At twenty-one, a young Englishman raised in Methodist meetings near Birmingham was already preaching several times a week. In 1771, he heard John Wesley’s call for volunteers to the American colonies and offered himself, not knowing he would never return to England.
Francis Asbury was born on August 20, 1745, in Hamstead Bridge, Staffordshire. The son of a gardener, he grew up beside a mother who sought a deeper spiritual life after the death of a young daughter, and so came to know the hymns and prayers of the young Methodist movement.
Landing in Philadelphia in October 1771, he found little more than three hundred Methodists scattered across the thirteen colonies. He refused to settle down: he spent the next forty five years on horseback, crossing the Appalachian Mountains dozens of times, preaching and organizing churches in frontier regions.
At the Christmas Conference in Baltimore, at the end of 1784, the American preachers themselves elected him superintendent alongside Thomas Coke. Asbury insisted on being chosen by his colleagues, not simply appointed from afar by Wesley, a gesture that reflected the spirit of the young republic. The title of bishop, which Wesley disapproved of, soon took hold among American Methodists.
His leadership had a difficult side: in 1784, under his presidency, the Conference approved rules against the holding of slaves among Methodists, but faced with a drop in membership in the South, the rule was suspended months later. Asbury chose the growth of the church over standing firm on the cause of emancipation, a choice now recognized as a failure of courage in the face of an injustice he himself had called an evil.
He never married. He considered family life incompatible with the itinerancy he demanded of Methodist preachers, and he lived out the same commitment he required of others. He ordained hundreds of preachers and helped found Cokesbury College, the first Methodist college in the United States.
He died on March 31, 1816, in Spotsylvania, Virginia, just days after preaching his last sermon in Richmond. He left behind a church of more than two hundred thousand members, built on a circuit structure that would outlive him for generations.
The model of the itinerant preacher, continually sent to new frontiers without a fixed parish, which Asbury consolidated in the United States, became a reference point for the Protestant missionary movement that would spread across the world in the following century.