The original document the below came from is part of the Crawford County Chapter of the Ohio Genealogical Society’s Church Collection and is dated April 12, 2012, but there is not a date of when the document was written.
United Brethren In Christ was an American religious sect which originated in the last part of the 18th century under the leadership of Philip William Otterbein (1726–1813), pastor of the Second Reformed Church in Baltimore, and Martin Boehm (1725–1812), a Pennsylvanian Mennonite of Swiss descent. Otterbein and Boehm licensed some of their followers to preach and did a great work, especially through class-meetings of a Wesleyan type; in 1789 they held a formal conference at Baltimore, and in 1800, at a conference near Frederick City, Maryland, the Church was organized under its present name, and Otterbein and Boehm were chosen its first bishops or superintendents.
The ecclesiastical polity of the Church is Wesleyan and its theology is Armenian: 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.
In 1889, a controversy over membership in secret societies, such as the Freemasons, the proper way to modify the church’s constitution, and other issues split the United Brethren into majority liberal and minority conservative blocs, the latter of which was led by Bishop Milton Wright (father of the Wright Brothers). The minority withdrew and formed the body initially known as the United Brethren in Christ of the Old Constitution, now called the Church of the United Brethren in Christ.
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