The Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen
The autobiography of Richard Allen, founder and first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, published after his death. It gives his first-hand account of the walk-out from St George’s Church and the founding of Bethel.
Allen wrote the narrative late in life and it was printed “by his request” in 1833. His preface warns that much of it was written many years after the events, that his memory could not fix the time of many of them, and that some are told without day or date. The book is short: a narrative that ends on its twenty-first page, followed by documents of Bethel church, the account of the yellow fever of 1793 that he published with Absalom Jones in 1794, and addresses to slaveholders and to people of colour.
It is the testimony of the chief actor, told from his side of a long conflict with the white Methodist preachers of Philadelphia, whom he names only by initials. Its sequence of events is clear; its dates are few. It is cited in Richard Allen and the African Methodist Episcopal Church and should be read beside the Doctrines and Discipline of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, whose historical preface Allen also signed.
Cited in
- 1787 to 1816, estimated date