Free Methodist Church
religious denomination in the United States
The Free Methodist Church (FMC) is a Methodist Christian denomination within the holiness movement, based in the United States. It is evangelical in nature and is Wesleyan–Arminian in theology.
The Free Methodist Church has members in over 100 countries, with 62,516 members in the United States and 1,547,820 members worldwide. The Light & Life Magazine is their official publication. The Free Methodist Church World Ministries Center is in Indianapolis, Indiana.
History
The Free Methodist Church was organized at Pekin, New York, in 1860. The founders had been members of the Methodist Episcopal Church but were excluded from its membership for earnestly advocating what they saw as the doctrines and usages of authentic Wesleyan Methodism. Under the leadership of the Rev. Benjamin Titus (B. T.) Roberts, a graduate of Wesleyan University, the movement spread rapidly. Societies were organized, churches built, and the work established.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Free Methodist Church” is religious denomination in the United States. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Free, Methodist and Church, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3066164. VIAF identifies the subject as 142495307. The Library of Congress control number is n80062929. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1860.
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This entry incorporates text from “Free Methodist Church” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.