The Colored Man in the Methodist Episcopal Church

by L. M. Hagood

“(b) As the work progressed, these colored men acquired by observation and experience, and such study as was possible with them, a wider knowledge of their work; and in due course the bishops began to appoint some of them as presiding elders, investing them with all the honors and responsibilities of this important office. It should also be stated that the Church that acted thus through her bishops was constantly displaying to them an encouraging interest in them by furnishing means to aid in the support of their Church work.

“(c) In the annual conferences they were and are brought under the presidency of our bishops—the most efficient presiding officers in this or any other country, a fact that became most obvious at the Ecumenical Methodist Conference. The very methods of business in our annual conferences, and the promptness with which it is dispatched under this presidency, have had such influence on the older conferences that the advantages of like administration to the colored conferences are obvious. The influence of the conference session ought also to be named, as these annual meetings of the preachers have all along affected most favorably the character of Methodism. These colored preachers have been coming together, as do their brethren in older conferences, to report and review the year’s work, to pass upon the character of each one, to consider the various connectional and benevolent causes, to attend to all the business that is usually presented, and to enjoy the social privileges and religious services to which all our preachers look forward with deep interest. Every such session tends to make them wiser and more effective in their work.

“(d) Under our system of study for probationers and deacons, the colored preachers are steadily improving, and their conferences are becoming more careful as to the qualifications of those who are received into the ministry. I well remember the class taken on trial in the South Carolina Conference in 1867; near a dozen of them were then uncouth and ill-clad men, who seemed to have come direct from the plantations; little or nothing was said as to even elementary education; they were taken as they were, and sent out to do work for the Master, who ordaineth strength even out of the mouths of babes. But it is radically different in that conference now; at its session, last January, I heard the report of examinations, and learned thereby that the standard of qualification is applied more rigidly each succeeding year. I rejoiced in this as a fact common to all these colored conferences; and yet I also rejoiced to remember that when the exigencies required it, our Church dared to send out the earlier members of that and other conferences, illiterate as they were, to the work of winning souls.

“(e) These early colored preachers, coming as they did from a condition in which there was no home, in the better sense of that word, soon came to know something of the importance that our Church attaches to Sunday-schools. They were organized, often in the crudest form; but they have been improved, and now nearly two thousand are reported in the twelve conferences. This work is important there, not only because it is in behalf of the youth and children, but also because there has been, and is, a relatively great demand for such work in the South. It is a fact that the ratio between the number of Sunday-school scholars and Church members of any and all Protestant denominations in the South is far below what it is in the North. The schools organized in our “new Southern field” have been aided with papers published by our Church, and especially adapted to the condition of the scholars. All the teachers employed by the Freedmen’s Aid Society have done good and faithful service in these Sunday-schools. Through them the Church has been, and is, furnishing moral and mental instruction to about one hundred thousand of the youth and children, that will be of incalculable value to them, and through them to the Church and the nation.

“(f) The Methodist newspapers published in the South—within this new field—by our Church, in order to furnish a literature specially adapted to the condition and needs of the people, have been potent for good. We may not be able to estimate the force of the fact that papers have been provided for them which they in a special sense regarded as their own. It was no mean fact with them that a part of the capital of the Book Concern was being employed to publish papers which, by their very location, must chiefly be for them. And the presence of a depository of books at Atlanta tended to impress the lesson, taught in so many ways, that our Church was ready and anxious to help them in their every effort to reach the plane of a higher and better life.

“Other facts might be named to show how every thing that is forceful in our itinerancy and its auxiliary agencies has been constantly, wisely, and effectively employed to reach, evangelize and elevate these colored people. It has been more than a formal recognition of Christian equality; it has been the continuous presence and power of educational relations as well as educational agencies among them. The Church, during these years, has recognized the divine call into her ministry of more than a thousand of these men, thereby reposing a confidence and conferring an honor that has been a special inspiration to them, and, in good degree, to their people. Ministerial position and pastoral duties, prerogatives and responsibilities, shared in common with the largest corps of preachers in our country, have been made realities to them. When that whole people shall come to the plane and glory of a true manhood and womanhood, it will be known that the impartial planting of our system of itinerancy among them was one of the early and potent means of their elevation.

“3. The aim of the Methodist Episcopal Church is to enlist every local society in the support of her benevolent enterprises. She would give to every person converted at her altars the opportunity to do work for the Master. For this reason, all her pastors are charged with the duty of presenting to their congregations the claims of the Missionary, Church Extension, Freedmen’s Aid, Sunday-school, Tract, and Educational causes, and of affording to all the opportunity to contribute thereto according to their ability. Into each sphere of work represented by these causes, the Church has been led by a marked providence, and her efforts in them have been attended with her Lord’s signal favor. The presentation of these causes in the relation they hold to the world’s evangelization, the end for which Christ established his Church, teaches with special emphasis the magnitude of her mission, and indicates the certainty of ultimate success. How the faith of God’s people has enlarged under the inspiration of this widening work! These causes have been presented more or less fully to our new societies in the South.

“The colored preachers and people have taken a ready interest in the Missionary Society because it carried the gospel to them. The preachers were not learned, and the people were poor; but what if the earlier missionary sermons were crude presentations of a world-wide cause? what if but a few pennies were collected in a charge? the people were thus coming into contact with the genius of the gospel, and beginning to have some part in the movement that is conquering the world. Among the many wise things done during the administration of the revered Dr. Durbin as missionary secretary, the one of all others that has affected and will continue to affect our Church the most, was providing for the organization of the Sunday-schools into missionary societies; wise and potential, because thus, in a practical and methodical way, the idea of the world’s evangelization is fixed in the thought of the youth and children, by far the greatest idea touching the human race that can be given to the human mind.

“The colored preachers have been learning this fundamental idea of the missionary cause and the purpose of each of the other benevolences of our Church, and in their own way it may be presenting them to their people; but the result has been a measure of enlightenment in these directions, an increasing knowledge of the far-reaching plans of the Church to which they belong, a clearer consciousness that by being brought within her pale they have part in one of the great aggressive Christian movements of the age. Standing as they do in the dawn of a new day, this conscious identification with all the benevolent plans of the Church that brought them the gospel can not do less than enlarge their views of Christian duty, and inspire them with zeal for and devotion to causes grand in themselves and glorious in their results.

“4. The preaching that is distinctively Methodistic has had its influence in this as in other fields. While we hold the fundamental truths of Christianity in common with other evangelical Churches—points of agreement, each of which is infinitely more important than all the questions in regard to which there is a difference—all do not place the same emphasis we do on some of these truths. Our preachers in the ‘new Southern field,’ as elsewhere, have given special prominence to the willingness and power of Jesus to save every one who comes to him; the universal call and the gracious ability of every one to come; the radical character of the change wrought in conversion—a new life through divine power; the adoption into the divine family, and that adoption clearly, satisfactorily attested through the witness of the Holy Spirit; the complete cleansing power of the blood of Christ, and the keeping power of the promised grace. Need I say in this presence that the emphasis given to these Scriptural doctrines by our ministry has molded the experience of Methodists in every society, and made the meeting for testimony, whether love-feast or class-meeting, a part of our Church life? The preaching of these doctrines in the earnest Methodist way among the colored people, the building up of a Church among them under the molding and inspiring effect of such truths, the leading of the members up to a clear, well-defined religious experience, is giving them a Church life, the advantage of which is best known from what Methodism has done for other peoples. Already the advance of Christian morality, the growing habits of industry and economy, the increasing spirit of benevolence and liberality, the new home-life where home was so recently unknown—the fruits of an evangelical gospel faithfully preached—show what we have done, and are the promise and pledge of a pure, strong, and active Church in every part of our new Southern field in the near future.”