Three British Methodist Churches Unite at the Royal Albert Hall

On 20 September 1932, delegates of the Wesleyan Methodist Church, the Primitive Methodist Church and the United Methodist Church met in the Uniting Conference at the Royal Albert Hall in London and adopted the Deed of Union, fifty one years after the Ecumenical Methodist Conference united world Methodism in 1881, already recorded here. The United Methodist Church was itself the product of an earlier merger, the New Connexion, the Bible Christians and the United Methodist Free Churches having combined in 1907; its coming together with the much larger Wesleyan body and the Primitive Methodists, whose open air preaching and camp meetings had grown out of Wesleyan discipline a century before, closed the last of British Methodism's nineteenth century divisions. The union proceeded under the authority of the Methodist Church Union Act 1929, after the Wesleyan Conference, whose approval required a higher threshold than the other two bodies, reached the necessary majority in 1928; the theologian A.S. Peake was among its leading advocates, while the minister J. Ernest Rattenbury and others argued against surrendering their churches' separate identities. The Deed of Union fixed the constitution and doctrinal standards of the body that resulted, known simply as the Methodist Church and styled the Methodist Church of Great Britain to distinguish it from Methodism elsewhere; it superseded the 1784 Deed of Declaration by which John Wesley had first given the original Wesleyan societies a legal constitution. Seven years before the American churches divided by slavery in 1844 reunited in 1939, already recorded here, British Methodism's own nineteenth century branches came together as one church.