Fields is the general superintendent of this group, which claims mission work in Suriname, Jamaica, Chile, Nigeria, France, Kenya and Malawi.
[1] Evangelical Methodism began as "a double protest against what were considered autocratic and undemocratic government on the one hand and a tendency toward modernism on the other in the Methodist Church.
"[2] The 1938 merger of the three major Methodist bodies in the U.S. (and charges of growing authoritarianism in the new leadership structure), the Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy (including perennial fights over evolution and scriptural reliability), Anti-Communist sentiment, and the success of the early Evangelical movement contributed to a series of small schisms from Mainline Methodism in the mid-Twentieth Century.
Hamblen's exit from a large church in Texas generated significant press coverage, leading to this coalition of conservative preachers and laymen from various pockets of the Holiness movement and Fundamental Methodism.
According to Hamblen, about 20 clergy and laymen led by Breckbill walked out of the 1952 conference in Altoona, Pennsylvania when they could not agree on Wesleyan doctrine of Holiness.
According to an observer, the development of a separate, fundamental EMC summarized the tensions between Holiness and non-Holiness conservatives present in many denominations in the wake of the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy.
[11] This wing of the Evangelical Methodist movement is more into cultural separatism than the larger EMC body, preferring modesty in clothing and refraining from "worldly amusements."
As recently as 2011, a resolution stated:[7] Evangelical Methodists call upon God's people to separate from churches or other religious groups that advocate modernism, new evangelicalism, the modern charismatic movement, ecumenism, Roman Catholicism, cultism and other theological theories which question, add to, subtract from, or twist the Word of God.