The Free Methodist Church sounds at first like Methodism without an admission charge. Strangely enough, that’s not entirely wrong. One of the reasons these Methodists were called “Free” was that they opposed the nineteenth-century practice of renting church pews. Wealthier families could pay for desirable seating while poorer worshipers were left with whatever remained. Free Methodists believed the gospel shouldn’t come with preferred seating.
But free pews were only part of the story. The founders also stood for freedom from slavery, freedom from class distinctions within the church, greater freedom for women to exercise ministry, and freedom for the Holy Spirit to work without worship becoming cold and formal. The Free Methodist Church emerged in 1860 as a reform movement within American Methodism, and its founders weren’t trying to abandon John Wesley. They thought Methodism needed to become more Wesleyan again.
B. T. Roberts and a Methodist Rebellion
The central figure in the story is Benjamin Titus Roberts, usually known as B. T. Roberts. He was a Methodist Episcopal minister in western New York who became increasingly concerned about what he regarded as spiritual and moral decline within his denomination. Roberts believed Methodism was becoming too respectable, too comfortable with wealth and social status, and too distant from the revivalistic Christianity of John Wesley.
Roberts was particularly disturbed by pew rentals. The practice seems almost bizarre today, but prosperous nineteenth-century churches sometimes financed themselves by renting particular pews or seats to families. The best locations naturally went to people who could afford them. Roberts believed this introduced economic distinctions into a church where rich and poor were supposed to stand equally before God.
He also opposed slavery at a time when American churches were being torn apart by the issue. Roberts belonged to the abolitionist wing of Methodism and believed the church needed to take a clear moral stand rather than accommodate slavery for the sake of institutional peace. His reform agenda increasingly put him at odds with Methodist leadership.
When Reform Gets You Expelled
Roberts wasn’t particularly skilled at keeping his concerns to himself. In 1857 he published an article called “New School Methodism” criticizing what he believed was a movement away from historic Wesleyan Christianity. His opponents responded, denominational trials followed, and Roberts was eventually expelled from the Methodist Episcopal Church.
His supporters believed he had been treated unjustly, and the controversy helped create momentum for a new Methodist body. In 1860, representatives gathered at Pekin, New York, and organized the Free Methodist Church.
There’s a delightful postscript. Decades after Roberts died, the Methodist Episcopal Church reconsidered his case and restored his ministerial credentials posthumously in 1910.
It’s nice to know he got his credentials back. It would have been even nicer if he’d been alive to receive them.
What Did “Free” Mean?
The name communicated much of the new denomination’s reform agenda. Free Methodists wanted free seats rather than rented pews and freedom for enslaved people rather than accommodation with slavery. They wanted freedom from social distinctions that gave wealthy church members greater influence simply because they had greater resources.
They also emphasized freedom in worship. Roberts and his companions believed the Holy Spirit should have room to work among God’s people rather than worship being reduced to polished ceremony. This didn’t mean disorder for its own sake. It reflected the revivalistic side of Wesleyan Christianity, where conversion, testimony, prayer, spiritual experience, and visible responses to God were expected parts of Christian life.
Eventually the idea of freedom would also become associated with the denomination’s expanding opportunities for women in ministry. Taken together, these themes gave Free Methodism an identity that was simultaneously conservative in theology and reform-minded in practice.
Wesleyan Through and Through
Theologically, Free Methodists stand squarely within the Wesleyan-Arminian tradition. They affirm the Trinity, the deity and humanity of Christ, his atoning death and bodily resurrection, salvation by grace through faith, the authority of Scripture, the work of the Holy Spirit, and the return of Christ. Their understanding of salvation follows John Wesley much more closely than John Calvin.
Like other Wesleyans, Free Methodists emphasize prevenient grace. Sin has damaged humanity so thoroughly that people can’t simply initiate their own salvation, but God’s grace reaches people before conversion and enables a genuine response to the gospel. God offers salvation rather than restricting Christ’s saving work to a predetermined elect.
That doesn’t mean people save themselves. Grace comes first, accompanies the human response, and makes salvation possible. Wesleyan theology simply insists that God’s gracious initiative doesn’t eliminate meaningful human response.
Salvation That Changes People
Free Methodists also inherited Wesley’s conviction that salvation involves considerably more than forgiveness. God doesn’t merely declare sinners forgiven and then leave them exactly as he found them. The Holy Spirit works within believers to transform character and produce holiness.
That brings us to sanctification, one of the most important words in Free Methodist theology. Wesley taught that Christians should expect God’s grace to produce genuine spiritual transformation. Holiness wasn’t reserved for an unusually spiritual handful of believers. It belonged to normal Christian discipleship.
Free Methodists historically taught entire sanctification, reflecting the broader nineteenth-century Holiness Movement. The language could sometimes be misunderstood as claiming that Christians reach a state in which they become incapable of sinning or making mistakes. Wesley’s central idea, however, concerned perfect love—a heart increasingly governed by love for God and neighbor.
The Free Methodist Church today frequently describes this heritage as life-giving holiness. That choice of words is significant because the denomination has become willing to acknowledge a problem that developed within parts of the Holiness tradition.
When Holiness Became a List
Holiness movements can easily move from asking whether a person’s heart belongs completely to God to asking whether his tie is the right width. Free Methodists weren’t immune.
Over time, behavioral standards could become detailed rules concerning clothing, entertainment, jewelry, dancing, tobacco, alcohol, and other aspects of daily life. Some restrictions grew from legitimate concerns about Christian character, while others risked turning holiness into conformity to a particular religious culture.
Modern Free Methodists have deliberately tried to distinguish biblical holiness from legalism. Their emphasis on life-giving holiness presents sanctification as liberation from sin and transformation through the Holy Spirit rather than merely compliance with an expanding catalog of prohibitions.
That’s an important correction within their own tradition. A movement founded to recover spiritual life can become just as institutional and rule-bound as the church it originally criticized. Apparently every revival eventually needs somebody to revive the revival.
The Authority of Scripture
Free Methodists maintain a strong evangelical understanding of the Bible. Scripture is understood as God’s inspired Word and the final authority for Christian faith and practice. That commitment distinguishes the denomination from the more theologically pluralistic forms of contemporary mainline Methodism.
This doesn’t mean every Free Methodist interprets every passage identically. Wesleyans have their own theological framework, and their conclusions sometimes differ substantially from Reformed, Baptist, Lutheran, or Pentecostal interpretations. The important point is that the denomination understands Scripture as authoritative over the Church rather than merely one historical witness among several competing authorities.
That becomes especially significant when comparing Free Methodists with the modern United Methodist Church. The two denominations share Wesleyan ancestry while having developed rather different institutional and theological cultures.
Baptism and Communion
Free Methodists recognize Baptism and the Lord’s Supper as sacraments and understand them within the Wesleyan concept of God’s grace. They practice infant baptism as well as the baptism of converts, placing them within the historic Methodist tradition rather than the Baptist understanding of believer’s baptism alone.
Baptism doesn’t mean that the baptized person automatically possesses saving faith. God’s grace must ultimately be received personally. Infant baptism instead reflects the conviction that God’s grace precedes our conscious response and that children can be welcomed within the covenant community of the Church.
Communion likewise isn’t treated as a bare memorial. The Lord’s Supper is a means of grace through which believers encounter God’s sustaining presence and are strengthened spiritually. Wesley encouraged frequent Communion, and Free Methodism inherited that sacramental dimension of his theology.
Women in Ministry
Here’s where the Free Methodist story gets particularly interesting. B. T. Roberts supported women’s ordination in the nineteenth century.
This wasn’t something Free Methodists invented after the rise of modern feminism. Roberts believed Scripture and the gospel supported women exercising ministry, and in 1890 he proposed that the denomination recognize ordination without distinctions based upon sex, race, or social condition. The proposal failed by a remarkably close 41–37 vote.
Roberts responded the way theologians sometimes do when they lose a vote: he wrote a book. His Ordaining Women, published in 1891, argued that women should be permitted to exercise the ministries for which God had called and equipped them. The denomination moved gradually in that direction, granting women limited ordination as deacons in 1911 and eventually establishing equal ministerial status for women and men in 1974.
Today women may serve throughout Free Methodist ministry and leadership. Christians who interpret passages such as 1 Timothy 2 differently will disagree with that conclusion, but it’s historically important to recognize where the Free Methodist position came from. In this denomination, women’s ministry wasn’t imported recently from mainline Protestantism. The argument goes almost all the way back to the founder.
Marriage and Sexuality
The Free Methodist Church retains the historic Christian understanding of marriage as a covenant between a man and a woman. It hasn’t followed the United Methodist Church in permitting same-sex marriage or revising its clergy standards around same-sex relationships.
At the same time, official Free Methodist teaching emphasizes the dignity of people who experience same-sex attraction and rejects hostility or dehumanizing treatment. The denomination attempts to combine traditional Christian sexual ethics with compassionate pastoral ministry.
That places Free Methodists in an interesting position within contemporary Methodism. They ordain women and have a long history of social reform, yet they remain conservative concerning marriage and sexuality. That combination doesn’t fit neatly into the categories Americans often use to classify denominations as either “conservative” or “progressive.”
Church history is usually more complicated than our labels.
Bishops and Connectional Government
Free Methodists retain the episcopal and connectional structure inherited from Methodism. They have bishops, superintendents, conferences, ordained ministers, and local congregations joined together through a larger denominational structure.
Bishops provide spiritual and organizational leadership, while superintendents oversee networks of churches and pastors. Local congregations have meaningful responsibility for ministry but aren’t independent churches in the Baptist or nondenominational sense.
One especially important Free Methodist principle is the participation of laypeople alongside clergy in church government. The denomination has historically emphasized substantial lay representation rather than allowing ordained ministers to monopolize decision-making. This fits its founding concern that ecclesiastical institutions should serve ordinary Christians rather than develop into a privileged religious class.
Abolitionism and Racial Equality
Opposition to slavery belongs near the center of Free Methodist history. Roberts and other early Free Methodists believed Christian holiness had unavoidable social implications. A church couldn’t preach love of neighbor while remaining indifferent to people being bought and sold.
That commitment continued after slavery ended. Free Methodists established ministries among Black Americans and developed interracial congregations at a time when segregation remained common throughout American Christianity. The denomination didn’t perfectly escape the racial attitudes of the surrounding culture, but racial equality was embedded unusually deeply within its founding ideals.
This helps explain why contemporary Free Methodists frequently connect holiness with justice. They don’t regard social concern as necessarily opposed to evangelical faith. Their founders were simultaneously revivalists, biblical conservatives, abolitionists, and social reformers.
Those categories fit together more naturally in nineteenth-century Wesleyanism than our modern political categories sometimes allow us to imagine.
Love-Driven Justice
The modern Free Methodist Church describes one of its central values as Love-Driven Justice. The denomination remains involved in ministries addressing poverty, racial reconciliation, human trafficking, modern slavery, refugees, vulnerable children, and other social concerns.
That emphasis grows directly from its origins. A denomination that began by opposing slavery and class privilege would have difficulty claiming that social conditions don’t concern the gospel.
Free Methodists nevertheless distinguish their understanding of justice from a purely political program. Ideally, social action grows from love of God and neighbor rather than allegiance to a political ideology. Christians can agree that exploitation, racism, slavery, and abuse are evil while still disagreeing about the best public policies for addressing particular problems.
That distinction is worth preserving, especially in an age when the word justice can mean very different things depending upon who’s using it.
The Holy Spirit and Worship
Early Free Methodists wanted greater freedom for the Holy Spirit to work in worship. Their services emerged from the revivalistic world of nineteenth-century Methodism, where spontaneous prayer, testimony, heartfelt preaching, singing, conversion experiences, and visible emotional responses weren’t considered embarrassing interruptions to respectable Christianity.
That doesn’t make Free Methodists Pentecostal. The denomination existed for more than forty years before the modern Pentecostal movement emerged, and speaking in tongues isn’t a defining Free Methodist doctrine.
Still, the family resemblance is there. Wesleyan sanctification theology helped shape the Holiness Movement, and the Holiness Movement provided much of the theological soil from which Pentecostalism grew. Early Pentecostals borrowed language about sanctification, Spirit empowerment, healing, testimony, revival, and experiential Christianity from the world Free Methodists already inhabited.
If Pentecostalism has Wesleyan grandparents, the Free Methodists are definitely somewhere in the family photograph.
Missions
Free Methodists developed a strong missionary tradition relatively early. Missionaries carried the movement beyond North America, and Free Methodism eventually became considerably more international than many Americans realize.
Today the worldwide Free Methodist family includes churches across Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and other regions. In many areas outside the United States, Free Methodist churches operate schools, medical ministries, leadership-training programs, humanitarian projects, and church-planting movements alongside evangelism and discipleship.
This international growth also means that American Free Methodism represents only one part of a much larger Wesleyan family. Like several denominations we’ve encountered, the center of gravity is no longer exclusively where the movement began.
The Free Methodist Way
Contemporary Free Methodists summarize much of their identity through The Free Methodist Way, built around five values: Life-Giving Holiness, Love-Driven Justice, Christ-Compelled Multiplication, Cross-Cultural Collaboration, and God-Given Revelation.
Those five phrases tell us quite a bit about the denomination. Life-Giving Holiness preserves Wesley’s concern with sanctification while distancing it from legalism. Love-Driven Justice continues the abolitionist and reform tradition. Christ-Compelled Multiplication emphasizes evangelism, discipleship, and church planting. Cross-Cultural Collaboration reflects the denomination’s increasingly international character. God-Given Revelation places Scripture at the center of Christian authority.
It’s a modern vocabulary for some very old Free Methodist instincts.
Free Methodist and United Methodist
Putting the Free Methodist Church beside the United Methodist Church helps demonstrate just how diverse the Methodist family has become. Both trace their theological heritage through Wesley. Both practice infant baptism, recognize Baptism and Communion as sacraments, ordain women, employ bishops, emphasize sanctification, and maintain connectional church government.
Yet their trajectories have diverged significantly. The UMC has developed into a broad mainline Protestant denomination with substantial theological diversity and, since 2024, official acceptance of same-sex marriage and gay clergy. Free Methodists remain much more explicitly evangelical in biblical authority, conversion, holiness, missions, and traditional sexual ethics.
The comparison also demonstrates why women’s ordination by itself tells us surprisingly little about where a denomination falls on the broader theological spectrum. Free Methodists can ordain women while remaining conservative on numerous doctrines where mainline denominations have changed.
History rarely organizes itself according to our convenient charts.
The Free Methodist Church Today
Today’s Free Methodist Church retains a recognizable combination of Wesleyan theology, evangelical conviction, spiritual experience, social concern, missions, and connectional church life. It remains much smaller than the United Methodist Church in the United States, but its influence reaches far beyond its American membership through the worldwide Free Methodist movement.
Its contemporary challenge is essentially the same challenge B. T. Roberts faced: how do you pursue holiness without becoming legalistic, pursue justice without allowing politics to replace the gospel, preserve theological convictions without becoming spiritually lifeless, and maintain denominational structures without allowing the institution to become more important than the mission?
Those aren’t particularly Free Methodist problems. They’re church problems.
Why the Free Methodist Church Matters
The Free Methodist Church is easy to overlook because it isn’t one of America’s largest denominations. But its story reveals an important strand of Christianity that doesn’t fit comfortably into our modern categories. Its founders were theologically conservative but socially reformist, revivalistic but sacramental, Methodist but willing to challenge Methodist institutions, committed to holiness but eventually willing to acknowledge the dangers of legalism.
B. T. Roberts believed Christianity should produce people who were genuinely free: free from slavery, free from class privilege, free from the domination of sin, free to follow God’s calling, and free to experience the transforming work of the Holy Spirit.
And yes, free to sit down in church without paying for the pew. Maybe the name wasn’t so strange after all.