"Live while you preach"

John Wesley Redfield, controversial lay evangelist in the Methodist Episcopal (ME) and later Free Methodist churches, was the cofounder of the Free Methodist Church, and in the 1840s and 1850s, he had a broad ministry in the ME Church and beyond. An outspoken abolitionist, he was controversial among Methodist leaders and in the ME press as his revivals typically were marked by powerful emotional manifestations, including dramatic conversions and people being slain in the Spirit." "Live While You Preach" makes available for the first time Redfield's autobiography, a 425-page handwritten manuscript he wrote shortly before he died. Redfield's manuscript details his early life; conversion; brief stormy marriage and divorce; abolitionist activities; contacts with Phoebe Palmer, one of the founders of the Holiness Movement; his occasional practice of medicine; and remarkable revivals. This book presents Redfield's manuscript in its entirety - with critical and contextual notes - and serves as an important primary source for the study of the Wesleyan Holiness tradition, American Methodism, revivalism, and abolitionism.