“But as we stand to-day separated, all of us are weak and inefficient. In almost every city, town, and village, each branch of the Methodist family has planted a Church, and in many places neither of the Churches can give the pastor a comfortable support. Neither of the branches above referred to has a first-class institution of learning nor an efficient corps of professors and teachers; and those we have are just existing, and that is all. Neither of these organizations has a missionary system operating as it should. Neither branch of these Methodist bodies has a first-class book concern.”
Now, the above comes from an African Methodist of the African Methodists—a man conversant with the inner and outer workings of the machinery of the three “strong, progressive, and independent” colored Churches. Who is right, Brother Wright? As to the wisdom displayed by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in setting apart its colored daughter, we leave Dr. A. G. Haygood to say, as he has at page 236 in “Our Brother in Black.” However, the aforesaid brother missed it a few years, when he says “set apart at the end of the war,” for it was not “set apart” until 1870. But then, you know, a few years—say seven—don’t amount to much when we have an object in view. At last he feels as if a solution of his troublesome problem has been reached. When speaking further of the three “strong, aggressive, and independent Churches,” he says: “If the members of these Churches could be united with the colored members of the Methodist Episcopal Church, they would make a million of people. What an opportunity for usefulness to their race would be thus placed before them!” It’s wonderful, is it not? At this point the good brother reaches his climax. By all means, let it be done! Let us begin now! Come, let us go up to the next General Conference of our Church, and pass a law that all the colored Methodists in America and Canada must come into our Church—bishops, elders, exhorters, and laymen—and thus accept the magnanimous “opportunity for usefulness to our race.” What would the good brother then think of General Conference representation? Would he have it reduced? But fearing that some others may not see the plan as he sees it, he says: “If they [the colored members] are to remain in the Church, would it not be to the interest of all parties to dissolve the annual conferences in which colored members are in the majority, into mission conferences? If not, then reduce the number of colored delegates.” Now, any one can judge from what we have cited from the book, just about how much credence should be had in anything the book, “Preachers and People in the Methodist Episcopal Church,” has presented. And yet it does show that the question of a separation from the Methodist Episcopal Church is being discussed; for even the author of that book has a backing within and without the Methodist Episcopal Church, for he is one of the leading officials in the Arch Street Methodist Episcopal Church, Philadelphia.
Caste prejudice has not been, but will yet be, driven to the owls and bats, before the onrolling tidal wave of intelligence and sober common sense that is even now breaking upon the shores of this country. And yet it does seem as if there is but one of two ways in which it can be done, or by a combination (suiting the case) of the two,—the hump of caste prejudice now resting so adroitly upon the back of our American Protestant ecclesiasticism must be amputated by the impartial but keen blade of the great Physician; or Protestantism must bow so low in the dust and ashes of humiliation, that this unsightly protuberance shall be visible no more forever. Then, and not till then, can we hope to see this camel go unscathed through the eye of the gospel needle.
CHAPTER XV
UNION OF COLORED METHODISTS.
What would be the result of such a union? If an organic union of all the colored Methodists in America could be effected, it would make no mean Church. Just think of the African Methodist Episcopal, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in America, and the colored members now within the Methodist Episcopal Church, say to the number of three hundred thousand, uniting and forming one Church, composed of 22,076 ministers and a membership of 1,012,300, bringing with them an army of Sunday-school children not far from 1,500,000! If the divine promise were fulfilled in each of these, that “one shall chase a thousand and two shall put ten thousand to flight,” why, such an army of true believers could, as the quaint preacher said, “shake hell to its center” while moving the world toward the cross of Christ!
It was in 1883 when Dr. Tanner, through the columns of the paper he was then editing, the Christian Recorder, of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, suggested the idea of an organic union of all the exclusively colored organizations. A year or so ago the colored Methodists of Canada, under Bishop Nazery, united with the African Methodist Episcopal Church. It did not amount to much then nor since. Several times overtures have been made to the two other colored Churches by the African Methodist Episcopal Church, but it has usually ended in talk. The fact may as well be stated first as last, that a time will never come in the history of this country when all the colored Methodists will belong to one great Negro Church. In the first place, the African Methodist Episcopal, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church of America, and the colored members of the Methodist Episcopal Church, each and every one of these is looking forward to, and praying for, a time when all the others will come back to mother or come over and live with sister. Again, because the separate and distinct colored Church organizations have been warring with each other from the beginning of their organization, and these old feuds and petty jealousies keep coming up every time organic union is mentioned. It can not occur, because the African Methodist Episcopal and African Methodist Episcopal Zion Churches continued separate before the war, and when it ended expected to, and did, receive a wonderful influx from the Methodist Episcopal and Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Those two organizations saw a few apples still clinging to the parent tree in the South. They began throwing sticks and mud, then they tried “taffy,” and then stones. In 1869 each of the above-named two Churches began to get ready for the reception of the one hundred thousand members then in the Church South. As the General Conference of the Church South in 1870 met, each of those denominations, basing its faith on the repeated promises of many of the prominent preachers of the Church South, began to prepare to receive them. They were chagrined, however, when, instead of “coming over,” they marched out into the broad field of independency, and set up shop for themselves by the assistance of the Church South. The two older Churches then began to bushwhack all they possibly could, seizing “every straggling soul as their own lawful prey.” The two larger colored organizations will not unite, because each is still waiting and expecting her younger sister to visit and remain with her. The three will not unite, because each is expecting a time to come when the three hundred thousand colored members of the Methodist Episcopal Church will leave in a body and join it.
Of course, the colored members of the Methodist Episcopal Church are praised, abused, loved, laughed at, or coquetted, as the case seems to require at the time. It is really amusing at times to hear the stories told—good, bad, and indifferent—by these three organizations, to induce our members to come. And yet, somehow or other, the one does not seem to know why the other should anticipate our coming. We can not see it. Before we had separate conferences it did look as if all our members would be stolen from us. But every day now the colored members of the Methodist Episcopal Church pitch their tent a day’s march farther from any kind of African Methodism, on the one hand, and from having the oceans circumscribe them by joining “The Colored Methodist Episcopal Church of, or in, America.” If there ever comes a time in the history of the colored members of the Methodist Episcopal Church when it will be no longer useful, pleasant, or wise to remain, they will undoubtedly form another colored organization, and man it themselves. They have the material. There is no colored Church in this country that is educating so many young people a year as the Methodist Episcopal Church. Our brethren of the three colored organizations in this country will tell you that the time has now passed when their bishops, General Conference officers, etc., can visit the Commencement exercises of our schools and colleges, and take away in their pockets, by flattery or promises, our young people as they were wont to do. This is the explanation of the mushroom “universities and colleges” under the auspices of certain “powers” in this country. Our young men and women begin now to see, as do many others, that a time not far distant must come when the best outlook for cultured colored men and women will not be, as some would have us believe, in Africa, nor among the Africans. Why should it not be a separate organization of our own, if any change must come? Indeed, the thought presents the most flattering prospect,—the twenty or thirty universities, colleges, normal schools, and academies given into the hands of our own competent presidents, professors, and teachers; the real estate, consisting of college buildings, churches, and parsonages, with mortgage on only about twenty-five cents on the dollar; five hundred thousand children in our schools, and over three hundred thousand members, with the great Methodist Episcopal Church behind them! Now and then some good brother, like the author of “Preachers and People in the Methodist Episcopal Church,” advances the utopian idea of handing us over to some one of the existing colored organizations, but the good men and women in the Methodist Episcopal Church are hoping for no such thing. We believe the good men and women predominate.
GAMMON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, ATLANTA, GA.
(Library Building.)