Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"By 1850, Methodists in the United States numbered 2.7 million, including children. Soon after the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Methodists began to make use of 'camp meetings.' . . . American Methodists held three to four hundred of them annually, drawing an attendance reliably estimated at about a million people a year. . . . To carry on between camp meetings or visits by a circuit rider, the Methodists organized their followers into 'classes' of about thirty persons each. . . . The Methodist system of organization demonstrated impressive effectiveness; no other association of any kind in the United States grew so dramatically and over so large an area in so short a time as Methodism. . . . Women and Africans could be class leaders; they could also become exhorters, the term for the laypeople who delivered what were in effect mini-sermons. . . . . Most Methodist preachers declared the Bible to be self-explanatory, requiring no learned exegesis. Following Wesley, the great majority embraced Arminianism, that is, belief in free will, rather than the philosophical determinism of Calvinism."