Towson United Methodist Church is a large United Methodist church located in the historic Hampton subdivision of Towson, Maryland. Its history is deeply rooted in the 19th century United States and its growth has closely followed the nation's political and sociological trends. In 1861, on the eve of the American Civil War, it was a divided congregation in a border state of divided loyalties. After the reunification of the two branches of Methodism in 1939, the First Methodist Church and the Second Methodist Church of Towson continued as separate entities for another thirteen years.
The Epsom Chapel was inaugurated and inaugurated for Towsontown's first public church service on Sunday, November 10, 1839, led by Methodist Episcopal Minister Daniel Helpler. Rachel, a third-generation minister, is a provisional elder at the United Methodist Church and looks forward to serving as pastor of Congregational Care at the National United Methodist Church. With the goal of increasing its appeal to the larger Towson community, the church now calls itself Towson Church with a Sunday worship service that combines traditional and contemporary elements. Reverend Doug Robinson-Johnson was ordained a deacon at the Louisiana Conference, where he served as a youth pastor in two congregations while earning a degree in Political Science at the Centenary College of Louisiana, affiliated with the United Methodist Church. In 1895, both groups of Methodists came together to celebrate a great revival in Towson.
With the merger in 1939 of the Methodist Episcopal (ME) and Methodist Protestant (MP) denominations in the United States, the Methodist Episcopal and Methodist Protestant Methodist churches in Towson were renamed First Methodist Church and Second Methodist Church, respectively. Ransom was chief minister of the First Methodist Church of Towson at the time of the merger of the two churches in 1952 and, later, prime minister of the Towson Unified Methodist Church during its construction and its first decade. The Towson United Methodist Church is an L-shaped structure, with the main sanctuary on a north-south axis. United Women in Faith is an organization that hosts an annual sale in the church yard to give members of their community an opportunity to clean out their closets (or fill them with bargains). He was ordained to ministry by the United Methodist Church in 1995, after studying at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado where he obtained a Master of Divinity and a Doctorate in Ministry.
The Methodist movement grew rapidly before Civil War but was plagued by disputes over slave ownership and domination by bishops which led to formal division into two groups in 1844. The northern-leaning Methodist Episcopal Congregation which continued to worship at Epsom chapel during Civil War began building its own church nearby with laying of cornerstone on August 14th 1869.
