Methodist Episcopal Church, South

The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, or Methodist Episcopal Church South (MEC,S), was the Methodist denomination resulting from the 19th-century split over the issue of slavery in the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC). Disagreement on this issue had been increasing in strength for decades between churches of the North and South; in 1844 it resulted in a schism at the General Conference of the MEC held in Louisville, Kentucky.

This body maintained its own polity for nearly 100 years. It did not reunite with the elder Methodist Episcopal Church and the Methodist Protestant Church (earlier separated from Methodist Episcopals in 1828) until 1939, then formed the Methodist Church. The national denomination merged in 1968 with the Evangelical United Brethren Church, to form the United Methodist Church, now one of the largest and most widely spread religious denominations in America. In 1940, some more theologically conservative MEC,S congregations, which dissented from the 1939 merger, later forming the Southern Methodist Church.

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was appalled by slavery in the British colonies. When the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) was founded in the United States at the famous "Christmas Conference" in Baltimore with the synod/meeting of ministers at small plain Lovely Lane Chapel in the city's waterfront district on Lovely Lane, off German (later Redwood) Street (between South Calvert Street and South Street) in December 1784, the denomination officially opposed slavery very early. Numerous Methodist missionaries toured the South in the "Great Awakening" and tried to convince slaveholders to manumit their slaves. In the first two decades after the American Revolutionary War, a number did free their slaves. The number of free blacks increased markedly at this time, especially in the Upper South.

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