African Union Methodist Protestant Church

Heritage

Peter Spencer and William Anderson led some forty Black members out of Asbury Methodist Episcopal Church in Wilmington in 1805 and founded Ezion Church; when white elders still claimed authority over it, they organized the Union Church of Africans in 1813 — independent and incorporated from its first day, which makes it the first Black denomination in the country to be fully its own. From 1814 its August Quarterly, "Big Quarterly," drew free and enslaved Black worshippers to Wilmington each year — the oldest continuing African American religious festival in the United States. Later divisions and an 1865–66 union with the First Colored Methodist Protestant Church produced the present African Union Methodist Protestant Church. Small in numbers, first in order; the cause, as in Philadelphia and New York, was the white church's failure to grant Black Methodists full standing.

Theological family

Wesleyan in doctrine, with the Methodist Protestant strand of its heritage showing in a strong lay voice: the double-barreled body of the church carries both facts.

Who decides what

Connectional with episcopal leadership over a small conference structure, and a tradition of lay participation inherited from its Methodist Protestant strand; the connection is small enough that leadership stays close to the congregations, concentrated in Delaware and the mid-Atlantic.

What a first-time visitor would find

Recognizably Methodist worship in the Black church tradition — preaching, congregational song, and an annual rhythm that still peaks at Big Quarterly in Wilmington, where the church's whole history gathers in one festival weekend.

What it has always cared about

Independence before almost anyone; the Big Quarterly festival as a public act of Black religious freedom conducted annually since 1814, in slavery times and after; and the memory of Peter Spencer, whose churches were built on legal self-possession as much as on doctrine.

Its gift to the wider church

Priority with dignity: American church history usually starts the story of independent Black Christianity in 1816 in Philadelphia, and the Spencer churches are the standing correction — 1813, Wilmington, incorporated. Every telling of the American church story that includes them is more accurate and more honest.

Commonly confused with

With the Union American Methodist Episcopal Church, the other continuing branch of Spencer's 1813 church — the two share a root and are distinct bodies; with the AME Church, which is a separate, larger, Philadelphia-born denomination; and with the Methodist Protestant Church, from which part of its polity but not its origin derives.

Range of views inside it

A small connection with modest public documentation; variation among its congregations is real but thinly recorded, and this record does not go beyond what is published.

Where African Union Methodist Protestant Church churches are on the map

2 African Union Methodist Protestant Church congregations appear on The Church Map, across 2 states.

• Maryland — 1
• Pennsylvania — 1