The Articles of Religion of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church

A movement had been building inside the Methodist Episcopal Church, South since 1866 to let its Black members, most of them formerly enslaved and worshipping in congregations their white bishops still controlled, organize a fully separate church of their own. It reached its conclusion on December 16, 1870, in Jackson, Tennessee, when the new body was constituted as the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in America. Two Black preachers, William H. Miles and Richard H. Vanderhorst, were elected its first bishops and ordained by Robert Paine, the senior bishop of the church they were leaving, so the new denomination began with an unbroken line of ordination even as it broke administratively.

A brand new denomination still needs a doctrinal foundation on its first day, and this one did not write one from nothing. It kept the Articles of Religion already standing in Southern Methodism, John Wesley's own 1784 abridgment of the Church of England's Thirty Nine Articles, carrying the same twenty five articles forward as its own confession rather than drafting a new one to mark the separation. The break the new church made was administrative and racial, a Black denomination governing itself rather than being governed, not doctrinal, and it stands as the first Protestant denomination organized by African Americans in the South. The church took its present name, the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, in 1956, after more than eight decades under its founding name, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church.

Read in sequence, the twenty five articles move from the most abstract claims toward the most practical. The opening articles state the Trinity, the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ, and the person of the Holy Ghost, before turning to the authority of scripture itself: the Old and New Testaments are named sufficient for salvation, and nothing beyond them may be required as an article of faith. From there the articles turn to human nature and salvation, original sin, the limits of free will apart from grace, and justification by faith rather than by good works, though good works are affirmed as the necessary fruit of a genuine faith rather than dismissed.

The later articles are the most visibly Reformation era in character. The visible church is defined, and only two sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper, are recognized, a deliberate narrowing against the seven of the church the document was written against. Purgatory, the veneration of relics and images, and the invocation of saints are named and rejected outright, alongside a specific denial of transubstantiation. Practical articles follow: ministers may marry, oaths are permitted under proper circumstance, private property and charitable giving are affirmed, and civil government is recognized as owed obedience in matters not contrary to the word of God.