During his 45 years in the colonies and the newly independent United States, he devoted his life to ministry, traveling on horseback and by carriage thousands of miles to those living on the frontier.

Asbury spread Methodism in British colonial America and the United States as part of the Second Great Awakening.

His journal is valuable to scholars for its account of frontier society, with references to many towns and villages in Colonial America.

[4] A few years later she found a renewed Christian faith as itinerant preachers, either Baptist or Methodists, visited Barr on a revival circuit.

The husband supported his wife in her faith and witness: he allowed Methodist meetings to be held each Sunday in the cottage.

Waves of workers migrated into the area, attracted by jobs in the growing factories and workshops in Birmingham and the Black Country of the mines.

But he soon left them and is believed to have eventually worked for Thomas Foxall, at the Old Forge Farm,[10] where he made metal goods.

There he continued working with metal and established the Foundry Church in Georgetown, now part of Washington, D.C. Asbury began to preach locally, and eventually became an itinerant preacher on behalf of the Methodist cause.

When the American Revolutionary War broke out in 1775, he and James Dempster were the only British Methodist lay ministers to remain in America.

[14] "During his early years in North America, Asbury devoted his attention mainly to followers living on the eastern shore between the Delaware River and the Chesapeake Bay.

When the American revolution severed the traditional ties between the American Thirteen Colonies and Great Britain, Bishop Asbury, in the interest of his religious tenets and principles and in an attempt to remain aloof from the political and military fervor that swept the country, announced he would, to keep the embryonic Methodist congregations neutral, refrain from endorsing either Great Britain or the newly formed United States of America government and urged all his followers to do the same.

The State of Maryland had enacted a law requiring all citizens to take an Oath of Allegiance to the newly formed American Congress.

[16] In 1780, Asbury met the freedman Henry "Black Harry" Hosier, a meeting the minister believed "providentially arranged".

[17] Hosier served as his driver and guide and, though illiterate, memorized long passages of the Bible as Asbury read them aloud during their travels.

Hosier eventually became a famous preacher in his own right, the first African American to preach directly to a white congregation in the United States.

He recorded the events in his journal: it showed the relation between religious revivalism and camp meetings, later a staple of nineteenth-century frontier Methodism.

His idea for a ruling council was opposed by such notables as William McKendree, Jesse Lee, and James O'Kelly.

Eventually, based on advice by Coke, he established in 1792 a General Conference, to which delegates could be sent, as a way of building broader support.

For the remainder of his life, he rode an average of 6,000 miles each year, preaching virtually every day and conducting meetings and conferences.

He was buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery, in Baltimore, near the graves of Bishops John Emory and Beverly Waugh.

The circuit consisted of small Wesleyan societies in West Bromwich, Wednesbury, Walsall, Wolverhampton, and Billbrook.

In January 1766, Mather offered him the opportunity to quit the forge and join the Wesleyan movement as a full-time itinerant on a trial basis.

[citation needed] Part of his training as a full-time traveling preacher required that he read extensively from books suggested by Wesley, who made them available in London, Bristol and Newcastle.

The list included several Divinity Books: the Bible, Wesley's tracts, the works of Boehm and Francke.

For the next five months, during his circuits in England Asbury teamed with William Orpe, a young preacher who was the Hebrew teacher at Wesley's Kingswood School in Bristol.

They covered the large Staffordshire circuit that encompassed not only Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Willenhall, Walsall, Wednesbury, Darlaston and Billbrook, but also an extended portion to the south in Worcestershire, Tewkesbury and Gloucestershire.

Along with Franklin at Whitefield's home were Connecticut colonial leaders including a Mohegan Indian named Samson Occum and his traveling companion, Princeton College Presbyterian minister, Nathaniel Whitaker, Lord Dartmouth, and the merchant Dennis De Bert.

Spending a couple months in London before the August conference, it is likely that Asbury not only heard Samson Occum speak at The Tabernacle, but also had opportunity to meet this unique group.

Asbury's short stopover in London occurs at the same time that Benjamin Rush is staying with George Whitefield, having completed his medical studies in Edinburgh.

After the Bristol conference in August 1768, Wesley assigns Asbury to the only circuit more difficult than the Staffordshire low Round, Colchester.