Francis Asbury

Francis Asbury ( born August 20, 1745 in Handsworth in Birmingham, England, † March 31, 1816 in Spotsylvania County, Virginia) was one of the first two bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States.

Francis Asbury was born in humble circumstances. At age 16, he was converted to Methodism and became a local preacher. From 1766 he was an itinerant preacher in Bedfordshire, Colchester and Wiltshire in England. In 1771 he volunteered to go to America.

There, too, he was an itinerant preacher ( " District Rider " ) in New York, Philadelphia and Delaware. After the Revolutionary War he was the only British-born Methodist preacher who was still active in the United States. He extended his travels from beyond the Appalachians.

Asbury was in 1784 one of the central figures of the so-called Christmas Conference in Baltimore, which is considered the founding meeting of the Methodist Church in America. John Wesley had him ordained in 1784 by Thomas Coke as a deacon, elder and bishop. During the next thirty years Asbury led tirelessly the rapidly growing American Methodist Church, where he was almost constantly on the move.

On his arrival in America, there were 550 Methodists in New York and Philadelphia, at his death, it was 250,000, with 700 ordained preachers.

Asbury died in Virginia and was buried in Baltimore.