Stretch Forth Thy Hands

Abstract

Abstract In 1892, one hundred years after Richard Allen and his comrades walked out of Philadelphia’s St. George’s Methodist Church, a group of black Methodists in Pretoria, South Africa, withdrew from the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society and established an independent African Methodist church. They called their movement the Ethiopian Church, or Tiyopia, after the prophecy of African redemption in Psalms 68. Through a seemingly providential series of contingencies and chance encounters, the leaders of the South African Ethiopian Church came into contact with Bishop Henry Turner and the leaders of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States. In 1896 the Ethiopians were formally accepted into the AME connection. The chapter which follows examines the history of the Ethiopian Church from its origins in nineteenth-century European missions through its amalgamation with the AME Church. In effect, the chapter charts the other side of the looking glass, exploring the origins and politics of African independent churches, as well as African Christians’ complex reflections on the subject of black America. At the same time, it represents an attempt to repopulate “Ethiopianism,” to give historical specificity and human faces to a movement that is too often treated as a kind of generic African phenomenon.