William Taylor (bishop)

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This article is about a Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church. For other people with similar names, see William Taylor (disambiguation)

Bishop William Taylor, depicted on steel-engraved frontispiece portrait of his book, Seven Years' Street Preaching in San Francisco, California; Embracing Incidents, Triumphant Death Scenes, Etc. Publisher: Phillips & Hunt (New York: circa 1860s) 394 pages, edited by W. P. Strickland.

William Taylor (1821-1902) was an American Missionary Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, elected in 1884.

[edit] Birth and Childhood

William was born 2 May 1821 in Rockbridge County, Virginia, the son of a preacher. He would make a tremendous mark as a Preacher and Missionary in his own right. But as a child, he was not much different that other boys of his age. There was a time, for instance, when three-year-old William saw a large cluster of bees hanging on the front of a hive his grandfather kept. He remembers in his autobiography thinking, "Ah, my sweeties, I'll fix you." He got an empty cow's horn and filled it with water and splashed the bees with it. They resented it so much that they stung him mercilessly. William remembers taking the lesson from that to mind his own business and not meddle in the affairs of others.

[edit] Conversion to Christ

Before William was ten years old, his grandmother had taught him the Lord's Prayer and explained that he could become a son of God. He longed for this relationship, but was unsure how to obtain it. Overhearing the story of a poor Black man who had received salvation, he wondered why he could not also. He recounts in his autobiography,

"soon after, as I sat one night by the kitchen fire, the Spirit of the Lord came on me and I found myself suddenly weeping aloud and confessing my sins to God in detail, as I could recall them, and begged Him for Jesus' sake to forgive them, with all I could not remember; and I found myself trusting in Jesus that it would all be so, and in a few minutes my heart was filled with peace and love, not the shadow of a doubt remaining."

He entered the Baltimore Annual Conference in 1843. Bishop Taylor traveled to San Francisco, California in 1849, and organized the first Methodist church in San Francisco. Between 1856 and 1883 he traveled in many parts of the world as an evangelist. He was elected Missionary Bishop of Africa in 1884, and retired in 1896. He wrote:

Seven Years' Street Preaching in San Francisco (1857)
Christian Adventures in South Africa (1867)
Four Years' Campaign in India (1875)
Our South American Cousins (1878)
Self-Supporting Missions in India (1882)
The Story of My Life (1895)
Flaming Torch in Darkest Africa (1898)

[edit] See also

List of Bishops of the United Methodist Church

This article incorporates text from an edition of the New International Encyclopedia that is in the public domain.
Taylor University: The first 150 Years ISBN 0962118729