page_title: Methodist Episcopal Church
section_title: New Institutions
hierarchical_section_title: Methodist Episcopal Church / History / Antebellum era (1817–1860) / New Institutions
caption_attribution_description: English: Looking southwest on a mostly sunny midday across 20th Street and Fifth Avenue at 150 Fifth Avenue, formerly the Methodist Book Concern building designed by Edward Hale Kendall. Part of the Ladie's Mile Historic District, NYCLPC designation 1989. See also File:150 Fifth Av 19 jeh.jpg.
context_page_description: The Methodist Episcopal Church was the oldest and largest Methodist denomination in the United States from its founding in 1784 until 1939. It was also the first religious denomination in the US to organize itself on a national basis. In 1939, the MEC reunited with two breakaway Methodist denominations to form the Methodist Church. In 1968, the Methodist Church merged with the Evangelical United Brethren Church to form the United Methodist Church.
  The MEC's origins lie in the First Great Awakening when Methodism emerged as an evangelical revival movement within the Church of England that stressed the necessity of being born again and the possibility of attaining Christian perfection. By the 1760s, Methodism had spread to the Thirteen Colonies, and Methodist societies were formed under the oversight of John Wesley. As in England, American Methodists remained affiliated with the Church of England, but this state of affairs became untenable after the American Revolution. In response, Wesley ordained the first Methodist elders for America in 1784.
context_section_description: Nathan Bangs is credited with leading the campaign for respectability. As the denomination's book agent and editor of both The Methodist Magazine and the weekly Christian Advocate, Bangs was the MEC's most visible and influential leader up until the 1860s. Under his watch, the Christian Advocate became the most widely circulated periodical in the world, and the Book Concern was transformed from merely a distributor of British reprints into a full-fledged publishing house providing literature for adults, children, and Sunday schools, as well as producing tracts for the Methodist Tract Society organized in 1817.
  By the 1820s, Methodists were ready to build institutions of higher education. Citing the lack of non-Calvinist colleges and seminaries, the 1820 General Conference encouraged annual conferences to establish ones under Methodist control. Around two hundred were founded by the Civil War. These included Augusta College (1822), McKendree University (1828), Wesleyan University (1831), Emory University (1836), Emory and Henry College (1836), DePauw University (originally Indiana Asbury University in 1837), and what would become the Boston University School of Theology (1839). In addition, the Methodists became affiliated with already existing Dickinson College and Allegheny College in 1833. Methodists invested in education for women as well, founding Greensboro College in North Carolina and Wesleyan College in Georgia.
caption: The former Methodist Book Concern building at 150 Fifth Avenue, New York City, designed by Edward H. Kendall
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