Methodist Episcopal Church

Methodist Episcopal Church
Classification	Protestant
Orientation	Methodism
Polity	Connectionalism
Origin	December 1784 Baltimore, Maryland, United States
Separated from	Church of England
Separations	Republican Methodist Church (1792) African Methodist Episcopal Church (1816) African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (1821) Methodist Episcopal Church of Canada (1828)
Merged into	Methodist Church (USA) (1939)

The Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) was the first Methodist denomination founded in the United States. In the early 19th century, it was the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S. The Methodist Episcopal Church existed from 1784 until 1939, when it merged with the Methodist Episcopal Church, South and the Methodist Protestant Church to form the Methodist Church. In 1968, the Methodist Church merged with the Evangelical United Brethren Church to form the present-day United Methodist Church.

The Methodist Episcopal Church originated from the spread of Methodism outside of England to the Thirteen Colonies in the 1760s. Earlier, Methodism had grown out of the ministry of John Wesley, a priest in the Church of England (also known as the Anglican Church) who preached an evangelical message centered on justification by faith, repentance, the possibility of having assurance of salvation, and the doctrine of Christian perfection.

Wesley was loyal to the Anglican Church, and he organized his followers into parachurch societies and classes with the goal of promoting spiritual revival within the Church of England. Members of Methodist societies were expected to attend and receive Holy Communion in their local parish church, but Wesley also recruited and supervised lay preachers for itinerant or traveling ministry.

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