"Commissioned by the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry for use in United Methodist doctrine/polity/history courses." This in-depth analysis of the connection between United Methodist polity and theology addresses ways in which historical developments have shaped--and continue to shape--the organization of the church.This revised edition incorporates the actions of The United Methodist General Conference, 2004. The book discusses continuing reforms of the church's plan for baptism and church membership, as well as the emergence of deacon's orders and other changes to ordained ministry procedures. The text is now cross-referenced to the Book of Discipline, 2004, including the revised order of disciplinary chapters and paragraph numbering. Denominational statistics are updated, along with references to recent works on The United Methodist Church and American religious life.

Explores the emergence of African Methodism within the black Atlantic and how it struggled to sustain its liberationist identity.

Race Patriotism: Protest and Print Culture in the A.M.E. Church examines important nineteenth-century social issues through the lens of the AME Church and its publications. This book explores the ways in which leaders and laity constructed historical narratives around varied locations to sway public opinion of the day. Drawing on the official church newspaper, the Christian Recorder, and other denominational and rare major primary sources, Bailey goes beyond previously published works that focus solely on the founding era of the tradition or the eastern seaboard or post-bellum South to produce a work than breaks new historiographical ground by spanning the entirety of the nineteenth century and exploring new geographical terrain such as the American West. Through careful analysis of AME print culture, Bailey demonstrates that far from focusing solely on the “politics of uplift” and seeking to instill bourgeois social values in black society as other studies have suggested, black authors, intellectuals, and editors used institutional histories and other writings for activist purposes and reframed protest in new ways in the postbellum period. Adding significantly to the literature on the history of the book and reading in the nineteenth century, Bailey examines AME print culture as a key to understanding African American social reform recovering the voices of black religious leaders and writers to provide a more comprehensive and nuanced portrayal of the central debates and issues facing African Americans in the nineteenth century such as migration westward, selecting the appropriate referent for the race, Social Darwinism, and the viability of emigration to Africa. Scholars and students of religious studies, African American studies, American studies, history, and journalism will welcome this pioneering new study. Julius H. Bailey is the author of Around the Family Altar: Domesticity in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1865–1900. He is an associate professor in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Redlands in Redlands, California.