John Street United Methodist Church is both an active worship place and a landmark of religion in America. From our start as the first Methodist society in colonial America, our members sparked movements in worship, social uplift, publishing, and equality.
See where it started.
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We congratulated George Washington when he was inaugurated after the Revolutionary War…we were just steps away. And we hosted everything from early New York stock shareholder meetings to Alexander Graham Bell's first telephone. Because the story of Methodism is the story of America.
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A convert to Methodism in Ireland, Heck had moved with her husband to colonial New York. On finding him gambling with friends one night, she threw his cards into the fire, ran to her cousin Philip Embury, and demanded that Embury preach as he had for Methodist societies in Ireland. It led to the first Methodist meeting in America...and she became the mother of American Methodism.
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Philip Embury's first sermon in his living room had only 5 listeners...but word spread. By 1767, a growing congregation began meeting above a supply store in a sail rigging loft on what is now William Street. And by 1768, they had purchased land and built their first meeting house, known as "Wesley Chapel," to Embury's own design.
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New York was America's first capitol and, fittingly, the site that shaped how Methodism would spread in the new country. As our nation's tireless first bishop, Asbury led a conference at Wesley Chapel in 1789 which founded the Methodist Book Concern, adopted the church's first emblem, decided to send preachers out to New England's frontiers…and drafted a formal greeting to a newly-inaugurated George Washington.
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African Americans had attended the society as equal participants since its very first meeting. However, when James Varick, a freedman and member since the church's first year, became licensed to preach, a part of the congregation moved to segregate church activities based on race. Varick and thirty other members chose to withdraw...founding what became the AME Zion Church.
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Mason organized the very first Sunday School in New York (at what was by then known as John Street Methodist Episcopal Church) in 1810. She would go on to build some of the city's major charitable institutions for women and kids. Mason not only founded the Female Assistance Society and the Female Benevolent Society but also the Female Missionary Society, a precursor of the UMC's General Board of Global Ministries.
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Crosby was a poet and lyricist who was blind from infancy. An advocate for special education who was active in Methodist churches throughout New York, she wrote over 8,000 hymns, including her classic "Blessed Assurance" in 1873.
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When you give to our Church Building fund, 100% is used to preserve our landmark of early American Methodism and its museum of 18th- and 19th-century artifacts.
You keep the Methodist flame alive.
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