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Orange Scott's heart bled for the slaves. But when he tried to convince his Methodist denomination that abolition was the only answer, they did not thank him for it.

Born in 1800 into a very poor Vermont family, Scott received only 13 months of formal education before becoming a Methodist preacher. When in 1833 he became convinced of the evils of slavery, he sent copies of William Lloyd Garrison's newspaper, the Liberator, to 100 Methodist preachers in New England. This made abolitionists of most of them and made Scott famous—or infamous—in the denomination.

At this time, many who opposed slavery refused to call for its immediate end—and many Methodists worried that taking an abolitionist stance would hinder the Gospel in the South. Scott, however, preached conversion, holiness, and the end of slavery as one message.

In 1836, Scott stood up at the Methodist Episcopal Church's General Conference to share his passion for abolition. For his trouble, he was labelled a "reckless incendiary" and stripped of his presiding eldership. Unbowed, he continued agitating against Methodist tolerance of slavery until, in 1842, he tired of the fray and made his exit.

Scott soon joined others who had left the MEC in forming the Wesleyan Methodist Connection of America. The Connection barred slaveholders and slavery sympathizers, insisting that slaveholding could not be part of a holy life.

After Scott's death in 1847, the Wesleyans continued to preach sanctification. And when emancipation was finally accomplished, they joined the national holiness revival and turned their attention to saving the souls and purifying the hearts of all Americans.

—Sarah E. Johnson

During the 1850s, all hell—or heaven, depending on perspective—broke loose in the Genesee Conference (western New York) of the Methodist Episcopal Church. A party labelled by its opponents "the Nazarites" arose to take their respectable denomination to task for condoning secret societies, renting out pews for as much as $100 a year, and becoming—as they saw it—stiff and formal in their worship practices.

Leading the dissent was Benjamin Titus Roberts, a man who, like Charles G. Finney, had put aside a promising legal career to plead the cause of Jesus. Roberts saw "the Bible standard of Christianity" John Wesley had upheld going into eclipse and Methodism becoming a rich man's preserve. Particularly odious to Roberts were pew rentals. By auctioning pews to the highest bidder, he charged, Methodist churches were saying, "We want none in our congregation but those who are able to move in fashionable circles."

In 1858, the Genesee Conference expelled Roberts. Two years later, he and his supporters organized a new church committed to free pews and freedom in worship. They called themselves Free Methodists.

Roberts took his commitments to biblical Christianity and the poor into his new denomination. He emphasized entire sanctification as a distinct work of the Spirit after justification. He spoke against slavery and supported a death tax that would prevent the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few.

Though Free Methodists have consistently upheld the doctrine of entire sanctification, some say Roberts's concern for the poor has declined in the denomination. Yet in recent years Free Methodists have begun to reclaim the kind of vision that prompted Roberts to claim, "My special mission is to preach the gospel to the poor."

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