Methodism began in England during the 18th Century by John and Charles Wesley.  The following is a brief account of the inception of the Methodist Movement and how it led to the founding of Asbury United Methodist Church.

The name “Methodists” was first given by way of derision to four students at the University of Oxford, among them John and Charles Wesley, who in November 1729, began to meet together regularly in a “Holy Club” for study, prayer and communion.  According to John Wesley, the exact regularity of their lives and studies occasioned a gentleman of Christ Church to say, “Here is sprung up a new sect of Methodists.”  About ten years later, after the Wesleys had become famous preachers and their movement was spreading, the name was revived, and those who followed them were designated the “people called Methodists!”

In 1735, John and Charles Wesley sailed to America as missionaries to Georgia.   On their return trip they were impressed with a group of Moravians whose religious faith provided an inner assurance amidst the terrible storms on the sea.  John Wesley arrived back in London in February 1738 and sought out a Moravian leader, Peter Bohler, who taught both he and his brother about self-surrender, instantaneous conversion and joy in conscious salvation.

John Wesley went to one of the societies on Aldersgate Street in London and heard a layman read Martin Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans describing faith.  Possessed of such faith, that preface had said the heart is cheered, elevated ad transported with sweet affection toward God.  It was at this point that something most dramatic happened to John Wesley.  Concerning this sudden happening, Wesley wrote, “About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, “I felt my heart strangely warmed.   If felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation, and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the ‘law of sin and death.'”  John Wesley’s experience, as referred to by others, was the determinative factor in the rise of Methodism and the evangelistic revival.  Thus Methodism was born.

During the years following the birth of Methodism, the denomination grew rapidly.   The Methodist Episcopal Church North and South was an outgrowth of Wesley’s Methodism. In 1758, John Wesley baptized two African Americans which broke the color barrier for Methodist societies. Some Blacks who converted to Christianity by their slave masters, accepted the Methodist doctrine as their own, and by 1790, African-Americans made up twenty percent of American Methodists.

After the American Civil War, many African American Methodists in the south left the Methodist Episcopal Church and joined either the African Methodist Episcopal Church, or the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, or the Methodist Church in the north. In 1844, the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church also split into two conferences because of tensions over slavery and the power of bishops in the denomination. The two General Conferences, Methodist Episcopal Church (or northern section) and Methodist Episcopal Church, South remained separate until the 1939 merger of these two denominations plus a third, the Methodist Protestant Church, the resulting church being known as The Methodist Church. In 1968, The Methodist Church united with the Evangelical United Brethren, also a result of mergers, to become the United Methodist Church (UMC).