History of the M.E. Church, Vol. IV - Media Sabda Org

HISTORY OF THE
METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH
By Abel Stevens
CHAPTER XII
GENERAL CONFERENCES, 1808 -- 1816
Necessity of a Delegated Form of the Conference -- Session of 1808 -- Committee of Fourteen"
on Representative Reorganization -- "Presiding Elder Question" -- Delegation Adopted -- The
"Restrictive Rules" -- Bishop Coke's Relation to the Church -- His attempt to Unite it with the
Protestant Episcopal Church -- Decisive Evidence that no General Conference was held between
1784 and 1792; Note -- Coke's Explanation -- His Treatment by the Conference -- McKendree
elected Bishop -- Other Proceedings -- The Occasion in the Baltimore Churches -- McKendree's
Remarkable Sermon -- Session of 1812, first Delegated General Conference -- Leading Members
-- McKendree's "Address"-- Proceedings -- Slavery -- Local Elders -- Temperance -- Elective
Presiding Eldership -- Session of 1816 -- Canadian Territorial Question -- George and Roberts
elected Bishops -- "Course of Study" -- Other Proceedings -- Slavery
I have traced the legislative development of the Church, by the General Conference, down to the
end of the session of 1804. The next meeting of that body was in Baltimore, May 6, 1808. It had
been anticipated with no little interest, as the change of its organization, to a delegated assembly, was
generally expected. For years Asbury and other leading men had advocated this modification; it had
now become an obvious necessity by the magnitude of the body, and the preponderance of the central
Conferences in its proceedings. At the present session Virginia, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New
York, had one hundred members out of the whole number of one hundred and twenty-nine recorded
at the opening of the Conference; Philadelphia and Baltimore Conferences had sixty-three, half of
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the whole, lacking three. A memorial, asking for a reconstruction of the Conference as a delegated
body, had been addressed, early in 1807, to the annual Conferences, by the New York Conference.
It was approved by the New England, Ohio, and South Carolina Conferences; but, as it proposed,
for the purpose, an extra session in the same year, it was defeated in the Virginia Conference, chiefly
by the influence of Jesse Lee, who, nevertheless, was decidedly in favor of a representative
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organization of the body, and successfully advocated the measure in the next Virginia session, held
three months before that of the General Conference. A committee of two members from each annual
Conference, making fourteen in all, was now appointed to report on the subject. They were Cooper
and Wilson, of New York Conference; Pickering and Soule, of New England; McKendree and
Burke, of the Western; Phoebus and Randle, of South Carolina; Bruce and Lee, of Virginia; Roszell
and Reed, of Baltimore; McClaskey and Ware, of Philadelphia. On the sixteenth of May they
reported a form of law, a species of constitution for a representative General Conference. It was
opposed, and postponed, that the question of the election of presiding elders, by the annual
Conferences, might first be decided. Cooper and Wells moved an elective presiding eldership. It was
decided in the negative by ballot (ayes 52, nays 8) on the eighteenth of May, and the same day the
report of the "Committee of Fourteen" was resumed, and rejected by a majority of seven out of a
hundred and twenty-one voting. Asbury and other chief advocates of the measure were profoundly
afflicted by this result. The New England, and most of the western members, who had been sent by
election, as representatives of their distant Conferences, which could not generally attend, retired,