The Methodist Church in Jamaica is one of the island’s historic Protestant churches. It traces its origin to 1789, when the English Methodist leader Dr Thomas Coke landed at Port Royal and, with the Rev. William Hammet, opened a mission in Kingston. Its early preachers were jailed and its chapels closed or burned by a planter class that feared the effect of religion on the enslaved, yet by the end of the nineteenth century it had more than 23,000 full members and 150 chapels. Today the Jamaica District of the Methodist Church in the Caribbean and the Americas (MCCA) has 27 circuits and about 170 congregations, and runs or is linked to well-known schools including York Castle High, Excelsior High and Morant Bay High. The 2011 census counted 43,336 Methodists, 1.62% of the population. Methodism gave Jamaica the words of its national anthem, through the Rev. Hugh Sherlock, and its mother church, Coke Memorial on East Parade, is one of the landmarks of downtown Kingston.
Last updated: 12 October 2026. This is a living reference: Jamaica Homes updates it when events warrant and reviews it every October. Part of our guide to Christianity in Jamaica. Figures and statistics are on Jamaica Religion Stats.
| Methodist Church in Jamaica | |
|---|---|
| Arrived | 1789, with Dr Thomas Coke, who landed at Port Royal; first meeting place in Hannah Town, Kingston, August 1789 |
| Pioneers | Dr Thomas Coke; Rev. William Hammet; early preachers Daniel Campbell, William Fish and John Williams |
| Tradition | Wesleyan Methodist, from the movement led by John and Charles Wesley in England |
| Census 2011 | 43,336 people, 1.62% of the population (down 13.4% on 2001) |
| Congregations | 172 (2017); 27 circuits (2018) |
| Regional church | Methodist Church in the Caribbean and the Americas (MCCA), autonomous since 1967; headquarters St John’s, Antigua |
| Structure | Jamaica District, one of eight MCCA districts, led by a district president with the title bishop; annual District Conference |
| District president | Bishop the Rev. Christine Gooden Benguche (in office since July 2018; named as district leader in October 2025) |
| Mother church | Coke Memorial Methodist Church, East Parade, Kingston |
| Schools | York Castle High, Excelsior High, Excelsior Community College, Morant Bay High |
| Theological training | United Theological College of the West Indies, Kingston (1966), with other Protestant churches |
| Website | jamaicamethodist.org |
Thomas Coke and the first mission, 1789–1790
Methodism began as a revival movement inside the Church of England, led by the brothers John and Charles Wesley from the late 1730s. It reached the Caribbean first in Antigua, where Nathaniel Gilbert, Speaker of the island’s House of Assembly, began preaching in 1760; the church today also honours the enslaved women Mary Alley, Mary Leadbetter and Sophia Campbell, who carried the work on Antigua’s sugar estates. In 1786 Dr Thomas Coke, an Oxford-educated clergyman and associate of John and Charles Wesley, brought a party of British preachers to the islands and stationed them in Antigua, St Kitts and St Vincent. Coke made several further voyages to the West Indies, and his History of the West Indies (1808–11) is an important early account of the missions.
Coke came to Jamaica in 1789, landing at Port Royal and crossing the harbour to Kingston. It was the first of three visits he made to the island. According to The History of the Jamaica Methodist District, cited by The Gleaner, Coke and the Rev. William Hammet set up the first Methodist meeting place and residence in a house in Hannah Town in August 1789, and Coke left Hammet in charge of a permanent base in Kingston. In 1790 the Methodists paid £1,200 for a large merchant’s house on the Parade, the square that is now St William Grant Park, and remodelled it as a chapel. That site, on East Parade, has been Methodist ever since and is today Coke Memorial Methodist Church, regarded as the mother church of Jamaican Methodism. The Methodists were the second Protestant mission to reach Jamaica, after the Moravians in 1754; Black Baptist preaching led by George Liele had begun in Kingston in 1783 (see Baptists).
Persecution and the preaching laws, 1790–1830
Planters and the colonial authorities were hostile from the start. A Kingston grand jury declared the Parade chapel “injurious to the peace and quiet of the said town” and ordered it shut. It stayed closed for about seven years; when it reopened, in 1814 according to the National Library of Jamaica, the congregation had roughly tripled, from about 600 to some 1,700 members.
The work spread nonetheless. In April 1802 local preachers from Kingston visited Morant Bay in St Thomas, followed by the Rev. Daniel Campbell and the Rev. William Fish, and by July a society of 30 people had formed. In December 1802 the Jamaica Council and Assembly passed “An Act to prevent preaching by persons not duly qualified by law”, aimed squarely at missionaries who preached to the enslaved. Campbell, Fish and a third preacher, John Williams, were all imprisoned under it, and Campbell left the island in 1803. Their petition, forwarded to the abolitionist William Wilberforce in February 1804, argued that the act was badly drafted and wrongly applied. Methodist records in London show that the act was disallowed by the Crown, and that the Wesleyan Methodist Committee then lobbied the Privy Council against any replacement, arguing that wider powers for Jamaican magistrates would breach the Toleration laws. Further restrictive measures followed in the early nineteenth century, and it was not until December 1815 that the missionary John Shipman finally obtained a licence to preach.
Even so, Morant Bay built its first chapel in 1807 and by 1815 had 155 members and was the head of a circuit. A chapel opened in Montego Bay in 1817, and the earliest surviving Methodist baptism registers in Jamaica, from Belmont in St Ann, begin in 1818. By 1824 there were eight Wesleyan mission stations. Disease took a heavy toll on the missionaries: the Morant Bay church remembers ministers who died of yellow fever and other illness in 1820, 1830 and 1835.
Slavery, rebellion and emancipation, 1820s–1838
The Methodist position on slavery in Jamaica was more divided than the Baptist one. John Wesley had attacked slavery in Thoughts upon Slavery (1774), and the missionary committee in London forbade its missionaries to own enslaved people. But its 1822 instructions told them to confine themselves to the spiritual and moral improvement of the enslaved and not to interfere in their civil condition, since access to the estates depended on the goodwill of planters. In 1824 some Jamaican missionaries went further and passed resolutions favourable to slavery, the so-called Jamaica Resolutions; London censured them and reaffirmed its opposition. Other missionaries, such as John Barry, opposed slavery openly and suffered for it. In 1830 the Wesleyan Methodist Conference in Britain resolved against slavery throughout the empire and urged congregations to petition Parliament.
The Christmas Rebellion of 1831–32, led by the Baptist deacon Sam Sharpe, brought the planters’ anger down on all the missions. Planters claimed that Baptist and Methodist missionaries had incited the rising, and the Colonial Church Union, a planters’ militia movement, set out to drive them from the island. Six Methodist chapels were burned or badly damaged, against fourteen Baptist churches; chapels in Montego Bay and Port Antonio were closed by magistrates; and the missionaries Murray and Greenwood were imprisoned for preaching. The Rev. George Bridges, the Anglican rector who led the Union’s propaganda, targeted Methodists more than any other group. In the best-known attack, on 6 April 1832, Union members broke into the Falmouth home of the young missionary Henry Bleby, beat him, covered him in tar and twice tried to set him alight, until his wife knocked the candle away and Black and coloured townspeople came to his rescue. His attackers were indicted in Montego Bay but escaped conviction before a jury of Union members.
The violence, reported in Britain by missionaries of all the dissenting churches, helped turn public opinion against slavery. The Emancipation Act took effect on 1 August 1834, and full freedom followed on 1 August 1838. The St Ann’s Bay Methodist Church dates its founding to that day, Emancipation Day 1838.
The nineteenth century: growth, division and depression
After emancipation Methodist work spread rapidly among the freed people, then fell back during the economic depression of the mid-century, before growing steadily again from about 1870. Kingston had three principal chapels: Coke, Wesley Methodist Church on Tower Street, whose baptism registers begin in 1829, and Ebenezer, which seated 800. The brick chapel that still stands on East Parade was completed around 1840–41; it was named Coke Memorial in honour of the founder, and the House of Assembly, once hostile, is reported to have helped fund it. In 1837 a split in the movement reached Jamaica when the Wesleyan minister Thomas Pennock and his congregation joined the Wesleyan Methodist Association, a breakaway body that gave laymen more say in church government. Its Jamaican work, later part of the United Methodist Free Churches, had circuits in Kingston, St Ann, Clarendon, St Mary and Providence; by 1907 it had ten circuits and 39 chapels, and these continued into the reunited Methodist Church.
The main Wesleyan body became part of a West Indian Conference, whose first president was the missionary George Sargeant, formerly chairman of the Jamaica District. In 1875 the church bought the York Castle estate in the hills of St Ann (see York Castle) and opened a theological college and high school there in 1876; it educated a generation of notable Jamaicans before closing for lack of funds in the 1890s. By the 1897 report the Wesleyan Methodists in Jamaica had 23,338 full members, 1,674 probationers, 13,856 Sunday-school scholars, 150 chapels seating 48,000 and 110 other preaching places, divided into district synods for Kingston, Montego Bay, St Ann and Morant Bay, with a fifth for Haiti and Santo Domingo. Good town chapels stood at St Ann’s Bay, Falmouth, Montego Bay, Morant Bay, Port Antonio, Buff Bay, Port Morant, Brown’s Town, Stewart Town, Mandeville and Savanna-la-Mar. The church published its own paper, The Methodist Messenger, and its ministers already served congregations of Jamaican migrants in Panama and Colón.
The twentieth century
The Kingston earthquake of 14 January 1907 badly damaged Coke Memorial; the congregation restored it in 1908 to the same Gothic outline, and sources differ on how much of the earlier fabric survived. In the political awakening of the 1930s its steps on the Parade were a favoured platform for speakers. Marcus Garvey, Jamaica’s first National Hero, grew up a few hundred metres from the St Ann’s Bay Methodist Church and worshipped there as a child.
The church’s most influential twentieth-century figure was the Rev. Hugh Braham Sherlock (1905–1998), born in Portland, the son of a Methodist minister. He served in the Turks Islands and the Ocho Rios circuit before founding the Kingston Boys’ Club in 1940, which grew into Boys’ Town in Trench Town, and he wrote the words of the national anthem, “Jamaica, Land We Love”, adopted at independence in 1962. Methodist education expanded at the same time. Excelsior High School, founded in 1931 by A. Wesley Powell, became a Methodist school; the church took over Northside Secondary School in Brown’s Town in 1957 and reopened it as York Castle High School in January 1958; and Morant Bay High School opened in 1961 on land bought from the church, the first high school in St Thomas. In 1966 Methodists joined other Protestant churches in founding the United Theological College of the West Indies in Kingston, alongside the Anglicans, Baptists, Moravians and the churches that now form the United Church.
The MCCA and the Jamaica District since 1967
In 1967 the Methodist districts of the region left the oversight of the British Methodist Conference and became the Methodist Church in the Caribbean and the Americas, legally established by a Deed of Church Order as an autonomous church and inaugurated at its conference centre in St John’s, Antigua, on land given by Vere Bird. Hugh Sherlock was its first president. The Belize-born minister Claude Cadogan, who served for decades at Coke Memorial, was its first secretary and second president; during his presidency the church ordained its first woman minister, the Rev. Hyacinth Boothe. In 2017 the Jamaica District marked 50 years of autonomy with a service of thanksgiving; it then had 172 congregations.
The Rev. Everald Galbraith led the Jamaica District for nine years before being elected president of the whole MCCA in 2018. In January 2018 the District Conference, meeting in Montego Bay before a congregation of more than 4,000, elected the Rev. Christine Gooden Benguche as his successor and adopted a strategic plan for 2018–2024, “A Church Without Walls”, and a safeguarding policy for children and vulnerable adults. She was installed at Coke Methodist Church on 8 July 2018, the first woman to lead Jamaican Methodism in its 229-year history. The district marked its 230th anniversary on 20 January 2019 with a re-enactment of Coke’s crossing from Port Royal, a “walk of witness” from Victoria Pier and a service at Coke Memorial. In May 2024 Jamaica hosted the MCCA’s 41st Connexional Conference at Providence Methodist Church in Liguanea, where Bishop Juan Miguel Simpson Bennett was elected president and the Jamaican attorney Lilieth Deacon, chair of Excelsior High School, vice-president for 2024–2027.
Beliefs and worship
Methodists stand in the Wesleyan tradition of Protestant theology. They believe that God’s grace is offered to all people, not only to an elect few; that a person can know the assurance of forgiveness; and that the Christian life should grow in holiness and love of neighbour. Jamaican Methodist leaders often describe the church’s mission in Wesley’s words, “to spread scriptural holiness through the land.” Methodists recognise two sacraments, baptism, including the baptism of infants, and the Lord’s Supper. Worship is ordered but less formal than Anglican liturgy, and congregational singing, above all the hymns of Charles Wesley, is central. Methodists mark Aldersgate Sunday each May, recalling John Wesley’s religious experience in London on 24 May 1738.
Distinctively Methodist features of church life in Jamaica include the circuit system, in which one minister serves several congregations with the help of trained lay preachers; the role of laypeople in church government; strong choral music, represented by the Methodist Chorale, founded in 1966 as the Corporate Area Methodist Youth Choir; and the ordination of women, which the MCCA has practised for decades and which in 2018 brought a woman to the head of the Jamaica District. The heads of the MCCA and of its districts carry the title bishop, although the church does not have bishops in the Anglican sense.
Organisation
The Jamaica District is one of eight districts of the MCCA, which in all has about 62,000 members, 700 congregations and 168 ministers across some two dozen countries. The district is led by a president, styled bishop, elected by the District Conference, with a district secretary; since 2018 the secretary has been the Rev. Dr Wayneford McFarlane. The district’s congregations are grouped into 27 circuits, each under a superintendent minister. The MCCA’s published list of stations names these circuits:
| Region | Circuits |
|---|---|
| Kingston and St Andrew | Coke; East Kingston; Providence; Western St Andrew; Grateful Hill |
| St Catherine | Spanish Town; Portmore; Watsonville |
| St Thomas and Portland | St Thomas; Manchioneal; Port Antonio |
| St Mary and St Ann | Annotto Bay; Fletcher; Ocho Rios; St Ann’s Bay; Brown’s Town/Edmondson; Beechamville/Bensonton |
| Central parishes | May Pen; Frankfield; Manchester; Lyndhurst; St Elizabeth |
| Western parishes | Montego Bay/Mt Ward; Falmouth; Duncans; Lucea; Savanna-la-Mar |
Grouping by region is Jamaica Homes’ own; circuit names as listed by the MCCA. Some circuits cross parish lines.
| Body | Role |
|---|---|
| Methodist Church in the Caribbean and the Americas (MCCA) | Autonomous regional church since 1967; Connexional Conference meets every three years; headquarters St John’s, Antigua |
| MCCA officers 2024–2027 | President Bishop Juan Miguel Simpson Bennett; vice-president Lilieth Deacon (Jamaica); connexional secretary Rev. Jacqueline Liddell |
| Jamaica District Conference | Meets annually; elects the district president; the 2018 meeting was the district’s 202nd |
| District president (bishop) | Rev. Everald Galbraith (to 2018); Rev. Christine Gooden Benguche (from 2018) |
| Circuits | 27, each under a superintendent minister |
| Ecumenical links | Jamaica Council of Churches (Bishop Gooden Benguche was its president until January 2026); Caribbean Conference of Churches; World Methodist Council |
Schools and institutions
Methodists were early providers of education to the freed population, and the church’s schools remain one of its main contributions to Jamaican life.
| Institution | Place | Founded | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| York Castle High School | Egypt, Brown’s Town, St Ann | 1957–58 | Takes its name from the church’s 1876 college at York Castle; opened January 1958 with 195 day students and 40 boarders; officially opened by Norman Manley |
| Excelsior High School | Mountain View Avenue, Kingston | 1931 | Founded by A. Wesley Powell; Methodist; past students include Louise Bennett-Coverley, Courtney Walsh and Chris Gayle |
| Excelsior Community College | Kingston | 1974 | Founded under Thomas Edward Dwyer as Jamaica’s first community college; part of the Excelsior (EXED) family |
| Morant Bay High School | Morant Bay, St Thomas | 1961 | First high school in St Thomas; first building an old Methodist manse |
| York Castle college and high school | York Castle, St Ann | 1876 | Theological college and school on an 800-acre estate; closed in the 1890s |
| United Theological College of the West Indies | Mona, St Andrew | 1966 | Ecumenical seminary training Methodist ministers with other Protestant churches |
| Methodist Chorale | Kingston | 1966 | Choir founded by Pastor Eric Bailey; renamed 1973 |
| Claude Cadogan Methodist Museum | 2015 | Opened to mark the centenary of the Rev. Claude Cadogan |
Notable churches
| Church | Place | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Coke Memorial Methodist Church | East Parade, Kingston | Site Methodist since 1790; present brick chapel c. 1840–41, restored after the 1907 earthquake; described as the mother church and as a national monument |
| Wesley Methodist Church | Tower Street, Kingston | One of the three main Kingston chapels of the nineteenth century; baptism registers from 1829; hosted the 1980 national ecumenical service for Independence |
| Ebenezer Methodist | Kingston | Seated 800 in the 1890s; marriage registers from 1838 |
| Coke Methodist | Morant Bay, St Thomas | Society formed 1802; first chapel 1807; graves of early missionaries in the churchyard |
| St Ann’s Bay Methodist | Bravo Street, St Ann’s Bay | Founded 1 August 1838; Marcus Garvey’s childhood church; destroyed by fire in 1898 and again in February 2018, rebuilt from 2019 |
| St John’s Methodist | Humber Avenue, Montego Bay | Venue of the 2018 district elections |
| Providence Methodist | Liguanea, St Andrew | Host of the 2024 MCCA Connexional Conference; Governor-General Sir Florizel Glasspole was buried in its cemetery |
| Black River Methodist | Black River, St Elizabeth | Stone walls crumbled and roof lost in Hurricane Melissa, 2025 |
| Frazerville Methodist | Duanvale, Trelawny | About 145 years old; left with three walls and no roof after Hurricane Melissa |
Notable Methodists
- Dr Thomas Coke (died 1814), founder of the Methodist missions in the West Indies; landed in Jamaica in 1789 and made three visits; died at sea on his way to Ceylon.
- Rev. William Hammet, first missionary left in charge of the Kingston work in 1789.
- Rev. Henry Bleby, missionary in Hanover and Trelawny, tarred and beaten by the Colonial Church Union in Falmouth in 1832.
- Rev. Hugh Sherlock OJ, OBE (1905–1998), author of the words of the national anthem, founder of Boys’ Town and first president of the MCCA.
- Rev. Claude Cadogan (born 1915 in British Honduras), long-serving minister at Coke Memorial, first secretary and second president of the MCCA; reached 100 in 2015.
- Bishop Everald Galbraith, president of the Jamaica District for nine years to 2018 and MCCA president 2018–2024.
- Bishop Christine Gooden Benguche, first woman to lead the Jamaica District (from 2018) and president of the Jamaica Council of Churches until January 2026.
- Lilieth Deacon, attorney-at-law and chair of Excelsior High School, MCCA vice-president from 2024.
- A. Wesley Powell, educator, founder of Excelsior High School in 1931.
Membership and growth
Methodism was never one of Jamaica’s largest churches by census count, but it was long among the most influential, through its schools and its ministers’ public role. Its numbers have fallen in recent decades, as have those of the other historic churches, while Pentecostal, Church of God and Adventist churches have grown.
| Census | Methodists | % of population | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2001 | 50,024 | 1.93% | – |
| 2011 | 43,336 | 1.62% | ▼ 13.4% |
Source: STATIN, Population and Housing Census 2011. The 2022 census religion tables have not yet been published. See Jamaica Religion Stats.
| Year | Church figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 1814 | about 1,700 members at the Kingston chapel | The Gleaner; NLJ |
| 1815 | 155 members at Morant Bay | Jamaican Ancestral Records |
| 1824 | 8 mission stations | Cockpit Country heritage |
| 1881 | about 24,000 at morning worship in 100 chapels on Census Sunday | Handbook of Jamaica |
| 1897 | 23,338 full members, 1,674 probationers, 150 chapels | Handbook of Jamaica |
| 2017 | 172 congregations | The Gleaner |
| 2018 | 27 circuits | The Gleaner |
Between 2001 and 2011 the Methodist share fell from 1.93% to 1.62%, a loss of 6,688 people, in line with the 10.8% fall across the historic churches as a group. The Jamaica District’s 2018–2024 strategic plan made growing membership through evangelism its first priority. No recent district-wide membership figure has been published that Jamaica Homes could verify.
Hurricane Melissa and current issues
Hurricane Melissa, the Category 5 storm that struck Jamaica’s south-west coast on 28 October 2025, hit Methodist congregations hard in Westmoreland and St Elizabeth. An MCCA update on 29 October, signed by the connexional president and secretary, reported that at least two chapels had severe structural damage, two had lost their roofs and one had partly lost its roof, while most congregations had not yet been heard from. Bishop Christine issued a pastoral note to the district the next day. In Black River, which the Prime Minister called “ground zero”, the historic stone walls of the Methodist church crumbled and its roof was torn away; the congregation continued to meet in safer parts of the property. In Duanvale, Trelawny, the 145-year-old Frazerville Methodist Church was left with three walls and no roof, and engineers advised that it be demolished and rebuilt, although church leaders had hoped to keep the old structure as heritage.
The Methodist Church in Britain and the Methodist Church in Ireland approved a joint £24,000 World Mission Fund grant for the district’s relief work in November 2025, when the district secretary, the Rev. Wayneford McFarlane, reported damage to church buildings, schools, manses and members’ homes. The Jamaica District then launched Project Nehemiah: Rebuild and Restore, which by February 2026 was delivering care packages, tarpaulins and supplies to communities in St Elizabeth. For the wider damage to Jamaica’s churches, see our analysis Jamaica, a Nation of Churches, Is Quietly Changing Its Faith.
Other recent events include the rebuilding of St Ann’s Bay Methodist after the 2018 fire, which destroyed its 110-year-old pipe organ; Bishop Gooden Benguche’s two-year term as president of the Jamaica Council of Churches, which ended in January 2026, while the Rev. Pauline DaCosta of St John’s, Montego Bay, became a vice-president; and renewed public attention to Coke Memorial, described in The Gleaner in September 2026 as “the chapel that refused to fall”. The MCCA’s current officers were elected for the 2024–2027 triennium.
Timeline
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1760 | Methodist preaching begins in Antigua with Nathaniel Gilbert. |
| 1786 | Thomas Coke brings the first British Methodist missionaries to the West Indies. |
| 1789 | Coke lands at Port Royal; first Methodist meeting place set up in Hannah Town, Kingston, in August. |
| 1790 | Merchant’s house on the Parade bought for £1,200 and opened as a chapel; later closed by a grand jury for about seven years. |
| 1802 | Methodism reaches Morant Bay (April); Assembly passes the act against preaching by persons “not duly qualified” (December). |
| 1803–04 | Preachers Campbell, Fish and Williams imprisoned; petition to London; the act is disallowed. |
| 1807 | First Methodist chapel built at Morant Bay. |
| 1814 | Kingston chapel reopens. |
| 1815 | John Shipman obtains a licence to preach (December). |
| 1817 | Methodist chapel opens in Montego Bay. |
| 1824 | Eight Wesleyan stations; London censures the pro-slavery “Jamaica Resolutions”. |
| 1831–32 | Christmas Rebellion; six Methodist chapels burned or damaged; Henry Bleby tarred in Falmouth (6 April 1832). |
| 1834 | Emancipation Act takes effect (1 August). |
| 1837 | Thomas Pennock leads a breakaway to the Wesleyan Methodist Association. |
| 1838 | Full freedom (1 August); St Ann’s Bay Methodist Church founded the same day. |
| c. 1840–41 | Present Coke Memorial chapel completed on East Parade. |
| 1876 | York Castle theological college and school opens in St Ann. |
| 1897 | 23,338 full members and 150 chapels reported. |
| 1907 | Kingston earthquake badly damages Coke Memorial; restored 1908. |
| 1931 | Excelsior High School founded by A. Wesley Powell. |
| 1940 | Hugh Sherlock founds the Kingston Boys’ Club, later Boys’ Town. |
| 1958 | York Castle High School opens in Brown’s Town. |
| 1961 | Morant Bay High School opens. |
| 1962 | Sherlock’s “Jamaica, Land We Love” adopted as the national anthem. |
| 1966 | United Theological College of the West Indies founded; Methodist Chorale formed. |
| 1967 | Methodist Church in the Caribbean and the Americas becomes autonomous; Sherlock first president. |
| 1974 | Excelsior Community College founded. |
| 2015 | Claude Cadogan turns 100; Methodist museum opened in his name. |
| 2017 | Jamaica District marks 50 years of autonomy; 172 congregations. |
| 2018 | St Ann’s Bay Methodist destroyed by fire (February); Christine Gooden Benguche installed as first woman district president (8 July); Everald Galbraith becomes MCCA president. |
| 2019 | 230th anniversary launched with a re-enactment of Coke’s harbour crossing (20 January). |
| 2024 | Jamaica hosts the 41st MCCA Connexional Conference (May). |
| 2025 | Hurricane Melissa (28 October) damages churches in Westmoreland, St Elizabeth and Trelawny. |
| 2026 | Project Nehemiah rebuilding programme under way. |
Updates to this page
| Date | Change |
|---|---|
| 12 October 2026 | Page created. |
Sources: Statistical Institute of Jamaica, Population and Housing Census 2011; The Gleaner, “Methodists commemorate 230th anniversary of ministry in Jamaica” (18 January 2019), “New Methodist bishop to be installed today” (7 July 2018), “Methodists appoint first local female head in 229 years” (9 July 2018), “Methodists maturing at 50” (25 May 2017), “Returning to glory yet again: fire-ravaged St Ann’s Bay Methodist Church being rebuilt” (6 October 2019), “Churches and missionaries under attack” (6 August 2023), “Beating and tarring of Reverend Henry Bleby” (13 August 2023), “National anthem” (7 August 2025), “Hannah Town revisited” (22 September 2025), “Faith shaken, not broken” (2 November 2025), “It was God’s wrath” (7 December 2025), “The chapel that refused to fall” (27 September 2026), “Excelsior honours past principals” (28 October 2014), Rebecca Tortello, “Pieces of the Past: places of worship in downtown Kingston”; Jamaica Observer, “Methodists elect first woman president” (3 February 2018), “Regional Methodists elect leaders for the next three years” (10 June 2024), “Bishop Garth Minott elected new president of Jamaica Council of Churches” (25 January 2026), “Rev Claude Cadogan scores a century” (9 May 2015), “Methodist Chorale marks milestone” (19 August 2016), “Remembering Father Hugh Braham Sherlock” (3 October 2020); Methodist Church in the Caribbean and the Americas, home page, officers 2024–2027, stations list and Hurricane Melissa update (29 October 2025); Methodist Church in Britain, “Prayer for those affected by Hurricane Melissa” (October 2025), “Methodist communities respond to Hurricane Melissa’s devastation in Jamaica” (6 November 2025), “Dailey and Babs” (24 February 2026); Methodist Heritage (UK), abolition and anti-slavery; SOAS Library, Methodist Missionary Society archives (Jamaica act of December 1802 and related papers, 1803–04); National Library of Jamaica, Digital Collection (Coke Methodist Church, Wesley Methodist, Hugh Sherlock, A. Wesley Powell, Glasspole funeral programme); Handbook of Jamaica (1900), via Jamaican Family Search; Jamaican Family Search, Wesleyan Methodist registers; Jamaican Ancestral Records, Coke Methodist, Morant Bay; Kingston Past; Cockpit Country heritage, Methodists; Aspects of Education in Jamaica 1850–1914, Old York Castle; My United Methodists (UK), Wesleyan Methodist Association in Jamaica; World Council of Churches, MCCA member profile; Wikipedia, entries on the MCCA, Thomas Coke, York Castle High School, Excelsior High School, Morant Bay High School and the United Theological College of the West Indies.