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Asa was born on May 3, 1781 in New Jersey, United States, the son of Jonathan and Mary (Clark) Shinn, and a descendant of John Shinn, who emigrated from England to America and was in New Jersey as early as 1680. Both of Asa's parents were Quakers. When he was seven years of age they moved to one of the inland counties of Virginia, and seven years later to what is now Harrison County, West Virginia.
His only schooling was received from a former sailor who wandered through the country conducting schools as opportunity afforded.
In 1798, under the preaching of Rev. Robert Manly, a Methodist circuit rider, Shinn professed conversion and three years later, influenced by the scarcity of ministers in the West, he joined the Baltimore Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and was assigned to the Redstone circuit in southwestern Pennsylvania.
In 1803 he was transferred to the Western Conference, which included all the territory west of the Alleghany Mountains. Here he remained until 1807, serving circuits in western Virginia, southern Ohio, and Kentucky. He returned to the Baltimore Conference in 1807.
Until 1816, when he was forced by mental derangement temporarily to discontinue his work, he had charge of circuits in Maryland and the District of Columbia. Except for the short periods of inactivity caused by his ailment, Shinn continued to hold important circuits and stations in the Baltimore Conference until his transfer to the Pittsburgh Conference in 1825, where he served as presiding elder of the Pittsburgh district and as minister at Washington.
In 1824 he became greatly interested in the agitation for certain reforms in the government of the Methodist Episcopal Church. When the Baltimore Conference in 1827 expelled a minister for circulating Mutual Rights, Shinn became active in his defense. Other reformers were also suspended.
At the General Conference of 1828 the great issue was the appeal of these persons for restoration. Shinn presented their case in an eloquent speech which won the admiration even of his opponents, and had the vote been taken at once, the reformers would probably have been reinstated; but it was delayed until the next day and their cause was defeated. Convinced that all chance at conciliation was past, the leading reformers now proceeded to form separate congregations and Conferences, and on November 2, 1830, a convention of delegates from the disaffected groups met in the city of Baltimore and there formed the Methodist Protestant Church.
From 1834 to 1836 he was in Baltimore, editing with Nicholas Snethen, the new denominational paper, Mutual Rights and Methodist Protestant, and thereafter for the next ten years held important pulpits in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Allegheny City.
He published in 1812, entitled An Essay on the Plan of Salvation; and, On the Benevolence and Rectitude of the Supreme Being, appeared in 1840.
He died in 1853.
Asa Shinn became one of the most voluminous and effective contributors to reformers established in The Mutual Rights of Ministers and Members of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Shinn took a leading part in organization of Methodist Protestant Church, was chosen president of the Ohio Conference and president of the Pittsburgh Conference. He was the author of two considerable books on theology: An Essay on the Plan of Salvation, On the Benevolence and Rectitude of the Supreme Being.
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Shinn took the anti-slavery view and defended that position in a speech of great power.
During the course of his life Shinn suffered four periods of insanity, resulting from a fracture of the skull in his boyhood. The first three of these, in 1816, 1820, and 1828, were of short duration; from the last, in 1843, he never recovered.
He possessed a logical mind and was particularly impressive in public address.
He married Phebe Barnes of western Virginia, by whom he had two sons and two daughters. After the death of his first wife he married Mary Bennington (Wrenshall) Gibson, widow of Woolman Gibson, and daughter of John Wrenshall, by whom he had one son.
