Francis Asbury (August 20 or 21, 1745 – March 31, 1816) was a British-American Methodist minister who became one of the first two bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States. During his 45 years in the colonies and the newly independent United States, he devoted his life to ministry, traveling on horseback and by carriage thousands of miles to those living on the frontier.
Asbury spread Methodism in British colonial America and the United States as part of the Second Great Awakening. He also founded several schools during his lifetime, although his own formal education was limited. His journal is valuable to scholars for its account of frontier society, with references to many towns and villages in Colonial America. Along with John and Charles Wesley, Asbury is often celebrated as one of the founders of the Methodism in the United States.
Francis Asbury was born at Hamstead Bridge, Staffordshire, England on August 20 or 21, 1745, to Elizabeth and Joseph Asbury. The family moved to a cottage at Great Barr the next year. His boyhood home still stands and is open as Bishop Asbury Cottage museum.
Soon after the family moved to Great Barr, in May 1748, Asbury's older sister, Sarah, died; he was less than three years old. Asbury wrote later that his mother Eliza was "very much a woman of the world"; with his sister's death, she "sank into deep distress....from which she was not relieved for many years," and was living "in a very, dark, dark, dark, day and place". A few years later she found a renewed Christian faith as itinerant preachers, either Baptist or Methodists, visited Barr on a revival circuit. From then on she began to read the Bible every day and encouraged her son to do so as well.
Eliza's deep faith may not have been shared by her husband, who seemed to have problems, possibly drink or gambling. Francis Asbury described his father as "industrious." The husband supported his wife in her faith and witness: he allowed Methodist meetings to be held each Sunday in the cottage.
During Asbury's childhood the West Midlands was undergoing massive changes as the industrial revolution swept through the area. Waves of workers migrated into the area, attracted by jobs in the growing factories and workshops in Birmingham and the mines of the Black Country. The Asburys lived in a cottage tied to a public house, on a main route between the mines and the factories. They would have been aware of the drinking, gambling, poverty and poor behaviour prevalent in the area.
Francis Asbury attended a local endowed school in Snail's Green, a nearby hamlet. He did not get on well with his fellow pupils who ridiculed him because of his mother's religious beliefs. During the 1740s there had been widespread anti-Methodist rioting in Wednesbury and the surrounding area, and into the 1750s a great deal of persecution. Nor did he like his teacher and left school at the first opportunity.
Asbury took a keen interest in religion, having "felt something of God as early as the age of seven". He lived not far from All Saints' Church, West Bromwich, which under the patronage of the Methodist Earl of Dartmouth, provided a living for Evangelical minister Edward Stillinghurst. Well connected, Stillinghurst invited as visiting preachers some of the foremost preachers and theologians of the day. These included John Fletcher, John Ryland, Henry Venn, John Cennick and Benjamin Ingham. His mother encouraged Francis to meet with the Methodists in Wednesbury, eventually joining a "band" with four other young men who would meet and pray together. For them a typical Sunday would be a preaching meeting at 5.00 am, communion at the parish church mid morning, and attending a preaching meeting again at 5.00 pm.
Asbury had his first formal job at age thirteen; he went "into service" for local gentry, whom he later described as "one of the most unGodly families in the parish" but he soon left them and is believed to have eventually worked for Thomas Foxall, at the Old Forge Farm, where he made metal goods. He became great friends with Foxall's son, Henry. They developed a friendship, which continued after Henry Foxall's emigration to Colonial America. There he continued working with metal and established the Foundry Church in Georgetown, now part of Washington, D.C.
Asbury began to preach locally, and eventually became an itinerant preacher on behalf of the Methodist cause.
Asbury's preaching ministry in England is detailed in the section below: "Asbury's circuits in England".
At the age of 22, Asbury's selection by John Wesley as a traveling lay preacher became official. Typically such positions were held by young, unmarried men, known as exhorters. In 1771 Asbury volunteered to travel to British North America. His first sermon in the Colonies took place with the Methodist congregation in Woodrow, Staten Island. Within the first 17 days of being in the colonies, Asbury preached in both Philadelphia and New York City. During the first year, he served as Wesley's assistant and preached in 25 different settlements. When the American Revolutionary War broke out in 1775, he and James Dempster were the only British Methodist lay ministers to remain in America.
"During his early years in North America, Asbury devoted his attention mainly to followers living on the eastern shore between the Delaware River and the Chesapeake Bay. Bishop Asbury was a good friend of the Melsons and was their guest many times on his rounds. When the American revolution severed the traditional ties between the American Thirteen Colonies and Great Britain, Bishop Asbury, in the interest of his religious tenets and principles and in an attempt to remain aloof from the political and military fervor that swept the country, announced he would, to keep the embryonic Methodist congregations neutral, refrain from endorsing either Great Britain or the newly formed United States of America government and urged all his followers to do the same. This request placed almost all of his followers, especially those living in Maryland, in an untenable position. The State of Maryland had enacted a law requiring all citizens to take an Oath of Allegiance to the newly formed American Congress. In addition to this, it stipulated all non-residents within its boundaries also had to take and sign an Oath of Allegiance. Those refusing were summarily incarcerated for treason. Asbury, after proclaiming his neutrality, fled to Delaware, where taking an oath of allegiance was not a requirement. His adherents in Maryland suffered the rancor of the proponents of the Oath."Asbury remained hidden during the war and ventured occasionally back into Maryland. Sometimes this had the effect of compromising his parishioners. Asbury did not become ordained or a bishop until December 1784.
Asbury taught that “slavery was a crime against the laws of God, man, and nature”. In 1780, Asbury met the freedman Henry "Black Harry" Hosier, a meeting the minister believed "providentially arranged". Hosier served as his driver and guide and, though illiterate, memorized long passages of the Bible as Asbury read them aloud during their travels. Hosier eventually became a famous preacher in his own right, the first African American to preach directly to a white congregation in the United States. Under Asbury's influence Methodists made African-Americans a special target for missionary work, leading to a large number of converts; and by 1800 nearly 20,000 African-Americans were Methodists, about one third of the overall Methodist population in America.
In the fall of 1800, Asbury attended one of the events of the Revival of 1800 as he travelled from Kentucky into Tennessee. The combined Presbyterian and Methodist communion observance made a deep impression on Asbury; it was as an early experience for him of multi-day meetings, which included attendees camping on the grounds or sleeping in their wagons around the meeting house. He recorded the events in his journal: it showed the relation between religious revivalism and camp meetings, later a staple of nineteenth-century frontier Methodism.