Authority and Power in Early American Methodism, Highlighting Lorenzo Dow and Francis Asbury

Abstract

Methodism uniquely sought to maintain competing commitments to a religious life of direct personal encounters with divine presence and a religious community of well-structured order. As with any effort to keep two conflicting principles in tension, the pursuers of this balance between spiritual power and institutional authority disagreed with one another on where the fulcrum should be placed. Such debates were intensified in an early American republic where questions of authority and power were the site of profound cultural change. A comparison of Francis Asbury and Lorenzo Dow shows us how two inheritors of the Methodist tension sought to navigate its competing demands in an early national context and how they arrived at different destinations.