John Wesley and the History of Methodism — Unit 8: African American Methodism and Methodism in Latin America and Africa

Key Verse

"There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:28, NKJV)

Learning Objectives

When you finish this unit, you should be able to:

1. Explain why the Wesleyan message of free grace for all people drew many enslaved and free Black Americans into Methodism.

2. Describe the founding of the African Methodist Episcopal Church under Richard Allen and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and give the reasons for their separation.

3. Explain how Methodist work began in Mexico, Cuba and Brazil, and say who now leads it.

4. Describe the early Methodist mission in West and Southern Africa, including the work of Thomas Birch Freeman.

5. State the objection that Methodist missions served empire and foreign culture, and give the Wesleyan answer.

The Voice of This Course

This course is written from inside the Wesleyan tradition, for students who belong to it. It is conservative and evangelical. When it says "we" or "our tradition," it means the Methodist and Wesleyan-Holiness churches that hold the Bible to be the Word of God and teach that Christ died for all. Other Christians and many historians see some of these matters differently. We state their views fairly and then give our answer. In this unit we describe several church bodies. We describe them as they are in history. We do not assume that every body today agrees with everything this course teaches.

Why This Unit Matters

Many CTS students are Mexican and Cuban, and others serve in Africa and other lands. This unit shows that Methodism has never belonged to one nation. It also tells a hard truth: the church that preached freedom in Christ did not always practice it. A pastor who understands this history will teach with both humility and confidence.

Free Grace for All and the Enslaved

The Wesleyan message is that Christ died for all people, that God's grace goes before every person, and that anyone may be saved. This message had a strong effect on people who were treated as property. In the early years of American Methodism, many enslaved and free Black people heard the preaching of the circuit riders and joined the Methodist societies. Some of the first Black preachers were respected by white Methodists too. One was Harry Hosier, who traveled with Asbury and with Thomas Coke and was known as a powerful preacher.

John Wesley saw clearly what slavery was. In 1774 he published Thoughts upon Slavery, a sharp attack on the slave trade and on slaveholding. In 1791, in the last weeks of his life, he wrote to William Wilberforce to encourage him in the struggle against the trade. As Unit 6 told, the Christmas Conference in 1784 adopted rules against slavery, though they were soon suspended. The church knew the right course and struggled to follow it.

Richard Allen and the African Methodist Episcopal Church

Richard Allen was born into slavery in Philadelphia in 1760. His family was sold to a farmer in Delaware. There he was converted through Methodist preaching. He was permitted to buy his freedom, did so, and began to preach, traveling widely. He settled in Philadelphia and joined St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church, where the number of Black worshipers grew.

An event at St. George's in the late 1780s became well known. Allen and other Black worshipers, including Absalom Jones, were directed to move from where they were kneeling in prayer. Historians debate the exact year, so we say only that it was in these years. Allen and others left the church. In 1787 they formed the Free African Society in Philadelphia, a mutual-aid group that also prayed together. Absalom Jones later led a congregation that joined the Episcopal Church. Allen remained a Methodist in doctrine. He built a church called Bethel, which began services in the 1790s.

For years Allen's congregation struggled to keep control of its own church against attempts by white Methodist authorities to direct it. Finally, in 1816, a Pennsylvania court decided in favor of Bethel's independence. In April of that year, Black Methodist congregations from several places met in Philadelphia and organized the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first independent Black denomination in the United States. Allen was elected its first bishop. The AME Church kept the doctrine and the Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church. It is Methodist in belief, and its separation was not about doctrine.

Allen wrote an account of his life, The Life Experience and Gospel Labors of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen, which is a primary source. Another early AME figure was Jarena Lee, who sensed a call to preach. Her story shows both the courage of women in early Methodism and the difficulty they met.

The AME Zion Church

A separate story took place in New York. Black members of John Street Methodist Church felt unwelcome and began to hold their own services. In 1800 they built a church called Zion. For years they remained connected to the white Methodists, but in 1821 they organized as a denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. James Varick was its first bishop. As with Allen, the reasons for separation were mainly unequal treatment, and not doctrine.

The Division over Slavery and After

White Methodists also divided over slavery. In 1844 the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church met in a crisis over a bishop who held slaves by marriage. The result was a split. In 1845 Southern Methodists organized the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. After the Civil War, most Black Methodists in the South joined the AME Church or the AME Zion Church, which grew rapidly. In 1870, Black members of the Southern church were helped to organize the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, now called the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Unit 9 tells how the larger Methodist family was joined again, and with what limits.

The question historians ask

Why did Black Methodists leave? Some historians stress racism: white Methodists refused real equality in worship and leadership. Others stress a desire of Black believers for self-direction, their own leaders and their own style of worship. Both are true. The churches formed by Allen and others were not only a protest but also a faithful response to a call.

Our answer

We hold that the separation was caused by the sin of racism in the church. That sin was a denial of the gospel of Galatians 3:28. We do not defend it. But we also hold that God was at work, and He raised up churches that kept the doctrine of Wesley and strengthened the faith of people who had been denied dignity. Our tradition honors Allen, Varick, Jones and the Black preachers and laypeople who built these churches. We should not call division a good thing in itself, and we should pray that brothers and sisters of every people may worship together in love.

Methodism in Latin America

Mexico

Methodist work in Mexico was begun by missionaries from the United States in the 1870s, sent by the Methodist Episcopal Church and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. They preached in Spanish, opened schools and printed Christian literature. Mexican believers and pastors soon took a leading part. In a country with a Catholic majority, the first Protestants sometimes met opposition. In 1930 the Methodist Church of Mexico (Iglesia Metodista de México) became self-governing, under its own Mexican leadership. Other Wesleyan-Holiness bodies, such as the Church of the Nazarene, also work in Mexico today. We list the Methodist Church of Mexico descriptively as part of the Wesleyan family. We do not say that every part of it holds every position of this course.

Cuba

American Methodist missionaries began work in Cuba around the end of the nineteenth century, in the years of the war of 1898. Cuban pastors and laypeople carried it forward. After the revolution of 1959, foreign missionaries left, and the Methodist church in Cuba continued under Cuban leadership, sometimes in difficult conditions. Its history shows that the faith in Cuba does not depend on foreign missionaries. Students from Cuba should read this history with pride: they are not guests in this story. They are part of it.

Brazil

Methodist work in Brazil also began in the nineteenth century by missionaries from the United States. The Methodist Church in Brazil became self-governing in 1930.

A note on Chile

In 1909, a revival among Methodists in Valparaiso, Chile, under the missionary Willis Hoover, became the root of a separate Pentecostal church. The Pentecostal courses tell this story. It shows that Methodist missions in Latin America were a seedbed for many churches.

Methodism in Africa

The first Methodist missionaries to the Gold Coast, now Ghana, faced a deadly climate, and several died soon after arriving. In 1838 Thomas Birch Freeman, who was of African and English parentage, arrived at Cape Coast. He traveled widely, reaching the Asante capital of Kumasi in 1839. In 1842 he took the gospel to Badagry, in what is now Nigeria. He is a major figure in Methodist history in West Africa.

Methodist work also began in Southern Africa in the early nineteenth century, and spread among African peoples as well as among settlers. American Methodists also sent missions, including those of Bishop William Taylor in the later nineteenth century. In each place, African evangelists, teachers and class leaders carried the faith farther than the missionaries could. The Bible was translated into many African languages, and Methodist schools taught many to read. Today the Wesleyan family in Africa includes large Methodist and Holiness churches, and Africa is one of the places where our family is growing. We are cautious about numbers, because estimates vary.

What These Stories Teach

Four lessons stand out from the history of these very different churches.

First, the same Wesleyan pattern appears wherever Methodism took root. Believers heard that Christ died for all, were joined to small groups for prayer and care, sang the hymns of the movement, and were sent out to tell others. The setting changed, from Philadelphia to Cape Coast to Mexico City, but the pattern was the same.

Second, ordinary people carried the work. Richard Allen, the first AME bishop, had been born into slavery. In Africa, evangelists and teachers whom history seldom names did much of the work. In Latin America, Mexican, Cuban and Brazilian pastors and laypeople took the lead. Our tradition has always been a movement of the whole people of God, and not only of its officials.

Third, the churches suffered and persevered. African American Methodists endured injustice inside and outside the church. Early Protestants in Catholic lands sometimes faced opposition, and believers in Cuba lived through years of hardship. Their endurance is a witness to the power of the gospel.

Fourth, the church must watch its own sins. The Wesleyan message was free grace for all, yet the church was slow to apply it to slavery and to race. We learn humility from this. We also learn that doctrine must be lived. A church that preaches that Christ died for all must welcome all to the same table.

Objection: Missions Served Empire and Foreign Culture

Some historians argue that Methodist missions in Africa and Latin America were bound up with colonial power, and that missionaries often looked down on local cultures. Some critics add that Protestant churches in Latin America are foreign religions brought by outsiders.

Our answer

We admit that some missionaries made mistakes, and some were influenced by the attitudes of their time. A fair history says this. But the gospel is not the property of any empire. Paul told the Athenians that God "has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth" (Acts 17:26). John saw before the throne a great multitude "of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues" (Revelation 7:9). Many missionaries gave their lives and health to serve people, and many opposed the slave trade or colonial cruelty. Above all, the churches that resulted are now led by Africans, Mexicans, Cubans and Brazilians, who preach the gospel in their own languages. A church that is led by its own people is not foreign. Christianity itself began in the Middle East and came to every nation in the same way.

Pastoral Application

A pastor in a town in Jalisco is told by a neighbor, "Your church is a foreign religion from the United States." The pastor feels the sting of this.

First, he listens and does not answer with anger. Second, he acknowledges the part of the charge that is true: missionaries from other countries carried Methodist and Holiness work to Mexico. Third, he explains that the message itself is the gospel found in Scripture, which began in the Middle East and which belongs to all nations, and that Mexican pastors and believers now lead the church. Fourth, he invites his neighbor to see the fruit, the changed lives and the care for the poor in his own congregation. Fifth, he prays for the neighbor by name.

Summary

The Wesleyan message of grace for all drew many enslaved and free Black people into Methodism. Wesley attacked slavery in Thoughts upon Slavery (1774). Richard Allen, born enslaved in 1760, left St. George's after unequal treatment, helped form the Free African Society in 1787, and was elected the first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, organized in 1816. The AME Zion Church was organized in 1821 in New York, with James Varick as its first bishop. White Methodists divided over slavery in 1844 and 1845, and the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church was formed in 1870. American missionaries began Methodist work in Mexico in the 1870s and in Cuba around 1898; the Methodist Church of Mexico became self-governing in 1930, and the Methodist Church in Brazil in the same year. In Africa, Thomas Birch Freeman reached the Gold Coast in 1838. Critics say missions served empire, and we answer that the gospel belongs to all nations and is now led by their own people.

Further Reading

• Richard Allen, The Life Experience and Gospel Labors of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen, a primary source.

• John Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery (1774), a primary source.

• Francis Asbury, Journal, for his references to Black preachers and congregations.

• John Wesley, Journal, for his account of the movement.

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