Methodist

Wesley's societies for scriptural holiness remained inside the Church of England for half a century; the sacramental needs of post-Revolution America drew Wesley to ordain in 1784, and the Plan of Pacification (1795), after his death, completed the parting in Britain — a separation Wesley himself never sought.

Organized at the Christmas Conference with Coke and Asbury as superintendents, adopting Wesley's Sunday Service and Twenty-five Articles; the largest Protestant denomination in 19th-century America and the trunk of the American Methodist family.

Black Methodists led by Richard Allen, having left St. George's in 1787 over racial discrimination within the church, organized the AME in 1816 — the first independent Black denomination in the United States; a member of the Pan-Methodist Commission (1996), a reconciliation annotation.

Black Methodists of New York, organized from the Zion congregation of 1796, formed a separate denomination in 1821 with James Varick as first bishop, for the same causes as the AME.

Reformers within the Methodist Episcopal Church sought lay representation in conference and elected presidents in place of bishops. After expulsions in 1828 they organized the Methodist Protestant Church in 1830. It entered the 1939 union with the two Methodist Episcopal churches that formed The Methodist Church.

The slavery controversy divided the church's 1844 General Conference and the southern conferences organized separately — the era's defining schism, seventeen years before the nation itself divided; both sides argued from scripture, and the node states that plainly.

Organized in 1870 by Black members of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, as an independent denomination after emancipation; the third of the historic Black Methodist bodies in the Pan-Methodist Commission.

The 1939 reunion of the northern, southern, and Methodist Protestant churches — achieved at the cost of the racially segregated Central Jurisdiction (1939–1968), which the node states plainly as part of the merger's history.

German-American revival bodies that grew up beside Wesley's connexion around 1800, the Church of the United Brethren in Christ and the Evangelical Church, united in 1946 as the Evangelical United Brethren Church. In 1968 it merged with The Methodist Church at Dallas to form the United Methodist Church.

Formed in 1968 from the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren, abolishing the Central Jurisdiction as a condition of merger; from 2019 the denomination passed through a division era in which roughly a quarter of its US congregations departed (see global-methodist-church).

The traditionalist denomination formed in 2022 amid the UMC's long dispute over its teaching and discipline on sexuality; departing congregations cited the denomination's doctrinal trajectory, and the continuing UMC removed its prohibitions in 2024. The tree's freshest fork; the node states both sides' stated grounds without adjudication.