Methodist Church

By: Terry D. Goddard

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Methodist Church

[This entry contains two subentries dealing with the Methodist Church and African Americans. The first article provides a discussion of the topic from the colonial period to the antebellum era, while the second article discusses the topic through the nineteenth century.]

The Methodist Church from the Colonial Period to the Antebellum Era

From its origins, just after the midpoint of the eighteenth century, Methodism in America almost instantly attracted enslaved and free black adherents. In fact, the Methodist movement was a rare phenomenon in America at that time: an interracial organization in which blacks listened to the words of white leaders and were sometimes leaders themselves. In 1766 a black woman named Betty was among the group of five who gathered at the New York City home of Philip Embry to celebrate the first recorded Methodist service in North America. The group soon grew too large to be accommodated in a private home, so its members decided they needed larger quarters. They raised money and built a “meeting house.” John Street Methodist Church, known as the “Mother Church” of Methodism, was built with the donations of white (mainly Irish) immigrants and black people, some of whom were enslaved. After the American Revolution the congregation bought an enslaved man, Peter Williams, to give him his freedom. Williams refused to accept the gift until he had reimbursed the members of John Street Church with the money he earned as the church sexton. This was not, however, the only interracial congregation in the area. Around the same time in nearby Long Island, a Methodist society member reported on the attendance at a meeting, saying that nearly half of the members were white; the rest were black.

The Methodist movement made inroads among blacks in America's colonial period for several reasons but primarily because leaders within the sect actively sought black men and women as members. The evangelical preachers who brought the discipline to North America believed that all souls, black and white, should receive the gospel and were therefore eligible to join their movement. Methodist preachers like Freeborn Garretson of Virginia spoke to mixed-race groups (in the North and South) and licensed black men—some of them still in slavery—as “exhorters” to preach before black and white audiences; these preachers were among the most vocal critics of American slavery. To a people largely held in bondage or recently freed from the condition, the Methodists appealed to their hopes for dignity and peace not only in heaven but also on earth.

Founding Ethos

The Methodist outreach to African Americans was all in keeping with the beliefs and spirit of the movement's principal founder, John Wesley. Born in 1703 in Epworth, England, Wesley was the son of an Anglican minister and a strong-willed and devout mother. While attending Oxford University, he and his brother, Charles, organized a “holy club,” a forerunner of the “societies” that would eventually make up the Methodist movement. After graduation Wesley became an Anglican priest, and despite the rise of Methodism as a formal denomination separate from the Anglican Church, he remained one for the rest of his life. Wesley's dissatisfaction with Anglicanism unfolded over time. As a young man he became ever more frustrated with the church's emphasis on rituals. Yet Wesley was unwilling to make a quick and total break with the church in which he had been raised. Instead, he promoted Methodism as a reform movement within the confines of the church. That is why the first Methodist congregations were deemed “societies” and not Methodist “churches.”

Wesley longed for a religion in which the “experiential” nature of Christianity was at the forefront, insisting that one's Christian beliefs should be acted out daily with one's fellow human beings. In keeping with this ethos, Wesley was that rarest of men during his time: a vocal opponent of slavery and of white supremacy, who in his journal wrote that “the Negroes who inhabit the coast of Africa” were “far from being the stupid, senseless, brutish, lazy … savages” that Europeans made them out to be and that they were in fact equal to Europeans. Wesley also believed in an individual's personal relationship with the creator, arguing that people should look inward to seek their connection to the “spirit of God.” For this reason the laypeople in Methodist congregations were seen as being on par with the clergy of their institutions. This, of course, argued for a further weakening of hierarchy and privilege in a world that was not yet ready to embrace such notions. With this unique worldview as a fixed part of their image, Methodists quickly became known (and eventually feared and despised by some members of the establishment) for their active commitment to charity work and social responsibility.

It is easy to see how African Americans would find this movement and its tenets attractive. In many ways the early phase of Methodism in America was tailor made for the time and for circumstances of African American life. In a world based on power and hierarchy, black people, enslaved and free, were at the bottom of society in all the communities where they lived in America. In the face of this reality, evangelical Methodists were not only inviting them into their meetings but also asking them to join a movement that actually had something to offer them in terms of improving their condition—if not always materially then at least spiritually and psychologically. Methodism's status as a reform movement, with a commitment to charity and an ethics of social responsibility, contained an implicit criticism of the status quo. Moreover, by emphasizing the individual's personal connection to God, Methodism said that black people, even slaves, could in their own way, through the workings of their hearts and souls, better society and achieve personal salvation.

In truth, these notions were not solely implicit; they were also explicit parts of Methodist doctrine, spelled out in its rulebook, The Doctrines and Disciplines. Although devoted to lessening hierarchy, Methodism did have some core rules that all its members were supposed to follow. First, there was the admonition to “avoid evils of every kind,” which included, among other things, intemperate use of alcohol and “buying and selling slaves.” That concrete equation of slavery with sin was enormously important to increasing black membership in Methodist societies. Second, there was a call to do good works, which included helping the poor and visiting the sick. This, too, was enticing to a people used to having their humanity trampled because it suggested that compassion, as a lived and acted on experience, might eventually be able to transform the hearts of their oppressors.

If the Methodists' commitment to changing society appealed greatly to blacks, it was anathema to many whites, particularly southern whites who saw in the Methodists' zeal a threat to what they perceived to be the natural order of things between whites and blacks, as well as between men and women. Just as they were concerned about Methodism's effect on slaves, some men protested its hold on their wives, who were encouraged to take charge of their own salvation. Encouraging slaves and women to believe they had some degree of power over their destinies struck at the heart of both racially based slavery and male dominance over women, which worked together to maintain white male power.

The nature of Methodist society meetings was another concern for some white southerners. Often highly emotional affairs, the meetings had members of the congregation crying, dancing, moaning, and falling into trances. The emotionalism of such displays frequently was associated with African ways of worship. However, this aspect of the faith had crossed the ocean from Great Britain, where it was enormously attractive to converts who were largely from the lower echelons of that society. These highly charged services evidently provided a form of release for men and women whose worldly hopes were narrowly circumscribed by the impoverished, class-bound circumstances of their lives. The meetings served the same function for blacks suffering under the oppression of slavery and racism. The sight of black men and women, alongside white men and woman, weeping and fainting as they expressed their love for God and Christ was not likely a welcome sight to many whites of the eighteenth century.

Beginnings of a Schism

In December 1784, at the so-called Christmas Conference, the Methodists in America formally broke ties with the Anglican Church, transforming the society movement into a separate denomination. That entire decade also marked a turning point for black Methodism. During that time it became clear that the interracial cooperation, as well as the commitment to the abolition of slavery, that had marked Methodism from the beginning would not withstand the doctrine of white supremacy. The first signs of trouble appeared with changes in the manner in which the congregations worshipped. Methodist meetings, particularly in rural areas, were usually held outdoors. Smaller congregations met in private homes. During the 1780s, as the popularity of Methodism increased, the Methodists built formal meetinghouses. At this point the relatively easy interracial mixing that had existed in many Methodist societies from the beginning began to break down as some white members resented being seated next to blacks in church pews. It was one thing in more informal settings outside to have blacks and whites seated haphazardly, and in the crowded condition of a home one would expect that people would sit where they could. In the eyes of some whites, however, the formality of the church building required a different arrangement. Blacks were forced to sit in the balconies or at the back of the room.

The most famous example of this occurred in 1787 when Absalom Jones, William White, and Richard Allen were attending services at Saint George's Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. The three men—all of whom would later become prominent clerics and leaders in the Methodist movement among blacks—were kneeling in prayer when a white member of the congregation told them they could not continue to pray from that spot. Jones protested, saying that he wanted to finish praying. The white member first pulled Jones up and then tried to do the same to White; the prayer ended before he got to Allen. The three men left the church, never to return, because they were intent on finding a place where blacks could worship without being degraded. A long period of divisiveness ensued. Many white Methodists did not want to conduct worship services in which whites and blacks would be treated equally, but they also did not want blacks to create a separate institution. Nevertheless, in 1794 the first black Methodist church, Bethel, was born. The opposition of whites to the separate institution raged on for years, with Bethel's leadership having to resort to lawsuits to maintain its control over the church.

The black Methodists' experience in Philadelphia was not unique. The drive for segregation, spurred by white members of the congregations, gained momentum in other cities as well. The same happened at two churches in Baltimore in 1786 and 1787. After segregation was imposed there, the black members began to worship at the homes of various members of the church. They raised money and bought their own church building in 1797, naming it Bethel, the same name as the church in Philadelphia.

At John Street Church in New York City, the black membership was large enough to fill all the pews of the church. At the same time, Methodism was moving beyond its roots in the middle and lower classes to include wealthier individuals who were used to privilege and deference. To fight for seats among lower-class whites was one thing, but to stand while blacks sat was quite another. Eventually, the church decided on a racially based solution to the problem: blacks were confined to segregated areas of the church, a move that was deeply traumatic for blacks. After all, they had been members of the church from the start, nurturing it from its infancy and giving money, even under the conditions of slavery, to help build the first meetinghouse.

Unlike Philadelphia, there was no single dramatic reaction to John Street's change of policy. Instead, the church's African American members opted to start having separate meetings while still maintaining some ties to the church. In fact, in 1780 the Methodist church officials formally recognized the right of black members to hold these meetings so long as there was a white minister present. White members complained that the separate services for blacks were taking up too much of the time of white ministers. Although blacks had long been licensed to be preachers in the faith, they were not formally ordained because that required a level of formal education beyond the reach of most black people. Without ordination, black preachers could not perform baptism or other sacraments. Thus, there were fairly severe limits on how far blacks could go to conduct their religious lives away from the supervision of the whites who had shown them such disrespect. A compromise of sorts was reached in 1796 when the African Chapel was built alongside John Street Church. The white assistant pastor of the church presided over the meetings held there. These efforts to settle the question to the satisfaction of blacks and whites ultimately failed. In 1799 the black members of John Street voted to establish a new church that would, in 1801, become the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Despite its separate setting, the charter itself indicated that “for the time being” the church would remain under the “direction and management of the Methodist Episcopal Church of New York City.” That “time being” would turn out to be more than two decades.

This process of separation played itself out over the years in other states. Besides the churches in Pennsylvania, New York, and Maryland, blacks formed separate Methodist churches in New Jersey and Delaware. The times were changing. There had been a moment when many expected that the fervor of the American Revolution might lead to the abolition of slavery. Of course, that happened only in the North and usually through gradual emancipation statutes designed to protect the property interests of slaveholders. In the South slavery became an even more fixed part of life. When slaveholders converted to Methodism, only a few had any interest in believing the church's determination that “buying and selling Negroes” was evil.

New Church

It was in this climate, in 1816, that Richard Allen, who had led the effort to create Bethel Church in Philadelphia, decided that it was time for all the separate black Methodist churches to work in concert. Allen was an extremely energetic and forward-thinking man, a former slave who had become a Methodist at age seventeen during a meeting “in a forest.” He had watched Methodism grow to the point that there were slightly more than forty-two thousand black members of the church. That was a small fraction of the almost 3 million blacks in the United States at the time, but Allen felt that the members of black churches were strong enough to chart their own religious course and to make a difference in the lives of all black people. He invited representatives from each church to meet in Philadelphia to discuss a strategy for moving out from under the control of white Methodist officials.

Even though they had achieved much of what they wanted in terms of setting up their separate houses of worship, some black Methodists were still dissatisfied with the second-class status foisted on them by church officials. The reluctance of church leaders to ordain black ministers was the main focus of contention. There were also disputes about ownership of church property. In sum, Allen and others were anxious to run their own affairs according to their own special needs. Sixteen men accepted Allen's invitation, and they convened their first meeting on 9 April 1816. Noticeably absent from the event were representatives from the African Zion Church and Asbury Church, the other prominent black Methodist congregation in New York, who because of personality clashes opted to remain separate from Allen's movement. After setting up a leadership structure with Allen at the head, the group voted to break formal ties with the Methodist Episcopal Church of America. Its members also elected Allen as the first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church.

By forming their own denomination, blacks were able to organize the church according to the particular needs and desires of members of its congregations. It made sense to require that all ordained ministers have a certain level of education. But the circumstances of blacks' lives meant that extra effort would be required to make sure that happened. While enthusiastically accepting black converts, the traditional Methodist Episcopal Church had made no real effort on this score. The few blacks who were ordained could not expect to rise through the hierarchy of the church. If black Methodists wanted to achieve their fullest potential in their religious lives, they had to create their own churches. The leaders of the AME Church did not simply abandon the idea that it was important for ministers to be educated, but some accommodations had to be made. Education was still required for ordination, but the church should set up schools to make sure that over time blacks could continually meet the standard. Jordan Winston Early, who had joined an AME Church started by William Paul Quinn, “the indomitable leader of African Methodism in the West,” said that wherever a church was built, “a Sabbath school was sure to follow.” The commitment to learning was an integral part of black ministers' lessons.

The AME churches had their greatest influence and membership in the North. Black Methodism continued to exist in the southern states, but with all the restrictions one would expect. Increasing numbers of white southerners joined the Methodist Church, and tensions over slavery rose to an intolerable degree. Although they had become less vocal about abolition, formal Methodist doctrine still forbade the buying and selling of slaves. At general conferences, where all major church business was conducted, the membership passed resolutions condemning slavery, which caused much resentment among southern Methodists. The relationship between the northern and southern Methodist Church continued to deteriorate until the 1844 conference, when the membership voted to discipline a slave owner for failing to emancipate the slaves he had received when he married. After much procedural wrangling, the northerners held firm. A “plan of separation” was drawn up, anticipating an eventual break between the northern and southern church. That occurred the following year, when southerners voted for separation, creating the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. That vote prefigured the great conflict that would occur when the nation as a whole went to war over the issue of slavery. When the dust settled, and slavery had been abolished, the Methodist Church, just like the country as a whole, was left to find ways to accommodate the new reality. The AME Church and the much less successful AME Zion Church were joined by the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church as a home for black Methodists. As for the Methodist Episcopal Church of America, now the United Methodist Church, which always had black members, it would take decades to find its way back toward the high ideals of its founder, John Wesley.

See also African Methodist Episcopal Church; African Union Methodism; Allen, Richard; Black Church; Education; Episcopalians (Anglicans) and African Americans; Gradual Emancipation; Integration; Jones, Absalom; New York City; Race, Theories of; Religion; Segregation; Spirituality;and Williams, Peter, Sr.

Annette Gordon-Reed

The Methodist Church after 1830

Methodism, founded by the Anglican John Wesley, thrived in the early national period of the United States. Like its Anglican parent, Methodism had roots in both Catholic tradition and liturgy and Reformation theology, such that the denomination had a hierarchical structure but nevertheless exuded a pious evangelical spontaneity that appealed to the “common man and woman.” Wesley, as well as his brother Charles and the evangelist George Whitefield, argued that one must be “justified” before “sanctification” can take place; that is, holiness in one's daily life was a prerequisite to this sanctification. With its pietistic grounding, Methodism found fertile soil in the milieu of the Second Great Awakening. In the intensity and fervor of camp meetings and their revivalist preaching, Methodism grew by the mid-nineteenth century to be the largest denomination in the fledgling Republic.

The Wesleyan tradition of concern for the poor, justice, and mercy well prepared Methodists for their role in the early antislavery movement. Late-eighteenth-century preachers threatened slaveholders with excommunication if slaves were not freed. By the mid-1830s, however, the mood in both the North and the South had changed. Many northerners had come to agree with their southern counterparts that the issue of slavery was a private matter between slave and master.

Placing the issue of slavery in the category of the private realm was not acceptable to all northern Methodists, however. Orange Scott, who had had a change of heart that he called “the great victory,” and Luther Lee, both from New York State, saw the abolitionist movement as God's calling. Their antislavery activities and preaching, begun in the 1830s, led to their unpopularity within the Methodist Episcopal Church. Scott was eventually brought up on charges by his bishop for antislavery activities, though he was not convicted. Finding their position as abolitionists within the church an untenable situation, Scott and Lee withdrew; in 1842 they joined together to form the Wesleyan Methodist Connection, formally splitting from the Methodist Episcopal Church. Central to the Wesleyan Methodist Connection was a doctrine of Holiness expressed through social action. Thus, Scott and Lee had a platform with which to continue their antislavery activities.

The issue of slaveholding could not long be swept under the carpet within the Methodist Episcopal Church; at the 1844 national convention the issue came to the forefront once more. It had long been accepted practice that ministers living in southern states could hold slaves, while bishops, who could theoretically live wherever they chose but had responsibilities for the entire church, could not. The bishop James Osgood Andrew of Georgia, however, had inherited two slaves—one a young boy and one a young woman. Andrew offered the black woman immediate freedom, but she refused because the laws of Georgia required freed slaves to leave the state immediately upon receiving manumission. Meanwhile, the bishop promised freedom to the young boy once he could fend for himself in the North. To further complicate the issue, Andrew's second wife was a slaveholder in her own right. Abolitionists, seeing only a slaveholding bishop, clamored for his removal. Andrew at first acquiesced but was later persuaded not to resign, leading to a split in the church the following year.

Mississippi Mission Conference. The Methodist Episcopal Church (northern branch) formed the Mississippi Mission Conference in a meeting in New Orleans in December 1865, to establish and administer churches for black Methodists. This engraving, from a photograph of the occasion by T. (Theo.) Lilenthal, appeared in Harper's Weekly on 3 March 1866.

New York Public Library, Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

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Throughout his life Frederick Douglass maintained a relationship with the church that was both passionate and volatile. His youthful religious conversion and enthusiasm became tempered once he reached freedom in the North. Clear insight into Douglass's understanding of American Christianity can be found in the appendix to his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Douglass begins the appendix, which he wrote on 28 April 1845, by claiming he is referring only to “slaveholding religion,” but after exposing the glaring hypocrisy of that term he states, “Dark and terrible as is this picture, I hold it to be strictly true of the overwhelming mass of professed Christians in America.” Douglass saw Christians of both the North and the South as equal participants in this “dark and terrible” environment. Douglass obviously struggled with the contradictions inherent in his personal longing for the church and his vocation as an abolitionist; in the end, he could not reconcile the two and chose the latter as his life's work.

Many black Americans followed Douglass's early enthusiasm for Christianity and the church, and a fair number found their home in Methodism. Black Methodism got its start in Philadelphia in 1787; blacks had worshipped at Saint George's Church under the leadership of the first black Methodist minister, Richard Allen. Segregated worship services were the norm, but a more insulting instance of discrimination led Allen and a number of other African American members of Saint George's to withdraw. The split ultimately led to the official formation in 1816 of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, which experienced rapid growth in the North up through the Civil War. Following hostilities the church continued to grow, as freedpeople flocked to a denomination they could call their own. The AME Church continued to grow throughout the United States and by the twenty-first century had become one of the largest Methodist churches.

The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church was launched in a similar manner; it, too, was founded following protests by black Methodists of discrimination, this time in 1796 at the predominantly white John Street Church in New York City. The first church was named Zion, which soon became part of the official name of the denomination. James Varick, the leader of the break with the John Street Church, became the group's first bishop. A third major black Methodist denomination to come into existence was the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Organized in 1870 as the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, it represented the only cordial separation from the mother church by African Americans. Somewhat surprisingly, this cordial split occurred between white and black members of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, at the end of the Civil War. Some recently freed black Methodists chose to leave the Methodist Church for new independent denominations, while others asked for a separation from the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. The resulting group changed its name in 1954 to the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.

See also African Methodist Episcopal Church; Antislavery Movement; Black Church; Douglass, Frederick; Integration; Religion; Religion and Slavery; and Segregation.

Terry D. Goddard

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