Academic literature on the topic 'Methodist Episcopal church, South, in New Orleans'

In October 1846, the men and women of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in St. Louis (African Church) met to consider whether they would remain with the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) or align with the recently-formed Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MECS). Two years earlier, in 1844, amid growing conflict over the question of slavery within the national Methodist Church, its General Conference had adopted a Plan of Separation that provided for the withdrawal of the southern Methodists and the creation of their own ecclesiastical government. The Plan provided that each Border State congregation would have the right to determine for itself by a vote of the majority with which of the two churches it would affiliate.After the southern conferences had organized the new MECS in May 1845, the trustees of the all-white Fourth Street Methodist Church (Fourth Street Church), whose quarterly conference exercised nominal authority over the African Church, informed the black congregants that they could retain their house of worship only if they voted to join the southern Methodists. Throwing caution to the wind, and putting at risk a decade-and-a-half of patient efforts to achieve formal congregational independence within the Methodist Church, the black congregants voted decisively, by a 110 to 7 margin, to remain affiliated with the Northern Conference.

This article traces and analyzes the missionary photography of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), the most important independent black American institution that began to operate in colonial South Africa at the onset of the politics of racial segregation in the 1890s. It argues that AME missionary photography presents a neglected archive, from which a history of black photographic encounters and a subaltern perspective on the dominant visual cultures of European imperialism and Christian missions in Africa can be retrieved. Focussing in particular on how AME missionaries deployed tropes of the culturally refined “New Negro” and the US South in their visual description of South Africa, this article demonstrates that photography was an important tool for black subjects to define their image beyond the representations of black inferiority that established visual traditions constructed.

Abstract John Wesley (1703-91）is known as the founder of Methodism in his time of Oxford University’s Scholar. However, about his Methodical religious theory, he got more spiritual and important influence from other continents not only Oxford in Great Britain but also Europe and America. Through Wesley’s experience and awakening in those continents, Methodism became the new religion with Revival by the spiritual power of “Holy Grail”. By this research using Multidisciplinary approach about the study of Legend of Holy Grail’s Knight, - from King Arthur and Knights of the Round Table in the Medieval Period, and in 18th century Wesley, who went to America in the way on ship where he met the Moravian Church group also called Herrnhut having root of Pietisms, got important impression in his life. After this awakening, he went to meet Herrnhut supervisor Zinzendorf (1700-60) in Germany who had root of a noble house in the Holy Roman Empire, - and to Legend of Holy Grail’s Knight Opera “Parsifal” by Richard Wagner at Bayreuth near Herrnhut’s land in the 19th century, Wesley’s Methodism is able to reach new states with the legend, such as the historical meaning of Christianity not only Protestantism but also Catholicism. I wish to point out Wesley’s Methodism has very close to Legend of Holy Grail’s Knight. In addition, after the circulation in America, in the late 19th century Methodism spread toward Africa, and Asian Continents. Especially in Japan, by Methodist Episcopal Church South, Methodism landed in the Kansai-area such international port city Kobe. Methodist missionary Walter Russel Lambuth (1854-1921) who entered into Japan founded English schools to do his missionary works. Afterward, one of them became Kwansei-Gakuin University in Kobe. Moreover, Lambuth such as Parsifal with Wesley’s theories went around the world to spread Methodism with the Spirit’s the Legend of Holy Grail’s Knight as World Citizen.

During the late nineteenth century, James Walker Hood was bishop of the North Carolina Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and grand master of the North Carolina Grand Lodge of Prince Hall Masons. In his forty-four years as bishop, half of that time as senior bishop of the denomination, Reverend Hood was instrumental in planting and nurturing his denomination's churches throughout the Carolinas and Virginia. Founder of North Carolina's denominational newspaper and college, author of five books including two histories of the AMEZ Church, appointed assistant superintendent of public instruction and magistrate in his adopted state, Hood's career represented the broad mainstream of black denominational leaders who came to the South from the North during and after the Civil War. Concurrently, Grand Master Hood superintended the southern jurisdiction of the Prince Hall Masonic Grand Lodge of New York and acted as a moving force behind the creation of the region's black Masonic lodges—often founding these secret male societies in the same places as his fledgling churches. At his death in 1918, the Masonic Quarterly Review hailed Hood as “one of the strong pillars of our foundation.” If Bishop Hood's life was indeed, according to his recent biographer, “a prism through which to understand black denominational leadership in the South during the period 1860–1920,” then what does his leadership of both the Prince Hall Lodge and the AMEZ Church tell us about the nexus of fraternal lodges and African American Christianity at the turn of the twentieth century?

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.