Francis Asbury

Francis Asbury was a Staffordshire blacksmith's son who volunteered at a Methodist conference in 1771 when John Wesley asked who would go to America. When the Revolution came, every other English preacher Wesley had sent went home; Asbury hid out in Delaware for two years rather than abandon the societies, and that decision is why American Methodism survived the war with an English leader intact.

He spent forty-five years on horseback, covering something like 270,000 miles over roads that were often just traces, crossing the Alleghenies some sixty times, sleeping in cabins and preaching in barns. He ordained around four thousand preachers and never had a home of his own or a wife. Wesley named him superintendent in 1784; Asbury refused the office until the American preachers voted for him, then took the title bishop, which annoyed Wesley considerably.

In his lifetime American Methodists grew from about twelve hundred to more than two hundred thousand.