Absalom Jones, Two Men, Two Denominations

Absalom Jones and Richard Allen are usually told as one story, and for good reason: both were pulled from prayer at St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church in 1787, both had already co-founded the Free African Society earlier that year, and both went on to lead independent Black congregations out of the same episode of exclusion. Where their paths diverge is instructive. Allen kept his congregation within the Methodist tradition and eventually organized it into its own denomination. Jones, leading the larger share of the Free African Society's membership, sought affiliation instead with the Episcopal Church, founding the African Church of Philadelphia in 1794 on the condition, negotiated in advance, that the congregation would retain its own lay leadership and property while accepting Episcopal doctrine and governance. The diocese admitted the congregation as St. Thomas African Episcopal Church, and in 1795 ordained Jones a deacon; his ordination to the full priesthood followed in 1802, making him the first African American priest in the Episcopal Church, decades before the denomination would ordain another. Jones used the pulpit for more than pastoral care. His 1808 sermon marking the United States' abolition of the international slave trade argued that the God of scripture is a God of justice who does not overlook the oppression of the enslaved, and he was an active petitioner to Congress against slavery throughout his ministry. The two founding paths, Allen's new denomination and Jones's negotiated place within an existing one, remain the two enduring models for how Black congregations of the period secured self-governance within American Christianity.