ABSTRACT
The dominating presence in the early decades of the Methodist Episcopal Church was Francis Asbury (1745-1816). Born in the English Midlands, he was attracted as a youth by extempore Methodist preaching and became a travelling preacher, volunteering for missionary work in America in the early 1770s. Though he tried to remain politically neutral in the Revolution, like other Methodists he was suspected of Loyalism. Fie eventually committed himself by taking up citizenship in Delaware. Wesley's own Loyalist attitude at the time probably lost him influence in America and it became evident that a separate Methodist Church needed to be established. Though Thomas Coke and other emissaries were sent by Wesley, Asbury's superintendency was soon translated into a 'bishopric' and he was at the centre of the strategy of itinerant evangelism which built up the church. Asbury's journal gives an account of the Baltimore meeting of 1784 at which the new church was founded.
