Matters of faith — how Methodism reached a Delaware bay town

Written August 2026 · Sources last checked 2 August 2026 · Corrections: hello@lewestown.com

Whitefield: the voice that did not need a church

George Whitefield (1714–1770) was an Anglican priest who never settled in a parish. At Oxford he joined the “Holy Club” and met John and Charles Wesley; unlike them he embraced Calvinism and led what became the Calvinistic Methodist movement. He first travelled to British North America in 1738.

In mid-August 1739 he sailed again for the New World, aged twenty-four. He reached Philadelphia that year, where he met Benjamin Franklin — who was unpersuaded by the theology, impressed by the performance, and shrewd enough to print the sermons. Over his career Whitefield preached perhaps eighteen thousand times to something like ten million listeners across the British Empire.

What made him consequential on this coast is that he preached in the open air. A man who could hold a field full of people did not need a congregation, a building or a bishop’s permission, which is exactly how the revivals of the Great Awakening reached small places like Lewes at all.

It has to be said plainly that Whitefield owned enslaved people, and campaigned for slavery to be permitted in Georgia, while also condemning the cruelty of individual planters. Both things are true of him, and a page about faith in a Delaware town — a slave state until 1865 — should not quietly drop the second half.

Asbury: the man who built the machine

Revival without organisation evaporates. Francis Asbury (1745–1816) supplied the organisation. Born in Staffordshire, he came to the colonies and became one of the first two bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church, organised in the United States in 1784.

For forty-five years he travelled by horseback and carriage across an enormous territory, reaching settlements too small and too poor to support a settled minister. The circuit system he drove was ideally suited to a thinly populated agricultural peninsula: one preacher, many congregations, a fixed rotation. Delmarva was the sort of country Methodism was built for, and it took root here with unusual depth.

Asbury also kept a journal, which is now a significant historical source in its own right for frontier and small-town America — a record of towns and villages, roads and weather, written by someone who saw more of the young republic at ground level than almost anyone.

What it left in Lewes

The physical residue is modest and easy to miss. Lewes Methodists raised a meeting house in 1790, six years after the denomination was formally organised in America — and that plain frame building survives, though only because it was moved twice and converted into a private home. Our page on the old Methodist meeting house follows what happened to it.

That is the pattern for early Methodist architecture everywhere: preaching boxes, built cheap, replaced as soon as a congregation could afford better, and therefore mostly gone. The grand church buildings in Lewes belong to the older established denominations — St. Peter’s Episcopal with its ninety-foot spire, and the Presbyterian church on Kings Highway. Methodism’s mark on the town is in the number of adherents, not in the skyline.

From the original page at this address

“It was in mid-August of 1739 that the ship Elizabeth set sail from England enroute to the New World. On board was the Rev. George Whitefield, age 24…”

Hazel D. Brittingham, “Matters of Faith”, Lewestown Publishers, 1997. © Copyright 1997 Hazel D. Brittingham. Short extract quoted for commentary; the full original is at the Internet Archive.