Francis Asbury

Francis Asbury: Five Thousand Miles of Soul follows the remarkable life of Francis Asbury, the English-born preacher who crossed the Atlantic in 1771 and spent fifty years on horseback building the Methodist Episcopal Church across a young and untamed America. From his humble origins in Handsworth, England — shaped by a mother whose dawn prayers never ceased — to his ordination as the first bishop of American Methodism at the Christmas Conference of 1784, Asbury rode through wars, wilderness, and failing health without ever stopping. He crossed the Appalachians more than sixty times, preached in barns and beside rivers, argued against slavery before presidents, and died in a stranger's house with nothing to his name but a Bible and a journal. This is a novel of the interior life behind that extraordinary exterior: the doubts, the loneliness, the deep silences on the road, and the unshakeable conviction that the people at the end of the next road were always worth the journey.