The Colored Man in the Methodist Episcopal Church

by L. M. Hagood

“‘Resolved, 1. That the bishops who may preside in the Kentucky Conference during the next four years, are hereby authorized to organize the colored ministers within the bounds of said conference into a separate annual conference, if said ministers request it; and if, in the judgment of the bishops, the interest of the work requires it, to be called the —— Conference: Provided, that nothing in this resolution shall be construed to impair the existing constitutional rights of our colored members on the one hand, or, on the other, to forbid the transfer of white ministers to said conference, whenever it may be deemed desirable or expedient.’

“So soon as this resolution was taken up, a motion was made to lay it upon the table, which was lost.

“A motion to amend by inserting, ‘Provided, that colored members may remain in the Kentucky Conference,’ was laid on the table.

“A motion to strike out the words ‘the interest of the work,’ and insert ‘the unity and success of the Church,’ was laid on the table; and the resolution was adopted as matured by the Committee on Boundaries.”

The motions subsequently made show at once the animus of the white brethren of that conference at that time. While many were anxious to have restrictions, others objected to it in toto. But, as in the General Conference, so it has been in nearly every annual conference, that a wide difference of opinion on the color-line question existed. It is well that it was so.

Following hard upon the above action in the interest of the colored man, this General Conference paid special attention to its work so grandly begun in the sunny South. While the discussion of the status of the colored delegates elicited much animation, the restrictions were removed from the conferences of the Church in the South, irrespective of color, by a vote of 197 to 15. All our benevolent societies were instructed to redouble their diligence to meet the exigencies of the case; our Book Concerns were to publish one or more papers adapted to the new order of things within the South; transfers, if needed, were to be sent into this fruitful field; training-schools and theological schools were ordered for the special training of the colored people of the South within our Church and without, if accepted. The bishops were requested to give the colored work special episcopal supervision. As a finale of the action of that General Conference, an “enabling act” for the establishment of the third annual conference among our colored members was passed, with the provision that in every case the rights of every preacher were to be fully and carefully, as well as impartially, considered. The white preachers and teachers who were sent by the Church into the South to carry out this plan of work were, in too many cases, not only subjected to insult, but cruel scourgings and false imprisonment, as if ostracism was not cruel and wicked punishment enough. But many of those thus treated were men and women of God, and therefore consistent but firm and true heroes and heroines.

Dr. Walden (now bishop), in an address, Aug. 13, 1883, at the anniversary of the Freedmen’s Aid Society, spoke of this work. The following needs no comment, as he speaks of the period in our work in the South at which we now are, and we insert it here as a retrospect:

“Two courses were open—one to delay employing colored preachers until they could be educated, the other to put these untutored men to work at once. No people ever needed the gospel more than did the freed people. Standing in the midst of new relations, the possessors of a new-found freedom for which they had never been trained, they needed both the restraints and the inspiration of the gospel. The Wesleyan prescience of our Church recognized this need, and at the same time the fact that these unlearned preachers, if divinely called, could so tell the story of the Cross as to benefit their people. The lives of many of these men had been an unbroken period of slave-toil; but the sequel proves that they knew enough of the saving power of Christ and the fullness of his love to instruct their hearers in the way of life, and we now see that their relation to this work was not unlike to that of the first of Wesley’s lay preachers to their work among their own classes in England.

“With this illustration before us of the general principle that a people may and must be instrumental in their own evangelization, let us study some of the results of our itinerant system among the freedmen—of our itinerancy and its auxiliary agencies. All understand our itinerancy to be the general superintendency and the pastorate; by auxiliary agencies I mean our sub-pastorate, in which the class-leaders stand, our Church literature, and our Sunday-schools. The mere suggestion of the fact leads you at once to see that the real function of each and all of these is to re-enforce both the general and the particular work committed to the itinerancy or three fold pastorate—the bishops, presiding elders, and pastors of our Church. The very fact of taking this comprehensive system to a people who had no system, of beginning at once to build them up into it, could not be without producing some marked and favorable results. I mention the more obvious of these:

“(a) The freedmen who were recognized as having a call to preach could do little more than exhort, but they were put into the pastoral relation; a great Church committed to them a new and solemn trust, and laid upon them grave responsibilities; they were under the leadership of the superintendents of the missions—good, prudent, self-sacrificing men—men who in their devotion to duty represented the highest life of their Church. Such things could not be without affecting these untutored preachers. Crude as all they did may have been at first, their pastorate benefited the people they served, and was to themselves a means of training, of real and rapid progress; and there are still in the effective ranks of the conferences which came from such beginnings many pious, able, and successful preachers, who were thus transferred from the cotton and rice fields and sugar plantations to, and trained in, our itinerant ministry.