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The Church of God in Christ (COGIC) is a Holiness–Pentecostal Christian denomination. COGIC is the largest Pentecostal denomination in the United States. Although an international and multi-ethnic religious organization, it has a predominantly African-American membership in the United States. The international headquarters is in Memphis, Tennessee. The current Presiding Bishop is Bishop John Drew Sheard Sr., who is the Senior Pastor of the Greater Emmanuel Institutional Church of God in Christ of Detroit, Michigan. He was elected as the denomination's leader on March 27, 2021.
Richard Allen was a minister, educator, writer, and one of America's most active and influential Black leaders. In 1794, he founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), the first independent Black denomination in the United States. He opened his first AME church in 1794 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The African Methodist Episcopal Church, usually called the A.M.E. Church or AME, is a predominantly African-American Methodist denomination. It adheres to Wesleyan-Arminian theology and has a connexional polity. The African Methodist Episcopal Church is the first independent Protestant denomination to be founded by black people, though it welcomes and has members of all ethnicities. It was founded by the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen (1760–1831) - later elected and ordained first bishop in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1816 from calling together of five black congregations of the earlier established Methodist Episcopal Church on the East Coast / Middle-Atlantic states area in the first General Conference, who wanted to escape the discrimination that was commonplace in society. It was among the first denominations in the United States to be founded for this reason, rather than for theological distinctions, and has persistently advocated for the civil and human rights of African Americans through social improvement, religious autonomy, and political engagement, while always being open to people of all racial backgrounds. Allen, an previously ordained Deacon in the Methodist Episcopal Church, was elected by the gathered ministers and ordained / consecrated as its first bishop in 1816 by the first General Conference of the five churches - extending from the three in the Philadelphia area in Pennsylvania to one in Delaware and one in Maryland of Baltimore. The denomination then expanded west and through the South, particularly after the American Civil War (1861–1865). By 1906, the AME had a membership of about 500,000, more than the combined total of the two other predominantly Black American denominations - the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in America and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, making it the largest major African-American denomination of the Methodist traditions.
The Christian Methodist Episcopal (C.M.E.) Church is a historically black denomination within the broader context of Wesleyan Methodism founded and organized by John Wesley in England in 1744 and established in America as the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1784. It is considered to be a mainline denomination. The CME Church was organized on December 16, 1870 in Jackson, Tennessee by 41 former slave members with the full support of their white sponsors in their former Methodist Episcopal Church, South who met to form an organization that would allow them to establish and maintain their own polity. They ordained their own bishops and ministers without their being officially endorsed or appointed by the white-dominated body. They called this fellowship the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in America, which it remained until their successors adopted the current name in 1954. The Christian Methodist Episcopal today has a church membership of people from all racial backgrounds. It adheres to Wesleyan-Arminian theology.
The black church is the faith and body of Christian congregations and denominations in the United States that minister predominantly to African Americans, as well as their collective traditions and members. The term "black church" can also refer to individual congregations.
Matthew Wesley Clair was one of the first African-American bishops in the Methodist Episcopal Church.
Gulfside Assembly is a Methodist retreat located in Waveland, Mississippi. It was founded to provide spiritual, educational and recreational facilities to African Americans who were denied access elsewhere because of segregation. Incorporated in 1924, it is today recognized as a historic site by the State of Mississippi.
James D. Lynch was a missionary, public official, and state legislator in the United States. He was the first African-American Secretary of State of Mississippi, and a minister.
An annual conference in Methodism is a regional body that governs much of the life of the "connectional church". Annual conferences are composed primarily of the clergy members and a lay member or members from each charge. Each conference is a geographical division. In general, the smaller states in the United States hold one conference each, while larger states often include two or more conferences. Several annual conferences are held in other nations as well.
An episcopal area in the United Methodist Church (UMC) is a basic unit of this denomination. It is a region presided over by a resident bishop that is similar to a diocese in other Christian denominations. Each annual conference in the UMC is within a single episcopal area; some episcopal areas include more than one annual conference. Episcopal areas are found in the United States as well as internationally. In some cases, such as the Western Jurisdiction of the US as well as some places internationally, an episcopal area covers a very large territory.
Religion of black Americans refers to the religious and spiritual practices of African Americans. Historians generally agree that the religious life of black Americans "forms the foundation of their community life." Before 1775 there was scattered evidence of organized religion among black people in the Thirteen Colonies. The Methodist and Baptist churches became much more active in the 1780s. Their growth was quite rapid for the next 150 years, until their membership included the majority of black Americans.
Willis Jefferson King was an African-American Methodist bishop, college professor and author.
Robert Josias "Raphael" Morgan was a Jamaican-American who is believed to be the first Black Eastern Orthodox priest in the United States. After being active in other denominations, including the AME Church, Church of England, and the Episcopal Church, Morgan converted to Orthodoxy. He was ordained as an Orthodox priest of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. He was designated as "Missionary to America and the West Indies." He claimed to have founded the "Order of Golgotha", but the Orthodox Church is not organized into orders.
The civil rights movement (1865–1896) aimed to eliminate racial discrimination against African Americans, improve their educational and employment opportunities, and establish their electoral power, just after the abolition of slavery in the United States. The period from 1865 to 1895 saw a tremendous change in the fortunes of the black community following the elimination of slavery in the South.
William Tecumseh Vernon was an American educator, minister and bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church who served as president of Western University beginning in 1896 and Register of the Treasury from 1906 to 1911.
Mississippi Industrial College was a historically black college in Holly Springs, Mississippi. It was founded in 1905 by the Mississippi Conference of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church. After desegregation of community colleges in the mid-20th century, it had trouble competing and eventually closed in 1982. The campus was listed as a historic site on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980 and was acquired by Rust College in 2008.
George Freeman Bragg was an African-American priest, journalist, social activist and historian. The twelfth African American ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church of the United States, he worked against racial discrimination and for interracial harmony, both within and outside of his church.
James Walker Hood was an African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church bishop in North Carolina from 1872 to 1916. Before emancipation, he was an active abolitionist, and during the American Civil War he went to New Bern, North Carolina where he preached for the church to the black people and soldiers in the area. He was very successful and became an important religious and political leader in North Carolina, becoming "one of the most significant and crucial African American religious and race leaders during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries". By 1887 he had founded over six hundred churches in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina and erected about five hundred church buildings. He was politically and religiously active as well, supporting education, civil rights, and the ordination of women.
Bishop Singleton T. Jones was a religious leader in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. When he was ten years old, he was apprenticed to a lawyer and worked for him for four years, after which he found positions at an inn, as a hod carrier, and on a riverboat on the Ohio River. He became a pastor in the 1840s, serving churches throughout Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. Although he had little education, the taught himself to be an articulate orator. Besides being a pastor to churches, he also edited AME Zion publications, the Zion's Standard and Weekly Review and the Discipline.
Israel Metropolitan Christian Methodist Episcopal Church is a Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. It was the first independent African American church of the city.
References
- ↑ Rev Robert Elijah Jones on Findagrave
- 1 2 3 Richardson, Harry V. (1976). Dark Salvation: The story of Methodism as it developed among Blacks in America . Garden City, New York: Anchor-Press/Doubleday. ISBN 0-385-00245-9.
- 1 2 3 "Last rites for negro churchman" . The Daily Herald. Biloxi, Mississippi. 20 May 1960. Retrieved 20 October 2017.
Funeral services will be held Monday at Waveland, Miss., for Robert E. Jones, 88, for many years a prominent Negro leader in the Methodist Church.
