John Wesley Hughes

Who was John Wesley Hughes?

John Wesley Hughes was an American minister. He was born in Owen County, Kentucky and was converted at the age of sixteen in a Methodist revival meeting in an old schoolhouse. Hughes attended Kentucky Wesleyan College in Millersburg, Kentucky, and served as a pastor in the Kentucky Conference of the Methodist Church before pursuing further education at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

After serving twelve years as a pastor and one year as an evangelist, Hughes felt that God was leading him to establish a distinctly religious school where students could receive a thorough college education under the direction of a faculty wholly consecrated to God. Hughes stated:

Hughes opened the Kentucky Holiness College in September 1890 at Wilmore, Kentucky. After a year of operation, Hughes changed the name of the school to Asbury College in honor of Methodist Bishop Francis Asbury, who had organized the Kentucky Conference of the Methodist Church in 1790. Also in 1790, Bishop Asbury had established Bethel Academy, a Methodist school and the only one of its kind west of the Allegheny Mountains, just three and a half miles south of Wilmore. This local connection gave even more meaning to the new name for the college, which Hughes viewed as less pretentious than the original name.