Methodist Episcopal Church, South in the context of "Evangelical United Brethren Church"

Auburn University (informally known as AU or Auburn) is a public land-grant research university in Auburn, Alabama, United States. With more than 27,900 undergraduate students, over 6,200 graduate students, and a total enrollment of more than 34,100 students with 1,435 faculty members, Auburn is the second-largest university in Alabama. It is one of the state's two flagship public universities. The university is one of 146 U.S. universities classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity".

Auburn was chartered in 1856, as East Alabama Male College, a private liberal arts college affiliated with the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. In 1872, under the Morrill Act, it became the state's first land-grant university and was renamed the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama. In 1892, it became the first four-year coeducational school in Alabama and in 1899 was renamed Alabama Polytechnic Institute. In 1960, its name was changed to Auburn University.

The Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) was the oldest and largest Methodist denomination in the United States from its founding in 1784 until 1939. It was also the first religious denomination in the US to organize itself nationally. In 1939, the MEC reunited with two breakaway Methodist denominations (the Methodist Protestant Church and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South) to form the Methodist Church. In 1968, the Methodist Church merged with the Evangelical United Brethren Church to form the United Methodist Church.

The MEC's origins lie in the First Great Awakening when Methodism emerged as an evangelical revival movement within the Church of England that stressed the necessity of being born again and the possibility of attaining Christian perfection. By the 1760s, Methodism had spread to the Thirteen Colonies, and Methodist societies were formed under the oversight of John Wesley. As in England, American Methodists remained affiliated with the Church of England, but this state of affairs became untenable after the American Revolution. In response, Wesley ordained the first Methodist elders for America in 1784. Under the leadership of its first bishops, Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury, the Methodist Episcopal Church adopted episcopal polity and an itinerant model of ministry that saw circuit riders provide for the religious needs of a widespread and mobile population.

The Methodist Church was the official name adopted by the Methodist denomination formed in the United States by the reunion on May 10, 1939, of the northern and southern factions of the Methodist Episcopal Church along with the earlier separated Methodist Protestant Church of 1828. The Methodist Episcopal Church had split in 1844 over the issue of slavery and the impending Civil War in America. During the American Civil War, the southern denomination was known briefly as the Methodist Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America.

Its book of liturgy used for the reunited denomination was The Book of Worship for Church and Home, editions of which were published in 1945 and later revised in 1965. They had two official hymnals, the first being The Methodist Hymnal, published in 1935 and 1939 by the same three church bodies that later became The Methodist Church. It was replaced in 1966 by The Book of Hymns.

The Southern Methodist Church is a Methodist denomination of Protestant Christianity. The church maintains headquarters in Orangeburg, South Carolina.

The church was formed in 1940 by conservative members of the former Methodist Episcopal Church, South, which in 1939 had reunited with the Methodist Episcopal Church to form the Methodist Church.