The Christmas Conference Establishes Methodism in America

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The American Revolution severed American Methodists from the Church of England as thoroughly as it severed the Episcopalians, and John Wesley, reluctant but persuaded there was no other workable path, agreed to let the movement in America organise as its own church. He sent Thomas Coke to ordain Francis Asbury as general superintendent, a step Wesley took carefully, in his own words as an act of necessity rather than of separation from the church he still considered his own.

Coke and Asbury met first at Barratt's Chapel in Delaware in November 1784, and roughly eighty preachers then gathered at the Lovely Lane meetinghouse in Baltimore from 24 December 1784 to 2 January 1785, a ten day meeting remembered ever after as the Christmas Conference. There they adopted a Discipline and a Book of Worship, ordained new preachers, and set Asbury apart as bishop, founding the Methodist Episcopal Church as an independent American denomination in its own right.

What this changed for Christianity's spread was the conversion of a renewal movement inside an established church into a fully organised, independent American denomination, complete with its own bishop, discipline and ordination authority, born from a single ten day meeting over one Christmas. Asbury himself spent the following three decades riding more than one hundred thirty thousand miles to organise the new church across every state and territory the young nation held.