Standing outside the historic Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Yvonne Studevan was full of pride as she saw her great-great-great-great-grandfather being honored with a new, 6-foot bronze statue.
“We’re a denomination that a man had a vision for that was so strong because he had the right vision of serving God: love God, serve God, love God’s people,” the Athens, Ga., woman said of Richard Allen, who started the nation’s first independent black denomination.
Just as their religious ancestors did exactly two centuries ago, members of the AME Church made a pilgrimage to Philadelphia on Wednesday (July 6) for the opening of the denomination’s General Conference.
They gathered not only to remember their history, but to continue to forge a path toward racial justice.
Allen started Bethel AME Church in 1791 after watching white officials of St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church pull up his friend, clergyman Absalom Jones, who was praying on his knees.
“We’ve been talking about Black Lives Matter since the AME Church started, not just now,” said the Rev. Gregory Ingram, host bishop for the quadrennial General Conference and leader of the AME Church’s First Episcopal District, in an interview.
At a bicentennial banquet Tuesday that kicked off the conference, the Rev. Mark Tyler, the pastor of Bethel AME, told 3,000 attendees they have much to celebrate.
“We gather tonight to give God praise — praise for keeping, protecting and expanding the freedom church birthed in a blacksmith shop, having come out of segregated pews but now standing on five continents,” he said at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.
As the festivities for the General Conference began with AMEs decked in tuxes and sequined gowns, speakers recalled their humbler beginnings, when delegates arrived on horseback from Delaware, New York and Maryland.
AME Church historiographer Teresa Fry Brown said the anniversary highlights a significant legal achievement by a religious organization of African-Americans.
“We had to fight all the way to high court,” she said of the battle that was resolved by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. “The Methodist Episcopal Church resisted an independent black denomination.”
An exhibit at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts showcased other successful efforts to counter discrimination and segregation over the years, including a photo of bishops praying in front of the Supreme Court for a favorable ruling in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case that ended legal segregation in U.S. schools.
But the joy and pride that the AMEs spoke of as they reunited was tempered with a reminder that the denomination’s work for racial justice continues.
Source: Religion News Service | Adelle M. Banks
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