The African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) has a rich and storied history, deeply intertwined with the struggle for racial equality and social justice in the United States. From its humble beginnings in Philadelphia to its current status as an international denomination, the AME Church has been a beacon of hope and a source of strength for African Americans and others seeking liberation.
Mother Bethel AME Church in Philadelphia, the "abbey of African Methodism."
Origins in Philadelphia
The seeds of the AME Church were sown in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1787. White Methodist Episcopalians at the city’s St. George Chapel forced those of African descent out of the congregation. This act of discrimination led to the dedication of the first AME chapel, Bethel AME, in 1794.
Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church is recognized as the genesis of Black religious organizing spirit, established in the crucible of the American revolutionary era. The church is mother church of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination, formed in 1816. Located at Sixth and Lombard Streets in Philadelphia’s Society Hill neighborhood, the church sits on the oldest continuously Black-owned parcel of land in the country.
Mother Bethel was founded by Richard Allen, a Delaware-born former slave who purchased his own freedom in 1783 and began preaching the gospel in Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. In 1786 Allen was asked by a Methodist elder to minister to Philadelphia’s growing free Black community at the city’s St.
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Allen, who believed deeply in the Methodism’s antislavery bona fides and its virtues of plain living and speaking, remained committed to establishing an independent Methodist church. On land located at Sixth and Lombard Streets that Allen had purchased in 1791, Bethel Church was dedicated in July 1794.
Among the churches formed in the wake of the walkout Allen’s Bethel Church was highly active, organizing the first Black Sunday school - and perhaps a separate night school - in 1795. Mother Bethel led in moral leadership, as well, with Allen shepherding and instructing newly liberated and free alike in rectitude.
By the 1810s, Bethel claimed greater than 1,000 members. In the antebellum era, Bethel’s reach spread throughout the republic. In 1816 Allen solidified a regional network of churches in an act that would transform Bethel into the “abbey of African Methodism.” Delegates from five churches in Baltimore, Washington, Wilmington, Philadelphia, and Salem, New Jersey, whose experiences with white Methodist parent churches were similar, agreed to ally in a new denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) “connection” with Richard Allen elected the organization’s first bishop.
If Bethel was mother church of the burgeoning AME connection, it was also a beacon to the still-enslaved, serving as a Philadelphia sanctuary along the “Underground Railroad” to freedom. And in 1830 Allen, who had long helped shape conversations about the destiny of Blacks in America - including the merits of African colonization - oversaw the planning of the first national meeting of Black leaders.
Richard Allen, founder of the AME Church.
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Delegates to the convention, the American Society of Free Persons of Color, met for five days in September 1830 at Bethel Church. By the time of Allen’s death, the AME Church had congregations in every northern state and several southern states with 10,000 members.
In the second half of the 1800s, Bethel could tout its leaders like journalist and activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper or famed educator Fannie Coppin. Mother Bethel was still the AME Church’s home. Philadelphia was still its headquarters.
The AME Church that has grown up around Mother Bethel is a sprawling international conference of churches, with 7,000 places of assembly and more than four million members. Mother Bethel is one of more than two dozen AME churches in Philadelphia in the AME’s First District Conference, headquartered since 1986 in West Philadelphia.
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Expansion and Growth
The geographical spread of the AMEC prior to the Civil War was mainly restricted to the Northeast and Midwest. 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.
The most significant era of denominational development occurred during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Oftentimes, with the permission of Union army officials AME clergy moved into the states of the collapsing Confederacy to pull newly freed slaves into their denomination.
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“I Seek My Brethren,” the title of an often repeated sermon that Theophilus G. Steward preached in South Carolina, became a clarion call to evangelize fellow blacks in Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Texas, and many other parts of the south. Hence, in 1880 AME membership reached 400,000 because of its rapid spread below the Mason-Dixon line.
By 1900, the AME Church was a sprawling denomination with churches in places as far-flung (from Philadelphia) as South Africa.
Today, the African Methodist Episcopal Church has membership in twenty Episcopal Districts in thirty-nine countries on five continents.
Bethel AME Church in Indianapolis
Bethel A. M. E. Church, known in its early years as Indianapolis Station or the Vermont Street Church, is a historic African Methodist Episcopal Church in Indianapolis, Indiana. Organized in 1836, it is the city's oldest African-American congregation.
The three-story church on West Vermont Street dates to 1869 and was added to the National Register in 1991. The surrounding neighborhood, once the heart of downtown Indianapolis's African American community, significantly changed with post-World War II urban development that included new hotels, apartments, office space, museums, and the Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis campus.
The Bethel AME congregation has a long history of supporting the city's African American community. It is especially noted for its activities on behalf of the antislavery movement in the years before the American Civil War; its support of the Underground Railroad, which provided protection to slaves en route to Canada; and its commitment to education and community outreach.
Augustus Turner, a local barber, organized a small group of African American Methodists in 1836. The congregation's first meetings were held in Turner's log cabin on Georgia Street. A new house of worship was constructed on Georgia Street in 1841.
In 1841 the congregation had its first church built on Georgia Street between the Central Canal and Mississippi Street (present-day Senate Avenue). The Bethel AME congregation continued to use the small, frame structure until 1857, when it bought the first Christ Church building from the city's Episcopal congregation.
The AME congregation had the small church moved to their site on Georgia Street; however, the church was destroyed by fire in 1862. It is believed that the AME congregation's open support of the abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad, which provided protection to slaves en route to Canada, may have led some pro-slavery advocates to burn the church.
In 1867 the congregation contracted with Adam Busch to build a new brick church on its West Vermont Street lot. By 1869, when the building was only partially completed, the congregation moved into the new church at 414 West Vermont Street and adopted the name of Bethel AME Church.
The church's West Vermont Street site, located in the northwest section of downtown Indianapolis, has historically been the heart of the African American community. The neighborhood included a mix of residential, retail, commercial, and light industry.
In February 2017 Indiana University announced that its School of Informatics and Computing at IUPUI had received a grant from the university to create a three-dimensional virtual reality model of the historic Vermont Street church. IUPUI students collected 3,000 images for use in the modeling project. When completed, the model will be accessible to the public through IUPUI's School of Informatics and Computing.
Bethel AME Church in Indianapolis.
Role in the Community
The Bethel AME Church elevated its role in the community as the city's black population increased. Before the American Civil War, the congregation became active in the antislavery movement and supported the Underground Railroad.
Bethel, the city's only AME congregation for thirty years, became the mother church to several congregations of the African Methodist Episcopal churches in Indiana, including the Allen Chapel, Coppin Chapel, Saint John, and Wallace (Providence) congregations.
The congregation established its first school for African American children at the church in 1858. The Bethel church also became a public meeting place for social activism, as well as a venue for organizing and implementing social services including providing money, clothing, and temporary lodging to African Americans immigrating to the city from the South after the Civil War.
Over the years the church provided other social programs such as a credit union, counseling services, a well-baby clinic, and day-care services for children and adults.
Indianapolis's African American population was small during the early decades of the nineteenth century. In 1840, shortly after the congregation organized, only 195 blacks lived in the city.
Bethel AME Church in Augusta, Georgia
Bethel AME Church is the oldest African Methodist Episcopal Church in Augusta, Georgia. After the Civil War, it was a common practice for former slave owners to donate land to African Americans for the purpose of building segregated churches. These conditional land grant churches populate the Southern United States today.
Bethel AME Church in Augusta, Georgia is noted as one of the first African American Churches established on land which was purchased by African Americans for their religious and educational use and is continuously owned by them today. This parcel of land was purchased by the Trustees for the congregation for the amount of $222.51.
Bethel AME Church in Augusta, Georgia gave rise to a Bishop of the AME Church. Bishop Richard Robert Wright, Jr. was converted and joined Bethel AME in 1892. As a child, Bishop Wright attended Haines Institute, founded by Ms. Lucy Craft Laney in Augusta, Georgia. He later served as a Sunday School Superintendent, Class Leader and Steward.
The church’s mission services includes assisting nursing homes, feeding the hungry, clothing the needy, giving hope to the derelicts, nursing those in distress, strengthening the prayer of life and helping the hopeless to find themselves. In 1956, Bethel AME Church received a citation for its service to the Augusta community during the bicentennial celebration of our nation.
Bethel AME Church was also presented an award in appreciation for its overall civic interest and community service, which contributed to the quality of life for citizens of Augusta. This award was presented by the Augusta Black History Committee, Mr. J. Phillip Waring, Founder and Chairman.
Under the leadership of Dr. A. J. Harris and Rev. Curtis Henri Boddy, the officers and members sought to extend the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the Augusta community. The church purchased a former Baptist church, which was no longer in use. This property contained a church building, an educational center and a house on Hazel Street.
During the period of Rev. A. James Harris tenure as Presiding Elder, Hickman Tabernacle AME Church was purchased and begun with assistance from Bethel’s officers and finance.
In 1974, Rev. C. E. Wells, Sr., officers and members saw the need for a more comfortable parsonage. A home was purchased at 401 Aumond Road. It served as a home for the pastors of Bethel for years.
Bethel AME Church in Arkansas
Arkansas’s earliest AME congregation formed under the leadership of the Reverend Nathan Warren. Warren, reared a slave in the District of Columbia, arrived in Arkansas in 1819 with Robert Crittenden, who served as the first secretary of the Arkansas Territory.
When the family returned to Little Rock, Warren became the minister to a small group of African Americans in Little Rock and Helena (Phillips County) who had been worshiping as Methodists. This was the first AME congregation in the state. The church later known as Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church was dedicated as Campbell Chapel (named after Bishop Jabez Pitt Campbell) in 1875.
Arkansas’s inaugural congregation placed service, education, and the social and political uplift of African Americans alongside its quest to minister to Black men and women’s spiritual needs. Bethel AME served as a springboard for other congregations to form across the state.
The growth of the denomination in Arkansas merited the establishment of annual state conferences and representation at the regional and national level. Under the direction of Bishop James A. Shorter, Arkansas became a destination for southern AME members and placed the state in a national spotlight.
The first Arkansas Annual Conference was held on November 19, 1868. Four years later at the general conference in Nashville, Tennessee, the state was accepted into the Sixth Episcopal District. An 1890 national census showed that the AME Church in Arkansas included 333 churches and 27,956 members.
At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the AME Church in Arkansas remained committed to what Reverend Dennis Dickerson called a “liberationist” mission. When racial tensions in the region escalated in the 1880s and 1890s, Arkansas’s AME leaders and assemblies performed mission work in Africa and were part of the Back-to-Africa Movement that was heavily promoted by southern African Americans for the purpose of establishing communities on that continent.
Arkansas lawyer Scipio A. Jones, who successfully defended twelve Black men arrested after the 1919 Elaine Massacre and helped prevent a similar tragedy in Little Rock in 1927, belonged to the city’s Bethel AMEC congregation and was a graduate of the Bethel Institute.
The AME Church was also an entrenched presence during the Little Rock Central High School desegregation crisis of 1957. Reverend Rufus K. Young Jr., who ministered at Bethel AME Church, supported the efforts of the Arkansas chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the leadership of AME member Daisy Bates.
In the twenty-first century, the AME Church in Arkansas (a member of the AME Twelfth District) remains dedicated to its mission to care for the intellectual, physical, and environmental-as well as spiritual-needs of all people through its initial liberationist creed.
Bethel AME Church in Baltimore
In 1785, a young black Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) lay preacher by the name of Richard Allen was stationed at a Methodist meeting house in Baltimore. Allen preached at the meeting house and free African Americans of the city came to hear him. Before the year was over, a number of those free Methodists left the MEC to worship amongst themselves.
