August 31, 1801 — to Thornton Fleming
WINCHESTER, VA.
ASB_VOL3.PDF, PDF page 282
Asbury is going on down the western route toward Kentucky and Tennessee. He is at Winchester, Virginia, and is probably thinking of passing Thornton Fleming’s district to the right of his way. He is giving Fleming a report of the work as well as his own. WINCHESTER, VA.
August 31, 1801
[TO THORNTON FLEMING]1
My very dear Brother:
I am pleased to hear the glad tidings of great joy, that the wilderness and solitary places are glad for them, (the people of God), and may the desert blossom as the rose. I have been foot-fast two months in Philadelphia; I am now crippling along to Nolichuckey, or as far as I can go. We have pleasing hopes of a general revival, it speeds east and west, and about the centre. As many as eighty have joined at one meeting eastward. Dover and Milton had their Pentecost that continues to this day I hope. Near one hundred, it was thought, were wounded, cured, and crippled at the great Dover meeting on Whitsunday. O, my brother, preach fully upon holiness in every sermon, where there is but one believer. I feel, seriously, that such multitudes of young converts have been born since the gospel came to the continent; and so few old people are changed, and so few old believers are sanctified. We must urge them to go on to possess the land. I am as ever thine,
FRANCIS ASBURY
Courtesy of the Boston Public Library
Notes (1)
- Presiding elder of Ohio District, Thornton Fleming (1764-1846) first preached west of the mountains on the Randolph Circuit in 1792-93. He was assigned in the East until 1801 when he was returned by the appointment of Bishop Asbury to the district west of the mountains as presiding elder. He spent the remainder of his ministry in the western Pennsylvania region, except 1805, being the oldest charter member of the Pittsburgh Conference when the conference was organized in 1825. He had been admitted on trial in 1787. He served as presiding elder from 1801 to 1805, with a second term from 1806 to 1810. He served a third term when two districts were organized in the region in 1819, serving as presiding elder of the Pittsburgh District from 1819 to 1823. After the formation of the new Pittsburgh Conference in 1825, he was again presiding elder of the Pittsburgh District from 1826 to 1828. Thus he served as a presiding elder for a total of fourteen years. He was, in fact, Asbury’s chief lieutenant on the frontier in the region of western Pennsylvania. (W.G. Smeltzer.) ↩