Methodist Episcopal Church, South
Disagreement on this issue had been increasing in strength for decades between churches of the Northern and Southern United States; in 1845 it resulted in a schism at the General Conference of the MEC held in Louisville, Kentucky.
Some dissenting congregations from the Methodist Protestant Church also objected to the 1940 merger and continue as a separate denomination, headquartered in Mississippi.
When the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) was founded in the United States at the "Christmas Conference" synod meeting of ministers at the Lovely Lane Chapel in Baltimore 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 the people whom they enslaved.
During the early nineteenth century, Methodists and Baptists in the South began to modify their approach in order to gain support from common planters, and yeomen.
They began to argue for better treatment of slaves, saying that the Bible acknowledged slavery but that Christianity had a paternalistic role to improve conditions.
Four years later, Andrew married a woman who owned a slave inherited from her mother, making the bishop the owner of two people.
The 1844 General Conference voted to suspend Bishop Andrew from exercising his episcopal office until he was no longer a slave owner.
[2] The American Civil War resulted in widespread destruction of property, including church buildings and institutions, but it was marked by a series of strong revivals that began in General Robert E. Lee's army and spread throughout the region.
The two independent black denominations both sent missionaries to the South after the war to aid freedmen, and attracted hundreds of thousands of new members, from both Baptists and Methodists, and new converts to Christianity.
Although usually avoiding politics, MEC,S in 1886 denounced divorce and called for Prohibition, stating: The public has awakened to the necessity of both legal and moral suasion to control the great evils stimulated and fostered by the liquor traffic.
Resolved, That the time has now come when the church, through its press and pulpit, its individual and organized agencies, should speak out in strong language and stronger action in favor of the total removal of this great evil.
Ambitious young preachers from humble, rural backgrounds attended college, and were often appointed to serve congregations in towns.
There they could build larger churches that paid decent salaries; they gained social prestige in a highly visible community leadership position.
As the historian of the transformation explains, "Denomination building—that is, the bureaucratization of religion in the late antebellum South—was an inherently innovative and forward-looking task.
Much smaller and poorer were Randolph-Macon College in Virginia, with its two affiliated fitting-schools and Randolph-Macon Woman's College; Emory College, in Atlanta (as the infusion of Candler family money was far in the future); Emory & Henry, in Southwest Virginia; Wofford, with its two fitting-schools, in South Carolina; Trinity, in North Carolina—soon to be endowed by the Duke family and change its name; Central, in Missouri; Southern, in Alabama; Southwestern, in Texas; Wesleyan, in Kentucky; Millsaps, in Mississippi; Centenary, in Louisiana; Hendrix, in Arkansas; and Pacific, in California.
The growing need for a theology school west of the Mississippi River was not addressed until the founding of Southern Methodist University in Texas in 1911.
