Beginning in 1738, John and Charles Wesley, Oxford educated Anglican Clergy in England, began preaching and teaching small groups of poor, uneducated people in the slums and mining districts of Britain. Banned from churches, they preached in the open air and drew thousands. John began the movement as a reform element within the Church of England.

However, in 1784, Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke held a Conference in Baltimore, MD and established the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States. After John’s death in the 1790’s, Charles led Methodism to form a church in England as well. However, the British Methodists never adopted Bishops within their governance.
In America, Methodist spread rapidly through the use of “Circuit Riders”, men who traveled throughout the frontier preaching the Gospel, teaching and administering the Sacraments. They made extensive use of lay preachers and established cell groups wherever they went. By 1865, one in two of all professed Christians in the US were Methodists.

Several groups have come out of Methodism including The Salvation Army, Church of the Nazarene, the Pentecostal movement, and Seventh Day Adventists.
The United Methodist Church, the result of mergers between various Methodist factions, was created in 1968 and is now the second largest Protestant denomination in the United States. The approximately 9 million United Methodists in the US are matched by an equal, and rapidly rising, number in Africa and Asia.

In 1844, Methodism split over slavery, as did the Presbyterians and Baptists. Parts of Methodism came back together in 1939, but under a racist structure that essentially marginalized African Americans. Structurally, that was corrected in 1964, but Methodism, like all American society, still struggles with the legacy and reality of racism.