Nearly 4 million African Methodists belong to two denominations: African Methodist Episcopal and AME Episcopal Zion. The denominations grew out of schisms occurring in white Methodists’ churches in Philadelphia and New York City at the end of the eighteenth century, when black church-goers objected to the church’s segregationist seating practices. Developing into national denominations in the first half of the nineteenth century, the AME and AME Zion churches grew in the wake of the emancipation of slaves into two of the largest denominations among African Americans.

In the second half of the century the AME Church spread to Haiti, Liberia and South Africa.

After the 1920s, with the influx of large numbers of Southern Baptists into Northeastern cities, the denominations’ influence began to decline. While churches generally lost influence to the rising black professionals, African Methodist denominations lost out to both elite churches catering to these professionals and the more charismatic churches from Baptist to Holiness, catering to poorer blacks.

The last thirty years have witnessed a dramatic reversal of fortunes for African Methodist churches. Although still outnumbered by the Baptists, African Methodists have taken on a leadership role in the Congress of National Black Churches (CNBC), an organization that was virtually created through the AME church’s initiative (with the financial support of foundations who, in the 1970s, were looking for a more conservative alternative to Black Power).

This new strength comes, in part, from the denomination’s highly centralized bureaucracies, allowing them to have more influence in the CNBC than the decentralized Baptist denomination. But, more importantly, it derives from the denomination’s theology, which, by marrying together nationalist (African) and European (Methodist) traditions, speaks to the dual political and religious influences of many black suburbanites. Thus, the Ebenezer AME church, formerly located in Washington, DC, has revitalized itself by moving its congregation into a black Virginia suburb.

The renewed prominence of the African Methodist churches is apparent when we take into consideration their vocal support for Clarence Thomas, the fact that the first black community President Clinton visited after his inauguration was an AME Church, and the fact that Christopher Darden, prosecuting attorney in the O.J. Simpson trial, has been a prominent member of the largest AME church in Los Angeles, CA.

African Methodists have not created an alternative theology or liturgy from that of white Methodists that would preclude reunification (though the flexibility of Methodism has allowed for different kinds of hymns, more gospel in nature, to gain widespread acceptance in these churches). Yet they have resisted reintegration with white Methodists throughout their history because they have felt that the United States discriminated against them and so they need their own autonomous churches.