JOHN WESLEY
1703-1791

    The fifteenth of nineteen children born to Susanna and Samuel Wesley, John Wesley was the founder of the Methodist movement. He attended Christ Church College at Oxford University and was ordained a priest in the Church of England in 1728.
    Upon returning to Oxford a year later as a fellow of Lincoln College, he became the lead spiritual adviser of the Holy Club started by his brother Charles, which was a group of students who practiced methodical study, spiritual devotion, and practical good works. These activities earned them the nickname "Methodist."
    From 1735 to 1737 he served as a missionary to Georgia, where he was influenced by the Moravians, a German church that stressed personal faith and disciplined Christian living. After his return to England, he attended a small religious meeting at Aldersgate on May 24, 1738, where he had a conversion experience and his heart was "strangely warmed."
    A year later he began preaching in the open air and organizing his followers into societies, which he formed into the movement called Methodism. He later drew up a set of General Rules for its members, adopted lay preachers, and started an annual conference.
    In 1784 Wesley ordained Methodist preachers for North America, a step that led to the formation of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and then of the Methodist Church worldwide.

1707-1788

    Charles Wesley is best known as the author of more than 7,000 hymns, including 480 hymns in The Methodist Collection of Hymns. He also was a clergyman of the Church of England and a leader with his brother John in the Methodist movement.
    Like John, Charles was educated at Christ Church College at Oxford. There he formed a small group of students called the Holy Club, which would be spearheaded by his brother John upon his return to Oxford as a fellow of Lincoln College. The group met regularly for methodical study, spiritual devotion, and practical good works – activities that earned them the nickname "Methodist." Their practice of accountability in small groups for the spiritual life of all their members became the basic structure of the later Methodist movement.
    In 1735 Charles was ordained as an Anglican priest. For the remainder of his life, he helped his brother John shape and provide leadership for the Methodist movement.
    After his marriage in 1749, Charles settled into parish ministry but remained a close adviser to his brother.

 1747-1814

    1745-1816

    Born near Birmingham, England, on the 20^th or 21^st of August 1745, Francis Asbury became a Christian at 16. He worked as a blacksmith, joined the Wesleyan conference in 1767 and gained considerable attention as a "boy preacher." When John Wesley asked for volunteers to take Methodist to America, Asbury answered the call and set sail for the Colonies in 1771.
    During the Revolutionary War he was the only Wesleyan missionary to remain in the Colonies. After the war he intensified his efforts to expand Methodist work into the American wilderness.
    Asbury preached some 25,000 sermons on the American frontier, laying the foundation of The United Methodist Church as we know it today.
    On Dec. 27, 1784, Thomas Coke, who had been appointed by John Wesley as superintendent of the Methodist Episcopal Church in America, consecrated Francis Asbury as superintendent or bishop. As soon as the conference was over, Asbury got back on the road. Fifty miles through a snowstorm was the first day’s ride.
    He never had a home of his own. His only address was "America," but sooner or later a letter addressed in that way would reach him. When he arrived in 1771 there were fewer than a dozen preachers and no more than a thousand Methodists. When he died in 1816, there were 695 preachers and 214,000 Methodists.
    His last sermon was preached at Richmond, Va., March 14, 1816, when he was too ill to walk or stand. He is buried in the bishop’s plot, Mt. Olivet Cemetery, Baltimore, Md.

1726-1813

    Phillip William Otterbein was born June 3, 1726, in Dillenburg, Nassau, Germany. In 1749 he was ordained in the German Reformed Church. He landed in New York July 28, 1752, and accepted a call to serve the German-speaking colonists of Pennsylvania and Maryland. Toward the beginning of that ministry, Otterbein happened to preach on the theme of "God’s grace" to a congregation in Lancaster, Pa. After the service, a member of the congregation came up to him wanting to know more about grace. Suddenly Otterbein realized he was not quite sure what God’s grace meant in his own life. Instead of giving a shallow answer to the man’s serious question, Otterbein simply said, "Advice is scare with me this day," and left.
    Otterbein went off by himself to pray to God, asking to be able to feel and to know the depths of God’s grace. During that moment of opening himself to God’s spirit, he abruptly felt confident that God’s grace was actively working changes in his life. From that time on, Otterbein’s preaching testified ever more urgently to the power of God to touch and change people.
    Otterbein joined with other ministers of the Reformed Church who wished to promote a spirit of inward piety. In 1800 this group of "united ministers" formed a new church known as the United Brethren in Christ. Phillip William Otterbein along with martin Boehm, a former Mennonite, became the first bishops or superintendents.
    Otterbein was a close personal friend of Francis Asbury, at whose consecration and ordination to the office of bishop Otterbein assisted at Asbury’s request.
    In 1805 Otterbein suffered a serious illness from which he never recovered. He never again left Baltimore, but United Brethren in Christ preachers still came to him for advice and counsel.
    He died Nov. 17, 1813, and is buried in the courtyard of the church in Baltimore where he had served for nearly forty years.

 1725-1812

    Martin Boehm was born Nov. 30, 1725, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to Mennonite parents who had come from Germany. He married Eve Steiner in 1753 and they eventually became the parents of eight children.
    His local Mennonite congregation chose him to be their pastor, but he did not feel ready to take on such a great responsibility. He felt that he had not himself received salvation, and, therefore, was not the right person to be praying for the salvation of others. Troubled by his lack of faith, he sank to his knees in a field he was plowing and prayed, "Lord, save, I am lost." Immediately a sense of joy and assurance swept over him as he heard the words of Jesus, "I am come to seek and save that which is lost."
    Boehm was attracted to the preaching of George Whitefield because it was along the lines of his own spiritual awakening. While preaching at the farm of Isaac Long, Whitefield’s sermon so moved Phillip William Otterbein that he hurried to Boehm’s side and declared, "Wir sind bruder (We are brothers)." From this occasion spiritual roots were formed that ultimately were to bring these two men together as co-founders of the United Brethren in Christ Church.
    In 1802 Martin Boehm joined the Methodist Episcopal Church at Boehm Chapel, although he continued to preach in the United Brethren in Christ Church.
    He died March 23, 1812. His son Henry was traveling at the time with Frances Asbury, and the two arrived home a few days later. The next Sunday Asbury preached a tribute sermon for his friend who was "greatly beloved in life, and deeply lamented in death."

1759-1801

    Jacob Albright was born near Pottsville, Pennsylvania, May 1, 1759. He married Catherine Cope in 1785 and turned to farming and tile making. His reputation for honesty earned him the title "the honest tile maker."
    In 1790, following the death of several of his children during a dysentery epidemic, Albright had a dramatic experience of conversion. At a prayer meeting in the home of Isaac Davies, a follower of the United Brethren in Christ, Albright turned to God in prayer, sharing his feelings of turmoil and grief. Suddenly God spoke to his heart, and he felt all his fear and anxiety disappear. That night he truly felt that he was a child of God.
    He was eventually licensed as an exhorter, or lay preacher, in the Methodist Episcopal Church. He felt called to preach to his German-speaking neighbors and began organizing churches in the southeastern part of Pennsylvania. He intended to bring his churches into the newly formed Methodist Conference but eventually parted with the Methodist Episcopal Church because of the lack of interest in continuing the German language in American Methodism.
    Jacob Albright died May 18, 1801. The work he had begun grew into the Evangelical Church which merged in 1946 with the Church of the United Brethren to become the Evangelical United Brethren Church.

                          1786-1823

    John Stewart, a free-born Negro, was born in Powhatan County, Virginia, about 1786. His parents were Baptists, and one of his brothers became a Baptist preacher.
    As a young man, Stewart went through some bad times that seriously tried his faith. One evening as he walked along the street in Marietta, Ohio, he was drawn by the sound of singing to a Methodist prayer meeting. He told the people gathered there of his problems, and they prayed with him and encouraged him in his faith. A short time later, while attending a camp meeting, he renewed his belief in Christ.
    As he continued to study and pray, he felt called to preach and believed that God was leading him to carry the message of salvation to the Wyandot Indians. The Wyandots lived on a small reservation in north-central Ohio. Stewart arrived there in November 1816 and continued to live and work among the Indians until his death in the fall of 1823, at times leaving to earn enough money to carry on his work.
    John Stewart is remembered as one of the earliest Methodist missionaries. His dramatic story stirred the growing missionary interest of the church and contributed to the organization of the Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1819.

    In 1760, six families of German-Irish Methodist made the long voyage across the Atlantic from Ireland to help colonize New York. Included in this group were Barbara Heck and her cousin Philip Embury. Embury had been a lay preacher among the Irish Methodists. However, when they arrived in New York they found that Methodism had not yet taken root in the soil of the New World. Some of the German-Irish immigrants found spiritual nourishment in a nearby Lutheran church. Others became careless about maintaining their religion.
    One day Barbara Heck walked into her home to discover her brother and several other men playing cards. Barbara became upset that these good men could find nothing better to do with their lives. She was afraid that they were slowly drifting away from a Christian way of life. Barbara grabbed the cards off the table, threw them into the fire, gave the men a good scolding, and ran over to the house of her cousin Philip. Finding Philip, she demanded that he start preaching again as he had in Ireland. Philip replied that he had no congregation or any chapel. Barbara replied that this was no excuse; they could start one. So Philip made plans to begin preaching and organized a Methodist society in his house.
    The Methodist society that began at Barbara Heck’s insistence still exists as the John Street United Methodist Church on Manhattan Island. This church stands as a testimony to the vision of mission and ministry that earned Barbara Heck the title of "Mother of Methodism in the New World."

1757-1835

    The first American-born Methodist bishop, William McKendree, was born July 6, 1757, in King William County, Virginia. Although he was reared in the Anglican faith, he joined a Methodist society at nineteen. He was received on trial as a preacher in the Virginia Conference in 1788. He went from Virginia to Kentucky – an area then known as the West.
    He was a delegate to the General Conference of 1808 at Baltimore. The Sunday before it opened, he preached so powerfully that one hearer reported, "Multitudes fell helpless, as if shot from their seats with a rifle, and an electric influence filled every heart." On hearing the sermon, Frances Asbury predicted McKendree’s election as bishop, a prophecy fulfilled a few days later.
    McKendree is credited with the introduction of some episcopal matters that remain to this day: consultation with the presiding elders in making appointments and a formal address by a bishop to General Conference.
    Although he had little formal education, he was a great preacher and an ecclesiastical statesman. He has been compared to Andrew Jackson, the first president of the United States to be elected from the West.
    He died March 5, 1835, in Summer County, Tennessee, and was buried there. Later his body was transferred to the campus of Vanderbilt University.

    After the Revolutionary War the amazing trek of the pioneers began moving westward. The Methodist preachers followed them on horseback. This was the era of the circuit rider, who rode the wilderness in search of souls.
    Appalling dangers were braved daily by Methodism’s "men on horseback," including dangers from storms, swollen streams, wild beasts, desperadoes, and hunger. They ate where and what they could; they slept in the woods when they could not find a cabin. How did they stand it? They didn’t! They died! Of the first 650 preachers, 500 had to "locate," or settle down at home. Of the first 737 who died, 203 were under 35 years of age, and 121 were between the ages of 35 and 45. Nearly half died before they were 30. Two-thirds of those whose records are known died before they preached twelve years, and 199 died within the first five years.
    The circuit riders had no churches as they swung their wide trail. Their pulpits were the cabins of the settlers, the taverns, brush arbors, the great out-of-doors. It was said that the first human sound in the wilderness was the ring of the frontiersman’s ax and that the second was the "hello" of the circuit rider who rode into his clearing. When storms raged, people remarked, "Nobody is out today except ducks and circuit riders!"

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