Last week on Five Minutes in Church history, we started looking at early developments in Methodist history.

We got to four of them, and that leaves one more, and that is the saddlebag ministry.

Now, this has to do with Methodism on the frontier of the early

United States in its early Republican period, and these were circuit riders. These ministers

covered literally hundreds of miles of territory, and they would have to do so in all kinds

of weather, in all kinds of terrain,

through dangers, toils, and snares. One statistic has it that nearly half of circuit-riding

preachers between 1800 and 1850 never reached their 30th birthday. The conditions were so challenging. Well, I want to focus on one of those

circuit riders in particular. He survived much past his 30th birthday. He made it all the way to his

87th year and spent 70 of those years as a preacher. Peter Cartwright was born

in 1785 to a farming family in Virginia. His dad was not only a farmer, he was a Revolutionary

War veteran. When Cartwright was five years old, the family moved to Kentucky. In 1801, Cartwright, who described himself as a

hell on the frontier young man, and after a rowdy time at the conclusion of a wedding, experienced

a serious time of introspection and soul searching, and this resulted in his conversion. He immediately

joined in with the Methodists. Two years later, he was a circuit-riding preacher, and he preached

until the day he died. He's described as having a meteoric rise through Methodism, and much of that has to do with his relationship

with Francis Asbury, who greatly admired the stamina and grit and spiritual nature of Peter Cartwright.

Cartwright espoused what he called a primitive Methodism. This is even reflected in the library. His library consisted of a Bible,

a hymn book, and the Methodist Book of Discipline. And he kept all of those three in his trusty

saddlebag. He also dabbled in politics. In 1828, he was elected to the Illinois legislature. Then in 1838, he was

re-elected to the legislature, and he beat out a lawyer by the name of Abraham Lincoln. But then,

in 1846, Abraham Lincoln returned the favor, and he beat Cartwright in a race for the United

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