In light of the intersection between Black History Month and Grace Meridian Hill’s commitment to build a “cross-cultural community,” I’ll be sharing a series of posts this month on notable individuals, features, institutions, and events in the history and heritage of the African-American Church. Last week, we started with a reflection on gospel music. Here’s something on one of the Black church’s historic Christian denominations: The A.M.E. Church.
The African Methodist Episcopal Church (aka the A.M.E. Church) is the first African-American denomination organized in the U.S. and the first major religious denomination in the western world that developed because of sociological rather than theological differences. The AME was formed by Philadelphia-area slaves and former slaves, who in 1787, led by preacher Richard Allen, withdrew from St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church (America’s first Methodist church) because of persistent and growing discrimination they faced there. After purchasing a lot on Sixth Street near Lombard in Philadelphia’s historic black community (this is believed to be the oldest parcel of real estate owned continuously by black people in the United States), the group formed and established the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1793. Because of its prominent place in Black church history in general and the AME Church in particular, the church is fondly known as “Mother Bethel.” Years later, W.E.B. DuBois called Mother Bethel, “by long odds the vastest and most remarkable product of American Negro civilization.”
Richard Allen—who was born a slave to a Quaker lawyer in Philadelphia, put his faith in Christ at the age of seventeen, and later bought his freedom for two thousand dollars—was ordained as the minister of Bethel AME in 1799 by renowned Methodist horseback preacher, Bishop Francis Asbury (whose statue can be found locally at the intersection of 16th St., Mt. Pleasant St., and Harvard Rd). In 1816, Allen called together black Methodists in other middle Atlantic communities to form a new denomination that would be called the “African Methodist Episcopal Church.”
The geographical spread of the A.M.E. Church prior to the Civil War was mainly restricted to the Northeast and Midwest. Major congregations were established in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Washington, DC, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Detroit. However, during Reconstruction, the AME church began to spread in the South, often calling newly freed slaves into their communion; the slave states of Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, Louisiana, and, for a few years, South Carolina, became additional locations for AME congregations. During this period, “I Seek My Brethren,” the title of an often repeated sermon that Theophilus G. Steward preached in South Carolina, became a clarion call to bring the gospel of Jesus Christ to fellow blacks.
Washington, DC is home to a number of AME worshipping communities—including, for example, Trinity AME Zion Church on 16th St and Meridian Place in Columbia Heights, and the historic Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church downtown (founded in 1838), which is known as “The National Cathedral of African Methodism.”
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