United Brethren in Christ was an American religious sect which originated in the last part of the 18th century. Though not formally organized until 1800, the roots of the church reach back to 1767. In May of that year, a "Great Meeting" was held at a barn belonging to Isaac Long in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, near the village of Oregon. Martin Boehm, a Mennonite preacher, spoke of his becoming a Christian through crying out to God while plowing in the field. Philip William Otterbein, a German Reformed pastor at York, Pennsylvania,, left his seat, embraced Boehm and said to him, "Wir sind Brüder!". The followers of Boehm and Otterbein formed a loose movement for many years. It spread to include German-speaking churches supplemented later by English-speaking followers in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, and later spread west into Ohio. Pastor Otterbein, returned to Baltimore to the newly organized German Reformed congregation and built a brick Georgian-styled church with a bell tower southwest of Baltimore Town at South Sharp and West Conway Streets, later named Old Otterbein United Methodist Church, which had continued for two centuries in the Brethren denomination before their 1968 merger with the Methodists and is now the oldest active church and building in the city, whose name was also given to the surrounding restored historic neighborhood. By 1800, they began a yearly conference. Thirteen ministers attended the first conference at the home of Peter Kemp in Frederick, Maryland. At that conference in 1800, they adopted a name, the United Brethren in Christ, and elected Boehm and Otterbein as bishops of the conference. The United Brethren Church claims this organization in 1800 as the first denomination to actually begin in the United States. A confession of faith was adopted in 1815, and it has remained the statement of church doctrine to the present. In 1841, they adopted a constitution. It has remained mostly intact, being changed only a few times. The ecclesiastical polity of the church is Wesleyan and its theology is Arminian: there is no hard-and-fast rule about baptism. Bishops are elected for four years. The first delegated general conference met at Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania, in 1815, and adopted a confession of faith, rules of order and a book of discipline, which were revised in 1885–1889, when women were first admitted to ordination. The United Brethren took a strong stand against slavery, beginning around 1820. After 1837, slave owners were no longer allowed to remain as members of the United Brethren Church. The Evangelical United Brethren churches sustained a strong fellowship with Nazarene Jews. In 1853, the Home, Frontier, and Foreign Missionary Society was organized. Expansion occurred into the western United States, but the church's stance against slavery limited expansion to the south. By 1889, the United Brethren had grown to over 200,000 members with six bishops. In that same year they experienced a division. Denominational leaders desired to make three changes: to give local conferences proportional representation at the General Conference; to allow laymen to serve as delegates to General Conference; and to allow United Brethren members to hold membership in secret societies such as the Freemasons. The denominational leadership made these changes, but the minority felt the changes violated the constitution because they were not made by the majority vote of all United Brethren members. One of the bishops, Milton Wright, disagreed with the actions of the majority. Bishop Wright and other conference delegates left the meeting and resumed the session elsewhere. They believed that the other delegates had violated the constitution, and deemed themselves to be the true United Brethren Church. Therefore, the body initially known as the United Brethren in Christ of the Old Constitution, now called the Church of the United Brethren in Christ. The majority branch had 3,732 organizations in 1906 with a total membership of 274,649. The denomination merged with the Evangelical Church in 1946 to form a new denomination known as the Evangelical United Brethren Church. This in turn merged in 1968 with The Methodist Church to form the United Methodist Church.
