The History of Allentown United Methodist Church

To everything there is a season, wrote the ancient preacher, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.  In those words is the abiding rhythm of the rolling seasons:  the stately measure of rural life since the dawn of time.  At the start of the nineteenth century, Allentown moved to that rhythm through a world which is now almost beyond our comprehension.  Of the titanic social and scientific revolutions which would shortly shatter that world forever, there was scarcely a sign.  Of our modern world, there was scarcely a hint.

That old world took its religion very seriously, indeed, and placed a proper value on a proper pious face.  Religion, after all, provided an eternal sanction for a peaceful and stable social order.  If it were a thing of the spirit, it was the spirit of the home and the fireside.  But, if for most it was a time of quiet piety, for a few it was a time of burning faith and a search for God’s own truth.

Among those afire with the spirit were the Methodist circuit riders who left the comfortable life to travel the back roads, bringing the Word to all who would hear it.  In a well regulated world such people are rightly seen as a disruptive influence.  It takes a particular kind of heroism to follow your calling and forsake the good opinion of society.  It takes another kind to stay at home and follow that call in daily life.  There were heroines in that day, too.  Consider the case of Mrs. Cafferty.  On June 14, 1809, the session of the Allentown Presbyterian Church noted that she had joined with the Methodists “without privity of consent”.  A committee was appointed to lay before her “the impropriety and obliquity of (her) conduct”.  What such social pressures must have meant in a small community may only be imagined.  Still, a year later, there were sufficient “improper” persons of a like mind to support the permanent establishment of the Allentown Methodist Episcopal Church.

The year 1810 has now slipped irrevocably from living memory.  Were it not for the labors of one man, much of the story of those early days might be lost.  In 1897, as the church approached its 90th anniversary, the Reverend Sherman G. Pitt wrote a brief history incorporating the memories of some who had seen the first decades of the church’s growth.  As part of the 190th anniversary celebration, we have chosen to reprint his text and make it available to a new generation.  It is at once the basic source of our knowledge of that period and a piece of history in its own right – a prime example of 19th century ecclesiastical prose.

In the 20th century we have yet to see the successor of Sherman Pitt; to continue our story we must rely on fragments of memory, bits of memorabilia and snippets from the pages of the Allentown Messenger.  If our story becomes episodic and a trifle chaotic, perhaps, in its own way, it reflects our century as Pitt reflected his.