For its first eight decades the denomination carried the name given at its 1870 founding, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, chosen partly because its founders wished to keep it distinct from the older AME and AME Zion churches. In 1954, in the early years of the modern civil rights movement, the denomination's General Conference voted to rename it the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, retaining the CME initials while dropping a racial designation its members had come to see as limiting.
The CME Church built a network of colleges alongside its congregations, including Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee, and Miles College in Birmingham, Alabama, both named for its founding bishops, and it retains the connexional government common to Methodism, with bishops presiding over episcopal districts and a General Conference meeting every four years to set church law. Its headquarters, called the Episcopal Office, are in Memphis, Tennessee. Though historically concentrated in the American South, the church has extended mission and sister congregations into Haiti, Jamaica, and more than a dozen African nations, and its own reporting in the mid-2020s puts total membership at more than 1.2 million. The denomination elected its first woman bishop, Teresa E. Snorton, in 2010, and has since elected a second.