African Methodist Episcopal Church

Heritage

In 1787, Black worshippers at St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia — among them the licensed preacher Richard Allen, who had bought his own freedom — were pulled from the altar rail mid-prayer to enforce segregated seating, and they walked out as one. Allen led them into the Free African Society and then into Bethel Church, dedicated in 1794 with Bishop Francis Asbury officiating. In 1816, Bethel joined congregations from Baltimore, Wilmington, Salem and Attleborough to organize the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and Allen was consecrated its first bishop. The doctrine was and is Wesley's, kept whole; what was new was a church in which no usher would ever again pull a praying man off his knees. The failure that made it necessary belonged to the white church, and the record should say so plainly.

Theological family

Methodist through and through: Wesleyan-Arminian doctrine, the Articles of Religion, prevenient grace, and holiness of heart and life. The AME Church has never treated its separateness as a doctrinal difference; its motto runs "God Our Father, Christ Our Redeemer, the Holy Spirit Our Comforter, Humankind Our Family."

Who decides what

Episcopal and connectional on the classic Methodist pattern: a General Conference every four years, active bishops presiding over episcopal districts on several continents, presiding elders over districts of congregations, and pastors appointed to their charges. Women serve at every level; Vashti Murphy McKenzie became the denomination's first woman bishop in 2000.

What a first-time visitor would find

Preaching at the center and expected to be strong; choirs ranging from anthems and spirituals to gospel; a recognizably Methodist order — Decalogue, hymns, doxology — carried with call-and-response warmth in many congregations; an altar invitation. A first-time visitor will find Methodist order carrying Black church fire, and should expect to be welcomed by name at the door.

What it has always cared about

Education as a ministry of freedom — Wilberforce University (1856) was the first college owned and operated by African Americans; publishing, through the Christian Recorder, among the oldest Black periodicals in the country; self-governance as a Christian dignity; and a line of public witness that runs from Richard Allen's pamphlets to the civil rights movement and beyond.

Its gift to the wider church

A standing demonstration that the gospel is true even when the church preaching it fails it: Allen did not abandon Methodism, he rescued it for his people. The AME Church gave America its first fully realized independent Black institution, and gave every tradition since a model of answering injustice by building — a church, then a college, then a press — rather than by protest alone.

Commonly confused with

With the AME Zion Church, a sister denomination born separately in New York — neither is a branch of the other; with the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, organized in the South in 1870; and with the United Methodist Church, of which it has never been a part — it predates that church's oldest ancestor merger by more than a century of independent life.

Range of views inside it

Congregations range from high liturgical formality to gospel exuberance, from rural chapels to urban cathedrals, and social-witness emphasis varies by district and pastor. Doctrine and polity are uniform across the connection.

Where African Methodist Episcopal Church churches are on the map

1,067 African Methodist Episcopal Church congregations appear on The Church Map, across 43 states.

• Florida — 140
• South Carolina — 134
• North Carolina — 102
• Georgia — 102
• Maryland — 57
• Pennsylvania — 54
• Texas — 51
• Alabama — 45
• Illinois — 36
• New York — 34

Moments this body was part of

• 1787–1816 — Richard Allen and the birth of the AME Church

  Richard Allen, a formerly enslaved Methodist preacher, walked out of St. George's Church in Philadelphia around 1787 after Black worshipers were pulled from their knees during prayer, founded Bethel Church in 1794, and in 1816 organized the African Methodist Episcopal Church — the first Black denomination in America — becoming its first bishop. The AME Church kept Methodist doctrine whole; what it refused was humiliation.

  The AME Church was born from the white church's failure, yet chose to remain unmistakably Methodist — a severed branch that kept the family's faith better than the family did.

• 1831–1865 — The Underground Railroad runs through the churches

  The network that moved fugitives from slavery to freedom ran substantially through congregations: Quaker meetings and homes, AME and AME Zion churches (Harriet Tubman's church home), free Black Baptist congregations, and antislavery Congregational and Presbyterian churches. The Reformed Presbyterians (Covenanters) had barred slaveholders from communion since 1800.

  Decades before the denominations could agree about slavery in their assemblies, believers across a dozen traditions were already agreeing at midnight, at the river crossings.

• 1865–1900 — After emancipation: the Black church builds

  In the decades after emancipation, freedpeople built the independent Black church at astonishing speed — Baptist congregations by the thousands, the AME and AME Zion churches sweeping south, schools and colleges and mutual-aid societies rising alongside every sanctuary. The Black church became, as its historians put it, the one institution African Americans wholly owned.

  Out of the nation's deepest wound came institutions of extraordinary endurance — churches that would later supply the moral leadership the whole country needed.

• 1916–1970 — The Great Migration replants the Black church

  Six million African Americans moved from the rural South to northern and western cities, and the Black church moved with them — historic congregations swelled, storefront churches by the thousands opened, COGIC became a national church, and in Chicago Thomas A. Dorsey fused blues and sacred song into gospel music, which reshaped the worship of the whole American church.

  Gospel music — born in the migrating Black church — may be the most widely shared gift any American tradition has given the others.

• 1955–1968 — The civil rights movement leads from the pulpit

  The Montgomery bus boycott was organized in Holt Street Baptist Church; the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was founded by pastors in 1957; and the movement's language — beloved community, redemptive suffering — was sermon language carried into the streets. The cost was borne in church buildings too, most terribly the four girls killed in the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist in Birmingham in 1963. In 1961, ministers committed to the movement, King among them, formed the Progressive National Baptist Convention after the National Baptist Convention's leadership resisted direct action.

  King lamented that eleven o'clock Sunday morning remained the most segregated hour in America — an indictment the church has been answering, unevenly, ever since. The movement itself was the Black church calling the whole American church back to its own gospel.