Revolutions Civil and Religious: Methodist Beginnings in America

Abstract

Abstract A Failed And Persecuted Irish farmer and a bold, pious woman are credited with founding Methodism in America, a fact less coincidental than it would first appear. Robert Strawbridge, a Methodist who fled his native Ulster because of religious persecution, emigrated to America in 1760, settling on a farm near Baltimore, Mary land. Strawbridge was not successful “as a man of business”; his farm, “had it not been for the toil of his wife and the charity of his neighbors, would have failed to keep himself and family from want.” Better at preaching than farming, Strawbridge soon raised a small society of Methodists that met and worshiped at his home. An other immigrant band of British Methodists landed in New York in 1760-only these men and women began to forsake Methodist ethics in the New World. When Barbara Heck, “a woman of piety, persistence, and genius for affairs” encountered her male friends and relatives playing cards, she became outraged, “seized the cards, threw them into the fire, and gave her friends a solemn warning against sin.” To return the group to Wesleyan piety, Heck entreated her cousin, Philip Embury, who had been a Methodist preacher in England, to begin holding services. Word soon spread that Embury’s home was the scene of strange goings-on, where “women often prayed, and even stood up and made speeches just like the men.” Heck was likely one of these women.2 From these modest beginnings, the Methodists grew into one of the most successful religious movements in American history.