and globally. The chapter focuses on the John Street Methodist Episcopal Church, which provides a useful lens for exploring the ways in which evangelicalism's efforts to transform the city allowed the city ultimately to transform evangelicalism. It revisits John Street at different points in its nearly ninety-year history on the same lot in lower Manhattan.

The participation of Blacks in Methodist Episcopal Church governance stood as a major barrier to reunion with the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and growing calls to segregate them still further forced those African Americans to consider the limits of accommodation. Chapter 9 looks at some steps that were taken to allow “bishops for races and languages” and thus enable the election of bishops of African descent confined to working with their own people. Although organic union with the Church South remained decades away, a plan took shape that paved the way. The early years of the twentieth century also saw continuing frustrations in Liberia and the passing of aging white allies from the scene. Nonetheless, with the historically black colleges and academies of the Freedmen’s Aid Society continuing to turn out educated leaders, their prophetic hopes for racial reconciliation and advancement lived on.

This chapter focuses on the African Methodist Episcopal Church and its meaning for free men and women in rural Maryland. Founded in 1816 by Reverend Richard Allen in collaboration with other African American Christians from across the Middle Atlantic states, the AME Church on the Eastern Shore expressed the values, culture, and experience of a distinct group of free African Americans while reinforcing their membership in a regional community. This chapter examines how the AME Church gained worship communities on the Eastern Shore through evangelism and how Methodism, along with Catholics and Quakers, contributed to the religious education of African Americans. It also considers the AME Church's denunciation of slavery and concludes with a discussion of the role played by the men and women who participated in rural prayer classes in propagating the AME mission.

The chapter revisits the relation between field and forest preaching, noting the former to be a signature of the evangelistic outreach of George Whitefield and of British Methodism. By contrast, by the time the Methodist Episcopal Church was organized in an 1784 conference and was gifted by John Wesley with doctrine, structure, hymnody, and orders, the Americans had discovered that the woods better accommodated the crowds their preaching attracted. Shady groves served as cathedrals. The forests also became gardens for prayer when preachers needed quiet and solitude. And as they tracked settlements west, the Methodist itinerants experienced woodland as wilderness. In this, as in other chapters, the patterns of Methodist religious life are illustrated with very ample quotations.

By 1860, this chapter argues, white Ohioans and Kentuckians had articulated starkly different purposes for their religious organizations and laws. With Cincinnatians sometimes at the forefront and at other times in tow, Ohioans rendered their faiths and constitution into notably antislavery positions and had begun to undo prejudicial laws afflicting African Americans. As Ohioans injected a “freedom national” philosophy into their most powerful institutions, Kentuckians sensed risk. In reaction, slaveholders there tried to purge the state of its emancipationist sentiments by diminishing Louisvillians’ electoral influence and by restricting the growth of a free black population. Though Ohioans insisted on the immediate rupture of property rights in persons upon contact with its soil, Kentuckians gave new divine clout to those same property rights. Before 1849, these sectional positions had not needed to be staked out so clearly. After that year, this chapter argues, Ohio and Kentucky risked increasing sectional alienation to further their positions on the morality of slavery.

This chapter details the educational institutions and efforts of the Colored Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church. Education was a key component of freedom to many blacks, and African American churches worked tirelessly to establish their own educational institutions. For the CME Church, determination to make their own schools mirrored their determination to make their own all-black denomination. Established in 1870 in Jackson, Tennessee, the CME Church arose from the soils of the Deep South, drawing the bulk of its membership from Alabama, Georgia, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The story of the establishment of the Mississippi Industrial College by the CME Church exemplifies southern blacks' collective efforts to educate their communities; it represents their continual struggle to maintain funding for their education, to govern the direction of their institutions, and to escape their dependence on paternal white supporters.

This chapter examines how Archibald J. Carey Sr. inserted party politics into church affairs. It looks at how his election to the episcopacy of the African Methodist Episcopal Church allowed him to use public theology to benefit African Americans, his influence on the pastors and parishes in his districts and his alliances with white politicians, his dispute with fellow bishop Reverdy C. Ransom, and his uneasy balance of civic and church affairs. The chapter also considers Carey’s denominational assignments in the South and in the West, his relationship with William Hale Thompson, his promotion of women’s roles in certain areas of the church, his endorsement of the AME Church’s Five Million Dollar and Evangelical Campaign, and his clout in Chicago’s local church and public affairs.

After years of being involved in community and civil rights, Archibald J. Carey Jr. was drawn into the political arena as a candidate for public office, as a party operative, and as a federal appointee while maintaining his ministry and serving in several denominational roles. He believed that all of these activities were intrinsic parts of a public theology designed to lift African Americans and reform their religious institutions. Several pastors agreed that Carey’s blend of ministry and politics had made him ready for the episcopacy of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1949, Carey became president of the Connectional Council, a church-wide clergy/lay organization that served as a forum for developing initiatives intended to achieve denominational reform. But hostile colleagues in the Chicago Annual Conference questioned his loyalty to the AME Church. In 1947, Carey was elected to the Chicago City Council. His most important legislative effort focused on the elimination of racial discrimination in Chicago housing. Carey was reelected four years later.

John Wesley founded Methodism as an evangelical renewal movement within the Church of England. That structure encouraged both establishment impulses and Dissenting movements within Methodism in the North American context. In Canada, British missionaries planted a moderate, respectable form of Methodism, comfortable with the establishment. In Ontario, however, Methodism drew from a more democratized, enthusiastic revivalism that set itself apart from the establishment. After a couple of generations, however, these poorer outsiders had moved into the middle class, and Canadian Methodism grew into the largest denomination, with a sense of duty to nurture the social order. Methodism in the United States, however, embodied a paradox representative of a nation founded in a self-conscious act of Dissent against an existing British system. Methodism came to embrace the American cultural centre while simultaneously generating Dissenting movements. After the American Revolution, ordinary Americans challenged deference, hierarchy, patronage, patriarchy, and religious establishments. Methodism adopted this stance in the religious sphere, growing as an enthusiastic, anti-elitist evangelistic campaign that validated the spiritual experiences of ordinary people. Eventually, Methodists began moving towards middle-class respectability and the cultural establishment, particularly in the largest Methodist denomination, the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC). However, democratized impulses of Dissent kept re-emerging to animate new movements and denominations. Republican Methodists and the Methodist Protestant Church formed in the early republic to protest the hierarchical structures of the MEC. African Americans created the African Methodist Episcopal Church and African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in response to racism in the MEC. The Wesleyan Methodist Church and the Free Methodists emerged in protest against both slavery and hierarchy. The issue of slavery divided the MEC into northern and southern denominations. The split reflected a battle over which religious vision of slavery would be adopted by the cultural establishment. The denominations remained divided after the Civil War, but neither could gain support among newly freed blacks in the South. Freed from a racialized religious establishment embedded in slavery, former slaves flocked to independent black Methodist and Baptist churches. In the late nineteenth century, Methodism spawned another major evangelical Dissenting movement, the Holiness movement. Although they began with an effort to strengthen Wesleyan practices of sanctification within Methodism, Holiness advocates soon became convinced that most Methodists would not abandon what they viewed as complacency, ostentation, and worldliness. Eventually, Holiness critiques led to conflicts with Methodist officials, and ‘come-outer’ groups forged a score of new Holiness denominations, including the Church of God (Anderson), the Christian Missionary Alliance, and the Church of the Nazarene. Holiness zeal for evangelism and sanctification also spread through the missionary movement, forming networks that would give birth to another powerful, fragmented, democratized movement of world Christianity, Pentecostalism.

This chapter summarizes the early life and ministry of Matthew Simpson. The chapter discusses Simpson’s rise from obscurity to being elected a bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church. The chapter focuses on Simpson’s account of his own spiritual life, particularly noting his struggle to receive the witness of the Spirit and assurance, which were key Methodist doctrines and experiences. The chapter also discusses Simpson’s time as a professor, college president, and editor of an influential Methodist periodical before being elected to the episcopacy. The chapter also highlights the importance of Simpson’s uncle in his life and the disagreement that they had over slavery, due to his uncle’s passionate commitment to abolition. The chapter places Simpson in his ecclesial context and shows his commitment to growing the Methodist Episcopal Church by appealing to as broad a group of people as possible in order to get more people and build nicer buildings (churches, parsonages, colleges, and seminaries).

This chapter opens with a detailed bibliographic study and publication history of the Recorder and a discussion of the broader history of the African Methodist Episcopal Church print culture. The chapter builds from this work to offer the fullest history available of the newspaper’s beginnings, its resurrection at the eve of the Civil War, and its structures and management during and just after the war. The chapter (re)introduces a crucial figure in both the African Methodist Episcopal Church hierarchy and the development of nineteenth-century Black periodical literature, Elisha Weaver, the driving force behind the paper’s 1861 resuscitation and its long-term survival. It places Weaver’s efforts, the paper’s growth, and important additional work by figures like Daniel Payne within the frames of larger narratives of national, racial, and church history and Black print culture studies.

Support of the Federalist Party and opposition to the Democratic‐Republicans afforded Lemuel Haynes his first engagement with a public sphere beyond church congregations and revival audiences. He supported Federalists George Washington and John Adams, both of whom had some reputation in the early republic as enemies of slaveholding. New Englanders Ezra Stiles and Timothy Dwight, each man a president of Yale College, articulated a vision of blacks and whites united in a Christian postslavery society. This was a patrician vision that Haynes and black contemporaries like Richard Allen, leader of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, found convincing insofar as it suggested that a class of social and religious leaders would act to protect black rights. However, Jeffersonian ideology spread even into western Vermont; in 1818, Haynes was dismissed from his pulpit because of his Federalism and his criticism of the War of 1812.

This chapter describes events in the life of Anna Howard Shaw from 1871 to 1880. Shaw had a vision that God had called her to a larger life. However, with no independent means of wealth, her choices appeared to be limited to marrying or resigning herself to struggle along as an impoverished schoolteacher, living in her parents' home. To gain access to any formal education for herself, she would have to leave that home. At this point Anna turned to the only resource she did have beyond her own dreams, ingenuity, and determination—her sister Mary, who had married a successful entrepreneur. So it was that Anna made the difficult and seemingly selfish decision to leave her parents' home and move in with her sister to seek her options in the small town of Big Rapids, Michigan. On August 26, 1873, the Big Rapids District Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church enthusiastically licensed twenty-six-year-old “Annie Howard Shaw” as a local preacher. In June 1878 Shaw sailed for Europe. By then she had earned her education and possessed her first investments. This thirty-one-year-old daughter of impoverished immigrants returned to tour the great sights of the continent.

This chapter describes rising tensions between Protestants and Catholics and the outbreak of religious violence in Ohio and Kentucky in the 1850s. It reveals intense efforts to proselytize across the Ohio River Valley, and the conflicts resulting from heated competition between Protestants and Catholics. This first chapter reveals the growth of powerful churches and missionary organizations based in urban Ohio and Kentucky, and especially in Cincinnati and Louisville. These Protestant and Catholic institutions sought to evangelize throughout the entire Ohio River valley. The chapter treats black and white Protestant revivals and evangelism, and reveals Catholics’ deep interest in fostering missions throughout the region.