Absalom Jones was an American abolitionist and clergyman who became prominent in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Disappointed at the racial discrimination he experienced in a local Methodist church, he founded the Free African Society with Richard Allen in 1787, a mutual aid society for black Americans in the city. The Free African Society included many people newly freed from slavery after the American Revolutionary War.
Pennsylvania abolished slavery and became a free state in the new United States. Jones became a lay minister of the interracial congregation of St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. The Methodist church admitted persons of all races and allowed African Americans to preach.
However, members of the church still practiced racial discrimination. In 1792, while at St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church, Absalom Jones and other African American members were told that they could not join the rest of the congregation in seating and kneeling on the first floor and instead had to be segregated, first sitting against the wall and then in the gallery or balcony. After their prayer, Jones and most of the church’s African-American members got up and walked out.
In 1794, Jones founded the first Black Episcopal congregation, and in 1802, he was the first African American to be ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church of the United States. He is listed on the Episcopal calendar of saints. He is remembered liturgically on the date of his death, February 13, in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer as “Absalom Jones, Priest, 1818”.
Also On This Day
1875 – Evangelist, pastor, and educator Charles G. Finney died in Oberlin.
1967 – John Courtney Murray, a Jesuit theologian and educator, died in New York City. He is best known for his defense of the United States Constitution and his arguments against any effort by the Roman Catholic Church to bring about change within nations by means other than moral persuasion.
Accessed ChristianHistoryInstitute.org 15 August 2022
Sadly, such racism STILL occurs in our nation!
Some dear friends who are an interracial couple in Selma, AL, have a wonderful ministry to at risk young people, most of whom are African-American.
When our friends started working there several years ago, they were welcomed as good tithing members to an evangelical church; the husband, though black, is an articulate islander from the Caribbean.
When they began bringing young people whom they were trying to lift out of poverty to church meetings, at first it seemed okay. But when “their kind” started socializing with the white youth of the church, the elders asked them to stop bringing these children and teens to the church‼️🤯
Can you imagine Jesus confronting this church on judgment day and telling them, “Inasmuch as you did it to the least of these, YOU did it to ME‼️”? May God have mercy on us Pharisees who think we are holier than others!
❤️&🙏, c.a.
Mercy is what we all need right now.