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The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, or Methodist Episcopal Church South, was the so-called "Southern Methodist Church" resulting from the split over the issue of slavery in the Methodist Episcopal Church which had been brewing over several years until it came out into the open at a conference held in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1844. This body maintained its own polity until it reunited with the Methodist Episcopal Church and the Methodist Protestant Church to form the The Methodist Church in 1939, which in turn later (1968) merged with the Evangelical United Brethren Church to form The United Methodist Church. Some more theologically conservative MECS congregations dissenting from the merger formed the Southern Methodist Church in 1940.
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John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was appalled by American slavery. When the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) was founded in the United States in 1784, the denomination officially opposed slavery. In the early nineteenth century, the MEC stance on slavery was weakened by wealthy Southerners. Clergy in the north were expected not to own slaves and to help emancipate them, while in the south slaves were legal. Conflict arose in 1840 when the Rev. James Osgood Andrew of Oxford, Georgia, a bishop, acquired a slave. Fearing that she would end up with an inhumane owner if sold, Andrew kept her but let her come and go. The 1840 MEC General Conference considered the matter, but did not expel Andrew. Four years later, Andrew married a woman who owned a slave inherited from her mother, making the bishop the owner of two slaves, yet with duties both in the north and south.
The 1844 General Conference voted to suspend Bishop Andrew from exercising his episcopal office until he no longer owned slaves.[1] The decision raised questions (particularly among Southern delegates to the conference) about the authority of a General Conference to discipline bishops. Of course, the cultural differences that had divided the nation during the mid-19th century had also been dividing the Methodist Episcopal Church. The 1844 dispute led Methodists in the south to break off and form a separate denomination, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MEC-S).
The statistics for 1860 showed rapid growth. MEC-S enrolled 757,205 people including 537,136 whites, an increase of 37,442 over 1858; 207,776 negro members (nearly all slaves), an increase of 19,740; and 4160 Native American members, an increase of 286. In 1858 MEC-S operated 106 schools and colleges. The Civil War was devastating to farms, church buildings and institutions, but it was marked by a series of strong revivals that began in Lee's army and spread throughout the region. The chaplains tended the wounded after the battles. John B. McFerrin recalled:
At Chickamauga, the slaughter was tremendous on both sides, but the Confederates held the field. I remained on the battlefield eleven days, nursing the sick, ministering to the wounded, and praying for the dying. The sight was awful. Thousands of men killed and wounded. They lay thick all around, shot in every possible manner, and the wounded dying every day. Among the wounded were many Federal soldiers. To these I ministered, prayed with them, and wrote letters by flag of truce to their friends in the North.[2]
After the American Civil War many African American Methodists in the South left the Methodist Episcopal Church, South and joined either the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, or the Methodist Episcopal Church. Out of 200,000 African American members in 1860 there in 1866 remained only 49,000, and most of them split off on friendly terms in 1870 to form the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, now the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, taking with them $1.5 million in buildings and properties. The new denomination avoided the Republican politics of the AME and AMEZ churches. It had over 3000 churches, over 1200 traveling preachers, 2500 local preachers, about 140,000 members, and 22 Annual Conferences, presided over by four bishops.
The MEC-S energetically tended its base and by 1880 counted 798,862 members (nearly all white), 1,066,377 in 1886. It expanded its missionary activity in Mexico. Although usually avoiding politics, MEC-S went on record in 1886 denouncing divorce and calling 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. We recognize in the license system a sin against society. Its essential immorality cannot be affected by the question whether the license be high or low. The effectual prohibition of the manufacture, sale, and use of intoxicating liquors would be emancipation from the greatest curse that now afflicts our race. The total removal of the cause of intemperance is the only remedy. This is the greatest moral question now before our people....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.[3]
The Methodists modernized after 1844. Ambitious young preachers from humble, rural backgrounds attended college, moved to town, and built larger churches that paid decent salaries and gave the social prestige of a highly visible community leadership position. These ministers turned the pulpit into a profession, thus emulating the Presbyterians and Episcopalians. They created increasingly complex denominational bureaucracies to meet a series of pressing needs: defending slavery, evangelizing soldiers during the Civil War, promoting temperance reform, contributing to foreign missions (see American Southern Methodist Episcopal Mission), and supporting local colleges. The new urban middle class ministry increasingly left their country cousins far behind. 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. It was, in a word, modern."[4]
The returns for 1892 showed:[5]
The hardscrabble condition of the church is shown by the statistics of academies. Nearly all had been closed by the war. There were 179 schools and colleges open in 1892, but they had only 892 teachers and 16,600 students. The church in 1881 opened Holding Institute, which operated as a boarding school for nearly a century in Laredo, Texas, having instructed numerous pupils from Mexico during its years of operation.[6]
The colleges were in scarcely better condition, though philanthropy was about to dramatically change that. Most were primarily high-school level academies with a few collegiate courses. The dramatic exception was Vanderbilt University, at Nashville, with a million-dollar campus and an endowment of $900,000, thanks to the Vanderbilt family. Much smaller and poorer were Randolph-Macon College in Virginia, with its two affiliated fitting-schools and Woman's College; Emory College, in Atlanta (with Candler family money 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 was not addressed until the founding of Southern Methodist University in 1911. The denomination also supported several women's colleges, although they were more like finishing schools or academies until the twentieth century, when they began to meet the standards of new accrediting agencies, such as the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. The oldest Methodist woman's college is Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia; other Methodist colleges that were formerly women's institutions are Lagrange College and Andrew College in Georgia, Columbia College in Columbia, South Carolina, and Greensboro College in Greensboro, North Carolina.
In March 1900, the East Columbia Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church-South purchased an existing school called Milton Academy, built by Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Milton, Oregon. The school, re-named Columbia College, opened September 24, 1900. Due to declining enrollment and lack of funds, the school was closed in 1925. First year enrollment was 131 pupils, under Dean W.C. Howard. The original wood building was replaced in 1910 by a four-story stone building which exists today as the city hall of the combined cities of Milton-Freewater, Oregon.
While the two other major Methodist denominations in America—the MEC and the Methodist Protestant Church—had agreed to ordain women either as local elders and deacons (the MEC) or full clergy (the Methodist Protestant Church), the MEC, South did not ordain women as pastors at the time of the 1939 merger that formed The Methodist Church.
The Methodist Episcopal Church, South is most remembered for its reluctance to oppose slavery and its lack of hospitality toward African Americans. However, the church was responsible for founding four of the South's top divinity schools: Vanderbilt Divinity School, Duke Divinity School, Candler School of Theology at Emory University and Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. Vanderbilt severed its ties with the denomination in the early 1900s. Duke, Candler, and Perkins maintain a relationship with The United Methodist Church. All four enroll students primarily from mainline Protestant denominations, and all four have a reputation for being progressive.
The denomination's publishing house, opened in 1854 in Nashville, Tennessee, would eventually become home to The United Methodist Publishing House. See Abingdon Press and Cokesbury.