Reformed Methodist Union Episcopal Church
Reformed Methodist Union Episcopal Church belongs to the Methodist family of churches.
Governance: episcopal.
A Black Methodist episcopal church organized in South Carolina in 1885 by congregations departing the AME — small, low-country, and persistent.
Heritage
The Reformed Methodist Union Episcopal Church was organized in 1885 in the Charleston, South Carolina orbit by former members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, following disputes over the selection of ministers and delegates. It adopted the full episcopal form in 1896, when its first bishop was consecrated with the assistance of Reformed Episcopal Church bishops. Its congregations have remained concentrated in South Carolina and Georgia. The public record on this church is thin, and this record deliberately stays within it.
Theological family
Wesleyan doctrine on the AME inheritance — the standard Methodist articles and the Black Methodist episcopal tradition, carried in a small connection.
Who decides what
Episcopal: a bishop and conference structure on the Methodist pattern, small enough that oversight is close to the congregations.
What a first-time visitor would find
Worship in the Black Methodist tradition of the Carolina low country — preaching, prayer, and congregational song; details vary by congregation and are best learned from the church itself.
What it has always cared about
Persistence: nearly a century and a half of continuous church life in one region, sustained by congregations rather than institutions, in the heartland of Black Methodism's southern history.
Its gift to the wider church
A reminder that the story of Black Methodism is wider than its three great denominations — smaller connections like this one carried the same tradition in particular places, and a map that finds them is telling the truth more completely.
Commonly confused with
With the AME Church, from which it came; with the Reformed Episcopal Church, which assisted its episcopacy but is a distinct Anglican-descended body; and with the Reformed Methodist Church, an unrelated earlier New England movement.
Range of views inside it
Little is published about internal variety; this record makes no claim about it.
A note from the mapmakers: No published US congregation count exists in our source: the body is verified absent from the RCMS 2020 national table, so this record carries no number. This record is deliberately minimal because the published record is thin. Nothing here may be asserted of a specific congregation; sentences drawn from this record hedge as "Reformed Methodist Union Episcopal congregations typically…" and yield to the church's own materials.
Sources: Encyclopedia of African American Religions (Larry G. Murphy, J. Gordon Melton and Gary L. Ward, Garland Publishing) · Handbook of Denominations in the United States (Abingdon Press)
Where Reformed Methodist Union Episcopal Church churches are on the map
1 Reformed Methodist Union Episcopal Church congregations appear on The Church Map, across 1 states.
- South Carolina — 1
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