A.M.E. Origin and formation

 African Methodist Episcopal Church
 Origin and formation expanded

Richard Allen, the father of the AME church from birth to manhood, was shaped by slavery and moulded in Methodism. He, born a slave 14 February 1960, converted to Christianity in 1777.  In 1783 he bought his freedom from Stokeley Sturgis. 

Richard Allen and Absolom Jones became a lay ministers of the interracial congregation of St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. The Methodist church admitted persons of all races and allowed African Americans to preach. They were the first African Americans licensed to preach by the Methodist Episcopal Church yet members of the church still practiced racial discrimination. They held separate services yet were opposed to a “black” church. Yet some blacks would still attend normal services at St George’s. At St. George's, interracial tensions increased. Growing membership necessitated a church expansion. Black church members were the most generous contributors of time and money to help build a new gallery. What they did not know was that the expanded upper gallery was targeted exclusively for the growing black membership. On a November Sunday in 1787, at the first Sabbath service after the church's renovations, a sexton ushered Allen, Absalom Jones, and prominent black church member William White to seats in the new gallery which was situated above the old part of the church. As the trio was a little late, they instead took seats near where they had formerly sat before the renovation. The service started and the congregation dropped to their knees in prayer.

An altercation ensued.

Allen looked up to find a church trustee trying to wrench Absalom Jones to his feet. It seemed that blacks were not to sit in the old gallery but to be relegated to the new gallery. An astonished Jones said to the trustee, "Wait until the prayer is over." The martinet replied, "No, you must get now, or I will call for aid and force you away." The devout Jones replied, "Wait until the prayer is over, and I will get up and trouble you no more." Then another trustee came and tried to pull William White from his knees. Allen recalled, "By this time the prayer was over, and we all went out of the church in a body, and they were no more plagued by us in the church. This racial incident “filled” Allen and his followers “with fresh vigour” to build their own church.

As well in 1787 Richard Allen, Absolom Jones and numerous others organised the Free African Society, as a nondenominational mutual aid society and the first dedicated to serving Philadelphia’s free black community. The FAS, after the St. George incident, also became a venue through which Allen could start a church. Allen, however, was disenchanted with the Society's mirroring of Quaker ways, finding them inimical with what he felt blacks needed spiritually. Though Allen was disassociated from the FAS he enthusiastically supported the plan to form the nation's first black church.Allen purchased a plot of land at 6th and Lombard in Philadelphia's already historic black community. As a note, during his early years in Philadelphia, Allen supported himself as a chimney sweep and parlayed his earnings into a shoemaking shop which eventually employed several apprentices. Since the black walkout at St. George's, the white Methodists had increased the hostility aimed at the splinter group while still trying to lure them back in the fold. Elders at St. George's saw their authority threatened, and in turn threatened to expel the exiles permanently. Allen replied that they could not be part of a church where they had been so "scandalously treated." He addressed St. George's Reverend McCloskey, saying, "If you deny us your name [Methodism] you cannot seal up the scripture from us, and deny us a name in heaven."

The FAS voted to be Episcopalian even though Jones and Allen wanted it to be Methodist. Absalom Jones agreed to head what would be called the Saint Thomas African Episcopal Church. In 1804, Jones would go on to be ordained the first black priest in the United States. W.E.B. DuBois said of Saint Thomas's: "the church has always been foremost in good work." Officers from St. Thomas's went on to find the nation's first black insurance firm. Allen, however, was still convinced that the discipline and style of Methodism was best suited to the black community in Philadelphia.

Richard Allan remained Methodist. While funds were being raised to build a permanent structure, Allen bought a blacksmith shop from a fellow named Sims and had it hauled by a team of his own horses to 6th and Lombard. Bishop Asbury presided over the  dedication of Bethel AME Church in Philadelphia on July 29, 1794. In its first two years, membership mushroomed from 20 to 121. Thanks to Allen's insistence on education Bethel had a children's day school and an adult night school on premises soon after its founding. In 1799, Richard Allen was ordained a deacon.

During this time Richard Allen encountered Daniel Coker, Coker was born a slave in the Maryland area from a white mother and black father. He was ordained a deacon in the Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1814 Coker led the black Methodists in Baltimore to establish a separate congregation. In 1815, the elders at St. George's managed to get Bethel put up for auction. Allen was forced to buy back his own church for the obscenely high price of $10,125. Shortly thereafter, a preacher from St. George's went to court claiming he had a right to preach at Bethel. The court disagreed saying, "what right do you have to preach to a congregation that won't listen to you." This was the de facto independence ruling for Bethel. Allen and Coker called black Methodists to meet in Philadelphia on April 9, 1816. Allen decided the time had come for these churches to band together. "Resolved, that the people of Philadelphia, Baltimore and other places who may unite with them shall become one body under the name and style of the African Methodist Church of the United States of American and that the book of Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church be adopted as our discipline..." Thus, Bethel Church became Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Allen commented, "We deemed it expedient to have a form of discipline, whereby we may guide our people in the fear of God, in the unity of the Spirit, and in the bonds of peace." They adopted the episcopal form of church government — meaning they would be under the authority of bishops who were ordained by officials within.

On that day Coker was elected the first bishop of this new Wesleyan body. On April 10, however, Coker either declined the episcopacy or resigned in favour of Allen. Accounts about the switch vary widely from Coker’s Caucasian features as a barrier to leading a black denomination to Allen’s insistence that a compromise making both of them bishops would tax the resources of the infant body.

Word about the founding of the AME denomination spread to free black communities in numerous sections of the United States and abroad. Between 1817 and 1819, for example, local black bodies in Charleston, Pittsburgh, and Brooklyn sought affiliation with the AME movement. Morris Brown, a free mulatto shoemaker, organized a black congregation in Charleston, which grew from 1,000 in 1817 to 3,000 in 1822. These black Methodists, upon learning about the AME Church, sent Brown to Philadelphia to connect the group with the newly founded denomination. Brown, fully ordained in 1818, led the congregation until white authorities closed it in 1822 because of its connection to a planned slave insurrection. Morris Brown became associated minister at Bethel and in 1828 was consecrated as the second AME bishop. 

Richard Allen believed, for example, that Methodism was beneficial to blacks because it possessed a “plain doctrine” and “a good discipline.” Though mostly adopted from Wesleyan whites, the AME Discipline, published in 1817, followed Methodist “Rules” on governance and “creeds.” Richard Allen died on March 26, 1831. At this time the AME Church stretched from Philadelphia to several states and to Haiti and Canada.

By 1846 the AME church had grown to 176 clergy, 296 churches, and 17,375 members. The 20,000 members in 1856 were located primarily in the North. Major congregations were established in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Washington, DC, Cincinnati, Chicago, Detroit, and other large Blacksmith’s Shop cities. Numerous northern communities also gained a substantial AME presence. Remarkably, the slave states of Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, Louisiana, and, for a few years, South Carolina, became additional locations for AME congregations. The denomination reached the Pacific Coast in the early 1850’s with churches in Stockton, Sacramento, San Francisco, and other places in California.

The AME church expanded into the Caribbean Islands and South America. Bishop Henry M. Turner pushed African Methodism across the Atlantic into Liberia and Sierra Leone in 1891 and into South Africa in 1896. Modern expansions have been into Europe as well as India.
Today, the African Methodist Episcopal Church has membership in twenty Episcopal Districts in thirty-nine countries on five continents. The work of the Church is administered by twenty-one active bishops, and General Officers who manage the departments of the Church.

 

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