Ordained as an elder in the Methodist Episcopal Church, then riven by conflict over slavery, Lumry was arraigned before its 1842 Illinois Annual Conference at Chicago for anti-slavery agitation, from which he was asked to desist.

He replied that no man or group of men would put a padlock on his lips,[2] and became a leading Illinois organizer of the new, staunchly abolitionist Wesleyan Methodist Church.

[6] Of him, Owen Lovejoy said, "Lumry is a sharp thrashing instrument, having teeth wherewith the Lord thrasheth slavery.

He was a carter and a descendant of the French Huguenot refugee André Lamoureux, from whose surname Lumry[note 2] is derived.

[2] Moving to western New York State, he was one of a class of sixteen candidates admitted on trial for ordination by the church's 1828 Genesee Annual Conference at Ithaca and was ordained as a deacon by Bishop Elijah Hedding on July 20, 1832, at Manlius.

After several months there, late in the fall of that year, he joined a group of twelve carrying provisions to miners in the Rocky Mountains, thought to be starving.