A church that preaches grace has to be able to tell the truth about itself. This is the truth about ours: a movement born fighting slavery that made peace with it, split over it, segregated its own members for a generation — and has spent the decades since learning to say so out loud, and to act.

Reviewed by the Beaverton First UMC editorial team · Fact-checked July 2026

Methodism began with one of the clearest anti-slavery voices of the eighteenth century. John Wesley called the slave trade “the execrable sum of all villainies,” and six days before his death in 1791 he wrote his last letter to William Wilberforce, urging him to fight on until slavery “shall vanish away.”¹ Early American Methodist conferences wrote rules against slaveholding into their discipline. Then, under pressure from a slaveholding society and its own slaveholding members, the church suspended, softened, and regionalized those rules until they barely functioned.² What follows is not a proud story. We tell it anyway, because we believe repentance begins with an honest ledger.

The people the church failed first

Before the denomination ever split, Black Methodists were already voting on its racism with their feet. Free Black members who were segregated in the galleries and denied full standing walked out and built their own Methodism: the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and later the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church — three great denominations that exist today largely because the churches that became ours would not treat Black Christians as equals.³⁴

1844: a church divides over an enslaver in a bishop’s chair

The breaking point came at the 1844 General Conference. Bishop James O. Andrew of Georgia held enslaved people — through marriage and inheritance — and the church’s rules, whatever was left of them, said he should not. After bitter debate, the conference voted that Andrew should step aside from his office so long as he remained a slaveholder. Southern delegates answered with a Plan of Separation, and in 1845 the Methodist Episcopal Church, South was born — a church organized, at bottom, to keep slavery and Methodism compatible.²⁵ Historians have long noted that the churches’ failure to hold together across this moral line rehearsed the national rupture that followed in 1861.

A movement born fighting slavery made peace with it — and then split over it.

1939: segregation written into the church’s own constitution

When the northern and southern churches finally reunited in 1939, they did it at Black members’ expense. As the price of union, the merged Methodist Church created the Central Jurisdiction: while white conferences were organized into five regional jurisdictions, roughly nineteen Black annual conferences were placed in a separate, nationwide jurisdiction defined not by geography but by race.⁶⁷ Segregation was not merely tolerated; it was structural, voted in, and printed in the church’s own governing documents. It stayed there for nearly thirty years, until the 1968 union that created The United Methodist Church abolished it.⁶

Saying the words: repentance, out loud and on the record

What has the church done about all this? First, it built accountability into its own structure: the 1968 church created the General Commission on Religion and Race to hold the denomination to its commitments,⁸ and since 1980 the Charter for Racial Justice — readopted by General Conference again and again — has named the eradication of racism as a biblical imperative, not a political preference.⁹

Then, on May 4, 2000, the General Conference stopped generalizing and apologized. In a three-hour service of repentance in Cleveland, the church confessed “the sin of racism” committed “against those who left and against those who stayed” — an apology addressed to the AME, AME Zion, and CME churches whose founders it drove out, and to the Black members who remained and endured discrimination inside it.³⁴ Four years later the church returned to the theme, formally honoring “those who stayed.”⁸

The work has continued into this decade. In 2020 the Council of Bishops and church agencies launched a churchwide Dismantling Racism campaign.⁸ And in November 2025, United Methodists finished ratifying a rewritten Article V of the church’s constitution — a racial-justice article that names racism as sin, “a direct contradiction of God’s law of love,” and commits the church to confronting racial inequity, colonialism, white privilege, and white supremacy by name.¹⁰¹¹ The rules Wesley’s heirs once suspended are now, at last, constitutional.

Why we tell this story on our own website

Because grace without truth is just public relations. The same tradition that failed here also carries the tools of repair: Wesley’s own General Rules — do no harm, do good — and a long Wesleyan practice of putting conviction to work. Telling this history plainly is part of how we try to love God with our whole mind, and our neighbors as ourselves. It is the same reason we tell the truth about the church’s harm to Indigenous peoples, including in our own city’s story. A church that can only tell flattering stories about itself has nothing to say to a world this honest about its wounds.

Questions people ask

Why did the Methodist church split in 1844?

Over slavery — specifically whether a bishop, James O. Andrew, could continue in office while holding enslaved people. When the General Conference said no, southern conferences separated and formed the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in 1845.²⁵

What was the Central Jurisdiction?

The racially segregated, non-geographic jurisdiction into which the 1939 Methodist merger placed its Black annual conferences. It lasted until the 1968 union that created The United Methodist Church.⁶

Has the church formally apologized?

Yes. The 2000 General Conference held an Act of Repentance confessing “the sin of racism… against those who left and against those who stayed,”⁴ and in 2025 the church wrote racial justice into its constitution, naming racism as sin.¹⁰

This is our history told as honestly as we know how — and our commitment: do no harm, do good, and keep the promises the church has made. If you want to see how that conviction runs through our whole tradition, start with social justice in the Wesleyan tradition.