Evangelical Christian denomination, founded from within the Anglican Church by John Wesley and George Whitefield in the mid-eighteenth century whose largest group of adherents, white and African American, live in the United States. Methodist denominations, while low church in ritual, are centralized and organized under the direction of bishops who supervise their own regions. This has allowed the denomination to be expansive, sending missionaries into new territories and countries previously unprovided for; it has also made it prone to schism and internal division.

The issue of race has been one of the major forces of tension among American Methodists. Both the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Philadelphia, PA and the AME Zion Church in New York City, NY were established in the nineteenth century by black men and women who could no longer abide the discriminatory seating practices in Methodist Churches. This division between white and black Methodists has remained, African Methodists now comprising as many as 4 million separate congregants in the United States.

Race caused another fundamental split in the mid-nineteenth century when Southerners resisted the eradication of slavery breaking away in 1844 to establish their own denomination, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. After the end of slavery the MEC, South formed segregated churches for their “colored” brethren, which became, in 1870, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (later called Christian ME).

By the twentieth century, with pressure coming from other denominations that were growing more quickly—the more elite churches like Episcopalians and Presbyterians attracting wealthier Americans, the Baptists and Spiritualist churches appealing to poorer Protestants, and the Catholic church growing among immigrants—many Methodists felt the need for consolidation. In 1939, therefore, the MEC and MEC, South reunited, and then in 1968 the United Methodist Church (UMC) came into existence by combining the Methodists and other liturgically similar Protestant denominations. In the early 1990s, the UMC alone had a worldwide membership of about 50 million, 11 million of whom resided in the United States. Overall, Methodism was the third-largest affiliated Christian denomination in America with 13 million members and over 52,000 churches.

Besides a church organization conducive to expansion, Methodism has also increased its appeal by avoiding extremes, at least theologically. Once political issues that divide Methodists diminish in importance, then other differences can be smoothed over. The racial divide, however, is not one that Methodists can easily overcome.