The Methodist Church was founded by John Wesley in 1738. Wesley was a religious reformer who believed that all people could achieve salvation only through faith in Jesus Christ alone. He founded the Methodist Church to spread his message to the masses and to help people in need live a moral life through faith and discipline.
Originally, the Methodist church did not start out as its entirely own branch. While studying at Oxford University in England, John, Charles, and several other students on campus formed a Christian study group devoted to prayer and helping the underprivileged. They would end up being labeled "Methodists," a term of criticism by their peers because of the orderly way they used rules and methods to go about their religious affairs. However, the group embraced this name as a badge of honor, refusing to let the opinions of others get in the way of their ministry.
Unfortunately, John Wesley struggled greatly in his efforts to bring his movement off the ground. After returning to England from America, he found himself disillusioned and struggling with his faith. Fortunately, after a chance meeting with a Moravian Peter Boehler, Wesley, and his brother decided to take up evangelical preaching in an effort to reach more people. This method proved to be a wild success, as people all across the country began to join their sermons. That, along with the arrival of George Whitefield to the foundation, caused attendance to swell tenfold.
Originally, Wesley did not set out to create his own church, rather opting to establish several small faith-restoration groups within the Anglican church called the United Societies. Soon, however, Methodism spread and eventually became its own separate religion when the first conference was held in 1744. By 1787, Wesley was required to register his preachers as non-Anglicans. Seeing an opportunity for preaching the gospel outside of England, Wesley ordained two lay preachers to serve in the newly independent United States of America, naming George Coke as superintendent. Wesley's strict discipline and persistent work ethic would serve him well as a preacher, evangelist, and church organizer. Inexhaustible, he pushed on through rainstorms and blizzards, preaching more than 40,000 sermons in his lifetime.
However, as time went on after his death, the methodist church would split apart into three separate branches, the Methodist Protestant Church, the Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Fortunately, the three branches eventually came to an agreement to reunite under one name, the Methodist Church. For the next 29 years, they prospered, and in 1968, bishops of the two churches took the necessary steps to combine their churches into what has become the second-largest Protestant denomination in America, The United Methodist Church. Today, the total number of Methodists in the world is estimated to be more than 75 million.