God Delivers Me
A Model from Strengthening the Black Church for the 21st CenturyBy Jacqulyn ThorpeAbingdon Press
Copyright © 2008 The United Methodist Publishing House
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-687-64889-4Chapter One
A HISTORY OF BLACK METHODISM IN THE UNITED STATES
Youtha Hardman-Cromwell
BEGINNING WITH SLAVERY
What we know about Black preaching in the United States is that from its earliest practice there was a central focus: Freedom. But these exhortations on freedom had a two-pronged emphasis, freedom from sin and freedom from slavery. The SBC21 project notes the continuity of this approach to ministry and discipleship throughout the history of the Black Church. Black churches and their ministries continue to emphasize both a conversion from sin and release from the oppression, brutality, and dehumanization that continues as a result of American slavery and its legacy of racism.
John Wesley abhorred the practice of slavery. In a letter to William Wilberforce that was written in 1791, within a week of Wesley's death, he continued to speak out against this practice: "Go on, in the name of God and in the power of his might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it." Yet the issue of slavery and discrimination against persons of African heritage shaped and influenced Methodism development across its history in the United States.
Much occurred in the four centuries from the introduction by 1619 of African slaves into the United States, their introduction to Christianity, and the baptism of slaves by John Wesley in 1758 to the launching of the SBC21 initiative in The United Methodist Church at General Conference in 1992. Across this time period the issue of race, the place of those of African heritage has been central. Along the way were the emergence of several denominations from both splits and mergers, the creation of the Central Jurisdiction, and the establishment of the BMCR. Despite Methodism's ambivalence about its Black members, in his study of the Methodist Church published in 1953, Dwight Culver wrote, "The Methodist Church has more Negro members than the other 'white' denominations in the United States combined." In 2004 over 420,000 African Americans were members of The United Methodist Church. They were six percent of the total United States membership. Today Windsor Village UMC in Houston, Texas, a Black congregation, is the largest congregation in United Methodism. Its history reveals the way in which a congregation can be vital and also birth other vital congregations. Table 1.1 shows that there have always been African Americans in the Methodist Movement. But let's start at the beginning of the story.
When slaves arrived in the United States from the coasts of African countries, they brought with them religious traditions that included ancestor veneration and worship practices that embraced the use of music, dance, and spirited interaction. They had a regard for the sacred and for the work of the spirit in their communal and individual lives, an understanding of the power of prayer, and a strong identification with the centrality of community in giving meaning to individual existence.
When they encountered Christianity in the context of their enslavement, they had difficulty reconciling the presentation of Jesus as a messenger of God's love and concern for humanity with their inhuman treatment at the hands of those who professed to be disciples of this Jesus. Christianity taught equality and brotherhood and yet condoned the practice of tearing people from their homes and transporting them to a strange land to become slaves. "They did not have the superhuman capacity to reconcile in their own minds the contradictory character of the new religion." Nevertheless, "the belief of John Wesley and the early preachers in the sacredness of all people, which lead [sic] to the rejections of slavery, and the spirited evangelistic appeal of Methodism in preaching and worship, were major factors in the attraction of slaves and free persons to The Methodist Church." Unknown to many is the fact that in 1758 John Wesley baptized slaves, one a woman.
SLAVES EMBRACE METHODISM
Methodism has always been biracial. Blacks were present at the first Methodist class meetings in America. When in 1762 Robert Strawbridge organized a class meeting of twelve persons in his home, among them was one known as "Aunt Annie," possibly a slave of the family. Beatty, who was a Negro servant in the Heck household when Embury preached there, was a charter member of the John Street Methodist Society in 1779. In 1828 Isabella Bomefree (Sojourner Truth) joined John Street also. Sojourner later became a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.
From 1784, when African Americans were present and active in the earliest organization of The Methodist Episcopal Church, Black people were an integral part of Methodism in America. The sin of equivocation and racial separation were there also from the beginning. Despite the evil spirit of racial supremacy that flowed from many of the White people, and the ruthless processes of dehumanization and exploitation that were imposed over the centuries, Black people did not lose sight of the biblical vision of creation.
White Methodists, such as John McKenney, preached to Blacks and to Whites. A Northern minister, Nehemiah Adams, attended a number of Methodist prayer meetings and reported that "a white brother presided and read a portion of Scripture, but the slaves conducted the meeting." Franklin calls ministering to Whites one of the unique services that Negro religious leaders rendered.
The leadership of Blacks is well documented. They were preachers (exhorters) and missionaries. These included such persons as the better known Harry Hoosier, known as "Black Harry," who traveled with Bishop Francis Asbury. There was Henry Evans, a Virginia free-issue, who is credited with establishing Methodism in Fayetteville, North Carolina among both Blacks and Whites. However, the proscription laws of the twenties and thirties ended his preaching to Whites. There was John Stewart who served among the Wyandotte Native Americans in Ohio. He "gave birth to the home missions' enterprise in the Methodist Church." Richard Allen, who founded the African Methodist Episcopal church, was an adolescent convert to Methodism. After purchasing his freedom, he became an itinerant preacher and later returned to Philadelphia and St. George Methodist Church. In 1887 Emma Virginia Levi (later Brown) served the Church through the Woman's Home Missionary Society as a missionary. She was the matron at Browning House, an industrial home for girls in Camden, South Carolina. Other Black women who served these homes included Mrs. Marcus Dale, Mrs. Hester Williams, a former slave; and Mrs. Isabella Howells.
The Mission Conference was the first structure in the Church to deal with the presence of Blacks. The 1824 General Conference approved Black preachers. Then in 1848 General Conference, responding to the need to provide for Black local congregations, approved separate annual conferences, and in 1864 African American Mission Conferences were authorized. John Wesley Church (now Tindley Temple) hosted the first such conference in Philadelphia in July 1864. It was not until the 1800s that Blacks were able to be fully ordained as elders. Finally in 1868 these Missionary Conferences were given the status of "Annual Conferences."
Francis Burns was elected the first Black bishop of the Methodist Church North in 1858. In 1866 John W. Roberts was also elected. They both were elected to serve as missionary bishops in Africa.
When they were a small, evangelical minority within the Church of England, the Methodists had vigorously denounced slavery as a travesty of divine, human, and natural justice.
But that stance did not lead to full acceptance of Blacks in the American church. Franklin notes:
After the [Revolutionary] War many churches accepted blacks, but whites were afraid that too liberal a policy would be disastrous to the effective control of slavery. Negro ministers and church officials, it was thought, would exercise too much authority over their slave communicants and would, perhaps, cause trouble on the plantations.
This commitment to root out slavery, through the mid nineteenth century, was focused on personal "piety, discipline, and godly behavior — touching both corporate and individual life and certainly touching both slave and slaveholder." Richey knows there was a lack of a public theology; not until the middle of the nineteenth century would their rhetoric include talk of making the nation Christian through educational, social, and political reforms.
Why did Black people become involved with the Methodist movement? In Bound for Canaan, Bordewich tells about a plot of a slave rebellion in Virginia, whose mastermind was a free blacksmith named Gabriel. The plan was to massacre all White persons except Quakers, Methodists, and Frenchmen. It seems that the message of individual redemption that came in language even the uneducated could understand came to satisfy the spiritual thirst of the oppressed Blacks in both North and South. Even when the sentiment of the leadership of evangelicals shifted toward tolerance of slavery, individual preachers, including Methodists, continue to speak against slavery. White Methodists were a part of the Underground Railroad. Calvin Fairbank was one of them. He was converted to be an abolitionist as a child while attending a Methodist revival, during which his family was housed in the home of two escaped slaves. He heard their story and later, as an adult, Fairbank served "the longest prison sentence on record for assisting a fugitive slave."
Blacks accepted Methodism, but also transformed it. Through Black leaders such as Harry Hosier, Richard Allen, and Henry Evans, "Blacks nuanced Evangelicalism with African religious culture."
The presence of Blacks in the Methodist movement met with various levels of acceptance and membership. Richey makes this astute observation:
American Methodism derived from its southern beginnings a deep ambivalence about slavery and the Black.... Northern and Black historians have read this story as Methodist principle compromised and southern interest honored.... Both interpretations tend to locate the commitment to antislavery outside the South and to depict southerners as quite ready to embrace slavery.... However, such viewpoints ... overlook the overwhelming southern character of the church during this early period and fail to recognize early antislavery as itself a southern impulse. They also fail therefore to appreciate the complexity of Methodist antislavery sentiment. It came laced with racism.
Freeborn Garrettson is an example of this ambivalence. He was the circuit rider who summoned the scattered preachers to the historic Christmas Conference in Baltimore in 1784. He also had an epiphany, realized that slave-keeping was wrong, and released his slaves. It was his influence on Richard Allen's master that led to Allen and his brother being able to buy their freedom. He was the author of an antislavery tract, a preacher to Blacks, and developed a good, long-term, respectful relationship with Richard Allen. Yet he failed to be egalitarian in his treatment of and support of Black Methodists in general. He failed to give Harry Hoosier respect in his address to and treatment of him, preached in at least one instance in which Blacks had to stand outside to hear, promoted colonization as a way to keep the Blacks and Whites separate, regarded Blacks as primarily preferring servitude to Whites, and failed to use his position and authority to prevent the separation of Blacks who left the church with Richard Allen. When he attended the first annual conference of what became the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, he advised the Blacks to proceed, expressing an expectation that at the next General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church a fully equal African Conference would be established. According to Ian Straker, it never was, and there is no evidence that Garrettson advocated for the Blacks in that legislative gathering. Straker sums up Garrettson's ambivalence in this way:
It is possible to discern in his writing a deep sympathy for slaveholders in a state of sin and mere pity for the plight of their slaves. In significant ways his own profound religious awakening did not move him to fully transcend his aristocratic, southern slaveholding heritage.
Straker makes a further observation that captures the dynamic that shaped and, perhaps continues to shape, the dynamic between Black and White Methodists:
The mixed and even conflicting views that African and white Methodist held of each other allowed for warm and friendly and supportive relationships to exist despite the non-egalitarian views of African progress and civil rights held by Garrettson and others.
Indeed, slavery and racism were key issues in the early church. In the Christmas Conference of 1784, a resolution passed against slavery, voting to expel from membership those who held slaves, but that resolve was suspended on behalf of the whole church in 1785 at a Conference in Baltimore.
Those early days of Methodism were marked by "various impositions" that reflected the attitudes of many White Methodists. The report to the 1996 General Conference, "Report on Strengthening the Black Church for the 21st Century," lists some of these:
• White Bishops in the office of president over Black churches
• Assistance of Whites with the organization of separate Black missionary conferences (Methodist Episcopal Church and Methodist Protestant Church)
• Formation of the racially separated Colored Methodists Episcopal Church, formed by the Methodist Episcopal Church South for Black People
SEPARATION: BLACKS AND WHITES
Ill-treatment began to lead to separations. Harding records one such voluntary separation:
By the end of the War of 1812 the black Methodists in Charleston—the single largest black denomination—outnumbered the white membership ten to one. They had developed a quarterly conference of their own, and had custody of their own collections and control over the church trials of their own members. This independence was intolerable for the supervising white Methodists (and probably their non-Methodist friends as well). In 1815 they had acted against this black freedom, taking away privileges that they claimed were theirs to give, asserting that the African people had abused their freedom.
The upshot of this was that the following year Morris Brown and other Black leaders went to Philadelphia, conferred with Richard Allen and others there, were ordained for pastorates in Charleston, and organized an independent African Association in 1817. After a dispute over burial grounds in 1818, more than 75 percent of the Black Methodists of Charleston withdrew from the White-dominated churches.
The 1996 Strengthening the Black Church report notes:
Black local churches were organized in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Their separateness signaled both the brokenness of the predominately White structures and the relative health of Black people who could affirm themselves, keep faith that change would come from God, and remain within the structures of predominantly White and decidedly hostile Methodist churches.
In the beginning Blacks were worshipping in the same services and facilities with Whites. This was the case in both Southern and in Northern congregations. Various church histories give voice to these relationships between Black and White adherents to Methodism and the ways in which various Black congregations came into being. Some examples follow.
In its history, Georgetown's Dumbarton United Methodist Church, a descendent community of the first Methodist society in the District of Columbia, records this fact:
Blacks, relegated to the balcony of the original Georgetown church, wanted their own place of worship. Henry Foxall, a slaveowner and prominent Georgetown Society member, helped make it possible. In 1816, he sold them his lot on Mill Street ... and helped them build a small brick meetinghouse first known as "The Ark." ... This church became Mount Zion Methodist Episcopal Church in 1844. By 1850, black Methodist Society members in Georgetown outnumbered whites 441 to 411. After years of preaching from white laypersons and pastors (provided by the Dumbarton Church until 1855), Mount Zion obtained its first black pastor in 1864.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from God Delivers Meby Jacqulyn Thorpe Copyright © 2008 by The United Methodist Publishing House. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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