Richard Allen and a Church with Dignity

In the years when the United States was still young, when slavery was still legal and Black men and women were still bought and sold, there rose up in Philadelphia a preacher who had once been a slave. His name was Richard Allen. He had been born into bondage, sold as a boy, set to work in fields he did not own, under a name he had not chosen. And somewhere in those hard years, he met Jesus Christ. The faith took hold of him so deeply that even the man who owned him came to believe that slavery was a sin. Allen bought his own freedom, and then he began to preach. He preached to anyone who would listen, white and Black alike, and the crowds grew, because the man spoke like one who had been set free twice over.

Now come close to one Sunday morning, in a church called St George's, in the city of Philadelphia. The building was Methodist. The doors were open to all. And Allen, with other free Black believers, came to worship there as members. But the welcome had a wall in it. As the congregation grew, the white leaders decided the Black worshippers should be moved. They were sent up to the gallery, away from the others, separated at the very moment they had gathered to be one body.

Picture it. The people kneel to pray. And as their heads are bowed, hands reach down and take hold of them, pulling them up from their knees, telling them to move. One of Allen's companions, a man named Absalom Jones, asks only for time to finish the prayer. Wait until prayer is over, he says. The answer is no. They will be moved now. And so, as the story is remembered, Richard Allen and his brothers and sisters rose from their knees, and they walked out of that church together. They would not be humiliated in the house of God. They would not have a wall built down the middle of the body of Christ.

That walk out of St George's was not the end of something. It was the beginning. Allen did not leave the faith. He loved Methodism to the end of his days. What he could not abide was a worship that preached one Lord on Sunday and treated his people as less than men. So he built. He gathered the free Black Christians of Philadelphia. He raised up a place where they could worship without insult, where they could lead, preach, marry, bury, and organise as those made fully in the image of God. In time these congregations joined into a single church, and in the year 1816 Richard Allen was made its first bishop. They called it the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

It was never meant as a celebration of division. It was a witness against exclusion. The scandal was not that Black Christians wanted their own church. The scandal was the prejudice that made such a church necessary for them to worship with dignity. Allen took that scandal and answered it not with bitterness but with building. A church with room for the whole person. A church that refused to let anyone be treated as scenery in someone else's worship.

When Richard Allen died in 1831, he left behind a denomination that would carry Black Christian leadership through slavery, through war, through a long century of struggle for freedom. Pulpits filled with men and women whom no one could send to the gallery. A people who had been told to move, and who, in the strength of God, stood up and built instead. The boy who had once been sold became a bishop. And the church he founded still proclaims, generation after generation, that no gallery, no wall, and no insult can divide the body that Christ has joined as one.