The Asbury-Gibson Bond

Francis Asbury and Richard Wright set sail for America on 4 September 1771 as John Wesley’s emissaries to the growing Methodist constituency in the American Colonies. Asbury preached his first sermon in America at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on 27 October 1771, just two weeks before Tobias Gibson was born in South Carolina. The lives of Asbury and Gibson would become interlaced with devoted friendship, mutual respect, and a common calling. The similarities in their lives were numerous.

Tobias Gibson was born along Great Pee Dee River, South Carolina on 10 November 1771. Tobias entered into ministry when he was still only twenty years old, in 1792. In 1799, at age twenty-seven, Gibson answered Bishop Asbury’s call to go to the far off Natchez District, then on the edge of the American frontier, very much like Asbury, who was twenty-six when he answered John Wesley’s call to go to America. Unlike Asbury, Gibson’s ministry was relatively short: just thirteen years. Gibson died 5 April 1804, near Vicksburg, Mississippi at the age of thirty-two and a half years.