Methodist Circuit Rider And Bishop

Frontier Clergyman.

Over the course of his long career as a Methodist minister and bishop, Francis Asbury traveled over 300,000 miles on horseback, crossed the Appalachian Mountains more than sixty times, preached 16,500 sermons, and ordained 4,000 other Methodist preachers. Asbury's heroic labors were only an extreme case of the incessant traveling of itinerant ministers all over the American backcountry. These men together made Methodism the fastest-growing Protestant denomination in early national America.

From England to America.

Asbury was born in England in 1745 and apprenticed to be a blacksmith. After he experienced a conversion, Asbury became a Methodist lay minister instead. He immigrated to Pennsylvania in 1771 as a missionary and was the only Methodist missionary to remain in the United States during the Revolutionary War. Methodism was suspect during this period because of the views of John Wesley, its English founder, who opposed...