African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church

By: Peter Hudson

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church

American Methodist denomination, known for its strong abolitionist roots and its evangelical work throughout the African diaspora, that emerged in reaction to the segregationist policies of the Methodist Church.

Since Methodism first emerged in colonial America, it has consistently attracted African American adherents. According to religious scholar Alfred J. Raboteau, “the direct appeal, dramatic preaching, and plain doctrine of the Methodists, their conscious identification with the ‘simpler sort,’ and especially their antislavery beliefs” drew blacks to the church. Indeed, African Americans had been members of New York City's John Street Methodist Church since its founding in 1768. By 1793 black membership increased to 40 percent of John Street's congregation.

Still, African Americans within the John Street Church—and within American Methodism in general—were treated as second-class citizens. They were denied ordination, forced to sit in segregated pews, and limited in their access to the Methodist itinerant clergy and the Communion table. Frustrated by such treatment, two black John Street members, Peter Williams, Sr., and William Miller, founded the African Chapel in 1796. The chapel was later renamed the Zion Church, and its members became known as the Zionites. In 1801, with the help of John McClaskey, a white minister who had opposed the independence efforts of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), founded by Richard Allen in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the Zion Church was incorporated as the African Methodist Episcopal Church of the City of New York. James Varick was its first pastor, and he later became the first black African Methodist Episcopal Zion bishop.

Although the new congregation stipulated that its trustees would be limited to people of African descent, the church property was still controlled by the white Methodist authority. Conflicts within the white Methodist organization, however, soon changed this. When the Methodist Church took legal action to centralize control of church properties in 1820, William Stillwell, the white pastor in charge of the African Methodist Church of the City of New York, resigned in protest.

Left without a pastor, the Zionites were free to pursue even greater autonomy. At their first annual conference on June 21, 1821, they voted to separate from the white-controlled Methodist Episcopal Church, which insisted on ultimate control of the church's leadership and property. The Zionites also decided against affiliating with the AME Church in Philadelphia. To distinguish between the two African Methodist Episcopal organizations, as well as to honor their original congregation, the New York Methodists voted to add Zion to their name in 1848.

Before the American Civil War (1861–1865), the African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) Church enjoyed limited growth in the northeastern United States. Although membership was small, the church included prominent abolitionists such as Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Jermain Loguen. After the Civil War, the AMEZ Church competed with the AME Church and other independent black Methodist and Baptist organizations to recruit the millions of emancipated African American men and women. Between 1821 and 1900, membership increased from 1,400 to 350,000. At the turn of the century, women entered the AMEZ clergy. Although it was not until the 1980s that significant numbers of women were ordained, in the 1890s Mary Julia Small became the first female elder in any American Methodist denomination, and Julia Foote, an author and evangelist, was also ordained.

Like other independent African American denominations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the AMEZ Church was influenced by the development of Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism and their emphasis on black political and economic autonomy. Driven by an ideology that linked the spiritual and material uplifting of people of African descent, the AMEZ Church embarked on evangelical missions to Nova Scotia, England, South America, the Caribbean, and Africa. Although the Bureau of Evangelism was founded in 1920 to coordinate missionary efforts, AMEZ evangelization beyond the United States had begun in the 1870s. The AMEZ Church currently has about 1.2 million members in the United States and 100,000 overseas, primarily in Africa and the Caribbean.

See also Black Nationalism in the United States.

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