The Free Methodist Church began in a dispute inside the Methodist Episcopal Church over practices that its founder, Benjamin Titus Roberts (1823-1893), believed had drifted from Wesleyan roots. As a pastor in western New York, Roberts published articles criticizing the growing practice of renting pews to wealthier congregants, a system he saw as excluding the poor from full participation in worship, and he argued for restoring the plain, revivalist, holiness-centered Methodism of John Wesley's own day, including the ministry of women and open opposition to slavery. His outspokenness led to a series of ecclesiastical trials, and in 1858 the Genesee Conference expelled him from the ministry.
Roberts and other sympathetic ministers who had likewise been disciplined or had resigned in protest gathered supporters over the following two years, and on August 23, 1860, about sixty of them, fifteen preachers and forty-five laypeople, met in an orchard at Pekin, New York, to organize a new denomination. They named it the Free Methodist Church, choosing free to signal freedom from slavery, from rented pews, from secret lodge memberships they considered incompatible with Christian fellowship, and from the formalism they believed had crept into revival worship. Roberts was elected the new church's first general superintendent.