Academic literature on the topic 'African Union Methodist Protestant Church'

AbstractA vigorous Protestant left existed throughout the first half of the twentieth-century in the United States. That Protestant left was the left wing of the social gospel movement, which many historians restrict to the pre-1920 period and whose radical content is often underestimated. This article examines the career of one representative figure from this Protestant left, the Reverend Harry F. Ward, as a means of describing the evolving nature and limits of social gospel radicalism during the first four decades of the twentieth century. Ward, the main author of the 1908 Social Creed of the Churches, a longtime professor at Union Theological Seminary (UTS) in New York, and a dogged activist on behalf of labor and political prisoners through his leadership of the Methodist Federation for Social Service, sought a new social order from the early years of the century through the Great Depression of the 1930s. This new order would be the Kingdom of God on earth, and, in Ward's view, it would transcend the competitive and exploitative capitalism that dominated American society in his time. Before World War I, Ward worked to bring together labor activists and church people, and, after the war, he shifted his work toward less expressly religious efforts, while continuing to mentor clerical protégés through his teaching. Ward's leftward trajectory and ever-stronger Communist associations would eventually bring about his political downfall, but, in the mid- 1930s, he remained a respected figure, if one more radical than most, among American Protestant clergy. Organic links tied him and his politics to the broader terrain of social gospel reform, despite the politically driven historical amnesia that later would all but erase Ward from historical memory.

AbstractIn the late 1960s, the South African Anglican Church set up a new women's organisation, the Anglican Women's Fellowship (AWF). With strong roots in the Cape and Natal, the AWF aimed to be more inclusive of all churchwomen than the international Mothers' Union (MU) where, at that time, membership was still closed to divorcees and unmarried mothers. MU locally had also become an African stronghold, which may have reinforced the qualms of white and Coloured women about joining. Based on some documentary sources and participation in the fourday AWF Provincial Council of October 2002, this paper explores the changing composition, goals and ethos of AWF over its 35-year history. Comparisons with other churchwomen's organisations—the (black) Methodist Manyano and (white) Women's Auxiliary as well as the MU—will be drawn to highlight what is distinctive about AWF and its response to social change in contemporary South Africa. While the article concludes by providing a brief snapshot of theology and practice within the movement, the striking current role of Coloured women leaders as bridge-builders is particularly emphasised and the effective crossing of racial, social, language and age boundaries evaluated.

This theses researches the bequest of The Unity of the Brethren in the lore and practice of the contemporary protestant churches in the Czech Republic. The first part evaluates numerous sources to concretize the bequest of The Unity of Brethren to ten points, which represent the most specific characteristics of its lore. The second part focuses on comparison of the previously specified bequest of The Unity of Brethren with practice and lore of particular contemporary churches. Through analysis of church sources and structured interviews with the heads of contemporary churches the thesis shows which points of the bequest of The Unity of Brethren actually appear in the lore of the examined churches and to what extend these points influence the real life of the communities. The main objective of the thesis is to examine whether the rich Brethren tradition can be found in today's Czech churches. Moreover this work also asks to what extend these churches manage to keep the Brethren bequest alive in the modern social environment.

The typical story of African American religions narrates the development and power of the Protestant black church, but shifting the focus to the long nineteenth century can reorient the significance of the story. The nineteenth century saw the boom of Christian conversions among African Americans, but it also was a century of religious diversity. All forms of African American religion frequently pushed against the dominance of whiteness. This included the harming and cursing element of Conjure and southern hoodoo, the casting of slaves as Old Israel awaiting their exodus from bondage, the communications between the spirit of Abraham Lincoln and Afro-Creoles in New Orleans, and the push for autonomy and leadership by Richard Allen and the rest of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. While many studies of African American religions in the nineteenth century overwhelmingly focus on Protestantism, this is only part of the story.

John Wesley founded Methodism as an evangelical renewal movement within the Church of England. That structure encouraged both establishment impulses and Dissenting movements within Methodism in the North American context. In Canada, British missionaries planted a moderate, respectable form of Methodism, comfortable with the establishment. In Ontario, however, Methodism drew from a more democratized, enthusiastic revivalism that set itself apart from the establishment. After a couple of generations, however, these poorer outsiders had moved into the middle class, and Canadian Methodism grew into the largest denomination, with a sense of duty to nurture the social order. Methodism in the United States, however, embodied a paradox representative of a nation founded in a self-conscious act of Dissent against an existing British system. Methodism came to embrace the American cultural centre while simultaneously generating Dissenting movements. After the American Revolution, ordinary Americans challenged deference, hierarchy, patronage, patriarchy, and religious establishments. Methodism adopted this stance in the religious sphere, growing as an enthusiastic, anti-elitist evangelistic campaign that validated the spiritual experiences of ordinary people. Eventually, Methodists began moving towards middle-class respectability and the cultural establishment, particularly in the largest Methodist denomination, the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC). However, democratized impulses of Dissent kept re-emerging to animate new movements and denominations. Republican Methodists and the Methodist Protestant Church formed in the early republic to protest the hierarchical structures of the MEC. African Americans created the African Methodist Episcopal Church and African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in response to racism in the MEC. The Wesleyan Methodist Church and the Free Methodists emerged in protest against both slavery and hierarchy. The issue of slavery divided the MEC into northern and southern denominations. The split reflected a battle over which religious vision of slavery would be adopted by the cultural establishment. The denominations remained divided after the Civil War, but neither could gain support among newly freed blacks in the South. Freed from a racialized religious establishment embedded in slavery, former slaves flocked to independent black Methodist and Baptist churches. In the late nineteenth century, Methodism spawned another major evangelical Dissenting movement, the Holiness movement. Although they began with an effort to strengthen Wesleyan practices of sanctification within Methodism, Holiness advocates soon became convinced that most Methodists would not abandon what they viewed as complacency, ostentation, and worldliness. Eventually, Holiness critiques led to conflicts with Methodist officials, and ‘come-outer’ groups forged a score of new Holiness denominations, including the Church of God (Anderson), the Christian Missionary Alliance, and the Church of the Nazarene. Holiness zeal for evangelism and sanctification also spread through the missionary movement, forming networks that would give birth to another powerful, fragmented, democratized movement of world Christianity, Pentecostalism.

The chapter compares the response of the Catholic Church in the South to desegregation with that of the region’s larger white denominations: the Southern Baptist Convention, the Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church in the United States, the Protestant Episcopal Church, and the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. It also makes comparisons with Catholics outside the South and with southern Jews, a minority, like Catholics, subject to suspicion and even hostility from the Protestant majority, and with the Northern (later American) Baptist Convention and the Disciples of Christ, both of which had a substantial African American membership. The comparison suggests that white lay sensibilities, more than polity or theology, influenced the implementation of desegregation in the South by the major white religious bodies. Like the major white Protestant denominations, Catholic prelates and clergy took a more progressive approach to desegregation in the peripheral than the Deep South.

Protestant Christianities in Asia today are Asian, but they also carry markers of piety, resilience, and social sensibility which reflect dissenting traditions. While acknowledging the fundamental importance of Asian agency, elements of Protestant Dissent can be identified among the multiple ideas, traditions, personalities, social phenomena, and historical events which have contributed to the formation of Asian Christianity. Denominational names often signify connection with a dissenting Christian identity. A dissenting heritage is often associated with education, an emphasis on bible -reading and translation, an openness to women and lay-leadership in positions of authority, and a cautious attitude towards relationships with governments. Links are also found in stories about pioneer personalities. However, Congregationalist, Presbyterian, British Methodist, and some Baptist churches who joined in national union schemes in India, China, the Philippines, and Thailand, have generally had their memory, and sometimes their polity, subsumed under the shared vision of a new national church.

This chapter’s central claim is that the notion of freedom, in the context of theology, music, and modernity (1740–1850), is incomplete if it does not address the sacred music of the enslaved people of North America during this period—a population for whom theology, music, and freedom were of enormous personal and social consequence. The central figure in this regard is Richard Allen (1760–1831), who in 1816 founded the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, the first independent black religious denomination in the United States. Allen was born enslaved, in Philadelphia or Delaware, but was able to purchase his freedom in 1783. He had already had a conversion experience in 1777, and once he gained his freedom, he became an itinerant preacher, ultimately settling in Philadelphia, where he preached at St George’s Methodist Church and a variety of venues in the city. In 1794 he led a walkout of black members at St George’s, in protest of racism; and over the course of a number of years he founded Mother Bethel, which would become the original church of the AME. This chapter situates Allen in the development of black sacred music in the US: first, as the publisher of hymnals for his church (two in 1801, and another in 1818); and second, as an important arbitrator between the traditions and performance styles of Protestant hymnody as inherited in the British colonies, and an evolving oral tradition and performance style of black sacred music.

This chapter investigates how African American activist-artists adopted new strategies to realize the promises of Reconstruction and partnered often with leaders of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church leadership to accomplish these. Black image producers used their reputations and successes to encourage opportunities for, and exercise newly granted rights to, black people after the Civil War. They funded black education, supported black Reconstruction politicians, and celebrated constitutional amendments; one even attained political office. They crafted images that revealed their investment in the visual culture of John Brown, black Union veterans, and the future of Cuba. Just as these black activist artists backed the AME Church, so the AME Church leadership repeatedly encouraged its readers to collect, reflect upon, and draw inspiration from their images and the messages that they communicated.