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N0KFQ > TODAY 16.03.15 15:31l 54 Lines 2443 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
BID : 48631_N0KFQ
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Subj: FW: Today in History - Feb 28
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Sent: 150228/1559Z 48631@N0KFQ.#SWMO.MO.USA.NA BPQ1.4.63
Feb 28, 1784:
John Wesley charters first Methodist Church in U.S.
On this day in 1784, John Wesley charters the first Methodist
Church in the United States. Despite the fact that he was an
Anglican, Wesley saw the need to provide church structure for his
followers after the Anglican Church abandoned its American
believers during the American Revolution.
Wesley first brought his evangelical brand of methodical
Anglicanism to colonial Georgia from 1735 to 1737 in the company
of his brother Charles, with whom he had founded the ascetic Holy
Club at Oxford University. This first venture onto American soil
was not a great success. Wesley became embittered from a failed
love affair and was unable to win adherents to his studious
practices. However, while in Georgia, he became acquainted with
the German Moravians, who hoped to establish a settlement in the
colony. The meeting proved momentous, as it was at a Moravian
meeting upon his return to London that Wesley felt he had a true
experience of God's grace.
While closely allied to the Moravians, Wesley began taking the
advice of fellow Oxford graduate George Whitfield and preaching
in the open air when banned from Anglican churches for his
unorthodox evangelical methods. By 1739, Wesley had separated
himself from the Moravians and attracted his own group of
adherents, known as Methodists, who were held in disdain by the
orthodox Anglican clerical and civic hierarchy. By 1744, the
Methodists had become a large enough group to require their own
conference of ministers, which expanded to create an internal
hierarchy, replicating some of the Anglican Church's
ecclesiastical order.
Wesley, however, remained within the Anglican fold and insisted
that only ministers who had received the apostolic
succession--the laying on of hands by an Anglican bishop to
consecrate a new priest--could administer the sacraments. The
refusal of the Anglican church to ordain Dr. Thomas Coke to
preach to Americans newly independent from the British State
Church, finally forced Wesley to ordain within his own Methodist
conference in the absence of a proper Anglican bishop. He
performed the laying on of hands and not only ordained Coke as
the superintendent of the Methodist Episcopal Church in America
but also commissioned him to ordain Francis Asbury as his
co-superintendent.
73, K.O. n0kfq
N0KFQ @ N0KFQ.#SWMO.MO.USA.NA
E-mail: kohiggs@gmail.com
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