High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, or Methodist Episcopal Church South, was the so-called "Southern Methodist Church" resulting from the split over the issue of slavery in the Methodist Episcopal Church which had been brewing over several years until it came out into the open at a conference held in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1844. This body maintained its own polity until it reunited with the Methodist Episcopal Church and the Methodist Protestant Church to form the The Methodist Church in 1939, which in turn later (1968) merged with the Evangelical United Brethren Church to form The United Methodist Church. Some more theologically conservative MECS congregations dissenting from the merger formed the Southern Methodist Church in 1940.