Absalom Jones

Richard Allen names Jones as one of the three men who joined him in planning a place of worship for the Black people of Philadelphia (Allen, Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours, p. 12). It was Jones whom a trustee of St George’s Church pulled from his knees during prayer, and who answered, “wait until prayer is over, and I will get up and trouble you no more” (Allen, Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours, p. 13). When the congregation that left voted on its denomination, he and Allen alone voted for the Methodists (Allen, Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours, p. 16); the majority joined the Church of England, and Bishop White ordained one of their number as pastor (AME Church, Doctrines and Discipline (1817), p. 4). In 1808 Jones published a sermon as rector of St Thomas’s, the African Episcopal Church (Jones, Thanksgiving Sermon (1808), title page).

With Allen he directed the work of Black nurses and grave-diggers in the yellow fever of 1793 and put his name with Allen’s to the published account of it (Allen, Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours, pp. 29–30). His sermon of 1 January 1808 gives thanks for the end of the legal slave trade to the United States and for “the privileges, we enjoy, of worshiping God, agreeably to our consciences, in churches of our own”, and asks that the day be kept each year as a thanksgiving (Jones, Thanksgiving Sermon (1808), pp. 15–16, 19). See Richard Allen and the African Methodist Episcopal Church.