Celebrating Black traditions of Methodism
This post is part of our Faithfully Asked Questions series, which we debuted last year and are ramping up in 2025 as part of our digital engagement efforts. In each installment, we’ll provide answers to common questions of faith. Journey along as we explore the meanings behind various holidays or rituals of the church, the histories underlying our favorite hymns, saints, or church leaders, and other common questions about Christian life. When and where we can, we’ll weave in special stories connecting our questions to life right here at St. Stephen. In February, March and April, we’ll be taking a special look at questions on church unity, as we celebrate the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed and a shared Easter date for all Christians in 2025.
Have a question you want answered? Have a story to contribute? Email Matt at mcomer@ststephenumc.net.
Celebrating Black traditions of Methodism
[Pictured above: Members of the AME Zion Publishing House board in Charlotte, 1916; Carolina Room, Charlotte Mecklenburg Library (top left); Clinton Chapel AME Zion Church, the “mother church” of the AME Zion Church in Charlotte, founded 1865; Second Ward Alumni Association & Charlotte Mecklenburg Library (right); Original building of Little Rock AME Zion Church in transit from Third Ward to First Ward in 1911; Charlotte Mecklenburg Library (bottom left).]
The year 2025 marks two unique moments of commemoration: the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed and a common, shared date of Easter for all Christians this year. We’ll explore these two commemorations and other topics on church unity over the next couple months, but we first begin with a nod toward Black History Month, taking a short look at some of the Black traditions of Methodism in America and their particular presence in Charlotte.
The United Methodist Church as we know it today is the result of a 1968 merger of the Methodist Church and Evangelical United Brethren Church, following several earlier mergers and reunions of Methodist traditions. Methodists have long valued unity, but throughout the church’s history big, complicated issues often stood in the way of greater union, among them slavery and race.
As in many other Protestant traditions, Black Americans of Methodist faith were not always fully welcome or affirmed in predominately (and many times exclusively) white-controlled church spaces. As a result, history has seen the foundation of a number of African-American Wesleyan and Methodist denominations which formed out of the mainstream Methodist traditions in America, including:
- The African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AME Zion) Church (founded 1800 in New York City)
- The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church (founded 1816 in Philadelphia)
- The Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church (founded in 1870 in Tennessee)
- The African Union Methodist Protestant (AUMP) Church (founded 1813 in Delaware)
- The Union American Methodist Episcopal (UAME) Church (founded 1865 as a separation from the AUMP Church)
In our Charlotte area, you’ll find a large presence of AME Zion churches, owing to the influence of Bishop James Walker Hood (1831-1918). Hood Theological Seminary, an AME Zion school, is based in Salisbury and is named in honor of Hood. The AME Zion Church’s headquarters is also located in Charlotte, where 35 AME Zion churches are located today in Mecklenburg County (24 in Charlotte, 3 in Matthews, and 2 each in Cornelius, Davidson, Huntersville, and Pineville).
In Uptown, Little Rock AME Zion Church’s second building, erected in 1911, was eventually bought by the city, renovated, and, in 1986, leased to the Afro-American Cultural Center, the precursor to today’s Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, which briefly occupied the historic space before moving into its new museum building on S. Tryon Street. Read more about this historic property.
Ecumenical movements throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries led to many efforts to re-unite a disparate and denominationally-fractured worldwide church. Like other denominations, Methodists, too, experienced efforts toward reunification. Lingering racism and segregation, however, continued to act as a wedge between largely white and historically Black denominations.
Efforts to heal some of these old wounds have resulted in positive developments toward unity, including an agreement on full communion by the United Methodist Church and each of the five historically Black Methodist denominations listed above. The full communion agreement, approved in 2012 (and adopted into the 2016 Book of Discipline) stops a little short of full re-unification but nonetheless offers one of the strongest nods toward unity that individual churches can make toward one another. With full communion, each denomination recognizes each other as part of the one, holy, catholic (universal), and apostolic faith and fully recognizes the validity of each other’s rites of Baptism and Eucharist, clergy, and other ministries.
The resolution adopting full communion noted this history: “The United Methodist Church has expressed in its General Conference through a formal Act of Repentance its apology for the injury it inflicted on its African American brothers and sisters through its racist position and policies that led to the formation of the historically African American Methodist churches.”
Though many African-American Methodists chose to begin their own denominations, others chose to stay in the larger Methodist denomination. Take a look at this video exploring how the African American Methodist Heritage Center is documenting the history of Black people who helped shape the modern United Methodist Church.