Christian Methodist Episcopal Church

Heritage

After emancipation, Black members of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South faced a choice: remain in the church of their former enslavers, join the Northern-born AME or AME Zion churches, or build their own. In December 1870, delegates meeting in Jackson, Tennessee organized the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, with the Southern church cooperating in the separation and transferring church properties; William H. Miles and Richard H. Vanderhorst were consecrated the first bishops. The name became Christian Methodist Episcopal in 1954. The origin is distinct among the Black Methodist churches — a negotiated founding rather than a walkout — and the CME Church has told its story with that nuance ever since, without letting the courtesy of the terms obscure what made separation necessary in the first place.

Theological family

Standard Wesleyan-Arminian doctrine — Articles of Religion, prevenient grace, sanctification — identical in substance to the rest of episcopal Methodism; its distinctiveness is historical, institutional and cultural, not doctrinal.

Who decides what

Episcopal and connectional: a quadrennial General Conference, bishops over episcopal districts, presiding elders, appointed pastors. Teresa Jefferson-Snorton became the church's first woman bishop in 2010.

What a first-time visitor would find

A first-time visitor will find Methodist order and Black church warmth: strong preaching, choirs spanning hymns, anthems and gospel, and worship that ranges from stately to exuberant by congregation, with an invitation to discipleship expected.

What it has always cared about

Education, urgently and early — Lane College, Paine College, Miles College and Texas College all stand in its lineage, several founded within a generation of emancipation; the Christian Index, among the oldest continuously published African American periodicals; and steady civil rights engagement in the twentieth century.

Its gift to the wider church

A church born from negotiation that proved no less free for it: the CME Church demonstrated that Black institutional independence could be secured across a bargaining table as well as through a walkout, and then spent its independence on colleges. Four historically Black colleges from a church organized by people five years out of slavery is one of the American church's great unsung achievements.

Commonly confused with

With the AME and AME Zion churches — Northern-born, earlier, and separate in origin; the three are sister denominations, not branches of one body. "Christian Methodist" also gets confused with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), an unrelated tradition.

Range of views inside it

Congregational culture varies from formal to gospel-centered, and the church spans rural Southern chapels, urban congregations across the country, and mission conferences abroad; doctrine and polity are uniform.

Where Christian Methodist Episcopal Church churches are on the map

11 Christian Methodist Episcopal Church congregations appear on The Church Map, across 9 states.

• Louisiana — 3
• Arizona — 1
• California — 1
• Connecticut — 1
• Florida — 1
• Georgia — 1
• North Carolina — 1
• South Carolina — 1
• Texas — 1

Moments this body was part of

• 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.

• 1870 — The CME Church: freedpeople claim their own house

  Formerly enslaved Methodists who had remained within the southern church organized their own denomination at Jackson, Tennessee in 1870 — the Colored (since 1954, Christian) Methodist Episcopal Church — negotiating the transfer of church buildings and ordaining their own bishops, William H. Miles and Richard H. Vanderhorst.