Methodist Episcopal Church

By: Peter Hudson

Source:

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

Methodist Episcopal Church

American Protestant denomination whose initial progress in ministering to African Americans was thwarted by segregationist policies.

When the Methodist Episcopal Church formally separated from the Anglican Church on Christmas Eve 1784, it declared that within a year all slaves owned by Methodists would be set free. The church soon drifted from this position, however. “On the local level it was not expedient to free slaves,” writes religious scholar Richard E. Wentz. “Preachers began to develop a theological position that concerned itself only with the saving of souls and left social ethics to the government.” Individual parishes were allowed to develop their own positions regarding slavery, but the questions it provoked haunted the church well into the next century.

By the 1830s a number of congregations in the North had left the church because this ambivalent posture conflicted with their own abolitionist stance. In the South, however, Methodist planters vehemently fought for the institution that was the foundation of their economy. To further protect themselves from attacks by abolitionist Methodists, in 1844 they convened the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.

The church's wavering position on slavery did not, however, halt its growth among African Americans. The Methodist itinerant clergy, following the teachings of founder John Wesley (“All God's children had a soul,” he once wrote, “and the only problem was to find it and save it”), took it upon themselves to seek black audiences. By the time of the convening conference of 1784, of the fifty-one societies that met, thirty-six included black members. Francis Asbury (1745–1816), the first elected Methodist bishop, who was seminal in establishing the church in the United States, helped to recruit black members out of his desire for a racially inclusive church and a belief in indigenous evangelism. Asbury ordained Harry Hosier, the first African American Methodist preacher, and dedicated Philadelphia's African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) and New York's African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (AMEZ). Even so, the institutional segregation of the church and its general reluctance to ordain black clergy stymied its growth among African Americans until the Civil War and prompted the rise of independent churches such as the AME and AMEZ.

After the war African American membership in the Southern church plummeted, and those who remained formed the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church. This new church, alongside both the independent congregations and the main body of the church, grew rapidly in the postbellum era. The social programs for recently emancipated blacks, established by the Northern missionaries flocking to the South, helped to swell African American membership.

This growth was not sustained. When the fractured church decided to regroup in the early twentieth century, the position of African Americans within it was hotly debated. Amid protest from black and white Methodists, at the 1939 Uniting General Conference segregation was written into the Methodist constitution, and all African American members were regulated to a central jurisdiction that existed until the late 1960s. After 1939 the black Methodist population did not increase—despite a rise in the national African American population—and the number of black churches declined. In 1968 the United Methodist church was formed from a merger of the Methodists and the Evangelical United Brethren Church. During the Uniting Conference that established the new church, the question of race—this time framed in discussions about approaches to inclusivity—was again an issue.

Since then the representation of African Americans in the Methodist hierarchy has increased, including the election in 1984 of the first black woman bishop, the Reverend Leontine Kelly. The most radical efforts to eliminate racism within the church and return it to its original commitment to social justice have come from the Black Methodists for Church Renewal, founded in 1968. Their work has led to antidiscriminatory legislation and various development projects within African American communities.

See also Abolitionism in the United States; Slavery in the United States.

processed xml | source xml