African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church

Heritage

In 1796, Black members of John Street Methodist Church in New York City, denied ordination and confined to segregated seating, began meeting separately, and by 1800 had built a chapel they called Zion. They organized as an independent denomination in 1821, with James Varick consecrated the first superintendent, and later added "Zion" to the corporate name to distinguish the New York church from Philadelphia's AME. As with the AME, the cause was the white church's refusal to treat Black Methodists as full members; Methodist doctrine was never the dispute. The nickname "the Freedom Church" was earned in the decades that followed, when its pulpits, pews and purses carried the abolitionist cause.

Theological family

Wesleyan-Arminian doctrine on the standard Methodist foundation: the Articles of Religion, prevenient grace, the pursuit of holiness of heart and life. Doctrinally the AME Zion Church is at one with the wider Methodist family; its distinctiveness is historical and institutional.

Who decides what

Episcopal and connectional: a quadrennial General Conference, a Board of Bishops over episcopal districts, presiding elders, appointed pastors. Zion moved early on women's ordination — Julia A. J. Foote was ordained deacon in 1894 and elder in 1900, decades ahead of most of American Methodism.

What a first-time visitor would find

A first-time visitor will find recognizably Methodist worship — hymns, ordered liturgy, strong congregational singing — carried with the warmth and preaching centrality of the Black church tradition: choirs from anthems to gospel, testimony in many congregations, and an invitation to the altar.

What it has always cared about

Freedom as gospel work: Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth all held membership in Zion congregations, and the connection sheltered Underground Railroad work in churches from New York to the border states. Education followed — Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina — along with global missions and a long civil rights witness.

Its gift to the wider church

Living proof that a church can hold evangelical doctrine and radical justice in one body without either eating the other: the denomination that ordained women in the 1890s and hid freedom seekers in the 1850s preached the same Wesleyan gospel on Sunday. The wider church still learns from that integration.

Commonly confused with

With the African Methodist Episcopal Church constantly — separate origin (New York, not Philadelphia), separate founders, parallel history; the two have several times discussed union without completing it. Also with the CME Church, and mistakenly with the United Methodist Church, from which it is fully independent.

Range of views inside it

Worship style and social-witness intensity vary congregation to congregation, from formal liturgical services to gospel-driven ones; the connection spans large urban churches and small rural ones, in the US, Africa and the Caribbean. Doctrine is uniform.

Where African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church churches are on the map

380 African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church congregations appear on The Church Map, across 33 states.

• North Carolina — 64
• Alabama — 60
• New York — 37
• South Carolina — 28
• New Jersey — 21
• Pennsylvania — 17
• Tennessee — 17
• Connecticut — 15
• Ohio — 11
• District of Columbia — 10

Moments this body was part of

• 1796–1821 — The AME Zion Church

  Black Methodists in New York, facing the same indignities Richard Allen's people faced in Philadelphia, formed their own congregation in 1796 and organized the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in 1821. It became known as the freedom church: Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth all belonged to it.

  The church that slavery's defenders dismissed became the spiritual home of the people who ended slavery.

• 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.

• 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.