Richard Allen and the African Methodist Episcopal Church

Richard Allen tells his own story. He was born on 14 February 1760, a slave of Benjamin Chew of Philadelphia, was sold with his family into Delaware, was converted there and joined the Methodist society, and bought his freedom from his master (Allen, Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours, pp. 5–7). After some years as a travelling preacher he came to Philadelphia in February 1786, preached at St George’s Church at five in the morning, and gathered a society of forty-two members among the Black people of the city (Allen, Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours, p. 12). He proposed a separate place of worship for them, and three men joined him, among them Absalom Jones (Allen, Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours, p. 12).

As Black worshippers at St George’s grew in number they were moved from their seats to the wall and then sent to the gallery (Allen, Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours, p. 13). One Sunday, Allen writes, they knelt there for prayer:

We had not been long upon our knees before I heard considerable scuffling and low talking. I raised my head up and saw one of the trustees, H-- M--, having hold of the Rev. Absalom Jones, pulling him up off of his knees, and saying, “You must get up--you must not kneel here.”

Jones asked to be left until the prayer was over, and a second trustee came to pull up another man. “By this time prayer was over, and we all went out of the church in a body, and they were no more plagued with us in the church” (Allen, Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours, p. 13).

They hired a store-room, worshipped by themselves and raised money for a building. When the Methodist elder threatened to disown them, they answered that he could not “seal up the scriptures from us, and deny us a name in heaven” (Allen, Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours, pp. 14–15). When the members voted on which denomination to join, a large majority chose the Church of England; only Allen and Jones voted for the Methodists (Allen, Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours, p. 16). Bishop White ordained one of their number as pastor of that church (AME Church, Doctrines and Discipline (1817), p. 4), and the title page of a sermon that Jones printed in 1808 names him rector of St Thomas’s, the African Episcopal Church (Jones, Thanksgiving Sermon (1808), title page). Allen refused the post: he “could not be any thing else but a Methodist” (Allen, Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours, p. 17).

Allen bought an old blacksmith’s shop, moved it to his own lot and fitted it for worship; Bishop Asbury opened it in July 1794, and it was named Bethel (Allen, Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours, pp. 17–18). For years the white Methodist elders of the city claimed control of its property and pulpit, until a suit before the Supreme Court ended in Bethel’s favour (Allen, Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours, pp. 18–21).

In April 1816 delegates from Baltimore and other places met those of Philadelphia and resolved to “become one body, under the name of the African Methodist Episcopal Church” (Allen, Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours, p. 21). On 11 April Allen was set apart as bishop by the laying on of hands of five ordained ministers (AME Church, Doctrines and Discipline (1817), p. 10). The new church’s Doctrines and Discipline, printed in 1817, kept the Methodism that Allen said had first brought the gospel to his people (Allen, Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours, p. 17); the church governed itself in order to be free of what its founders called “spiritual despotism” (AME Church, Doctrines and Discipline (1817), pp. 8–9), and refused membership to slaveholders (AME Church, Doctrines and Discipline (1817), p. 190).