Nineteenth-Century Methodism

A movement that began as a society inside the Church of England spent the nineteenth century becoming a worldwide family of churches, and dividing as it grew. In Britain the Wesleyan connexion consolidated into a respectable denomination, and those who found it too respectable went their own way: the Primitive Methodists, born at an open-air camp meeting on Mow Cop in 1807 and a settled connexion by 1811-12, took the gospel into the pit villages behind working-class preachers, a striking number of them women. In America, Methodism became the largest Protestant body in the country and then split down the middle over slavery in 1844 into northern and southern churches that would not reunite for nearly a century. Black Methodists, refused equal standing, had already built churches of their own — the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1816, the AME Zion Church in 1821. By 1881 the family was scattered enough that it needed a world conference simply to speak to itself.