Founding Fathers, Part I

Founding Fathers, Part I[i]

Historians of American history frequently emphasize our “founding fathers.” Politically speaking, they highlight white males like George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine, and James Madison. Spiritually speaking, they feature white males such as Roger Williams, Cotton Mather, John Winthrop, Jonathan Edwards, and Isaac Backus.

Sadly, they have often left African American founding fathers missing in action. In particular, the spiritual founding fathers of independent African American church life have been neglected, relegated to the back seat of the historical bus.

Walking the Talk: Modeling Christian Manliness

Throughout church history, developing and displaying the character of a soul physician was the absolute prerequisite before focusing upon competence in soul care and spiritual direction. This has certainly been the case with African American founding fathers as they strove to practice what they preached. In particular, we learn from them that we sustain, heal, reconcile, and guide as much by our actions (our model) as by our interactions (our message). People listened to their words of counsel because they witnessed them heeding their own counsel.

E. Franklin Frazier contends that the historic Black Church was somewhat passive due to its other-worldly focus.[ii] However, firsthand accounts draw a different portrait altogether. Traditionally, manhood has been a central theme in the independent Black Church.[iii] Bishop B. W. Arnett described the organizing conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AMEC) in 1816 as “the Convention of the friends of Manhood Christianity.”[iv]

Bishop Daniel Alexander Payne, an early leader in and the official historian of the AMEC, believed that the separation of the AME from the white Methodist Episcopal Church was “beneficial to the man of color” in two ways. “First: it has thrown us upon our own resources and made us tax our own mental powers both for government and support.” Secondly, it gave the black man “an independence of character which he could neither hope for nor attain unto, if he had remained as the ecclesiastical vassal of his white brethren.” It produced “independent thought,” “independent action,” and an “independent hierarchy,” and the latter “has made us feel and recognize our individuality and our heaven-created manhood.”[v]

Personally, Payne experienced numerous opportunities to live out his Christian manhood. Payne was devastated when a new law forced him to stop teaching his fellow African Americans. Wavering on the precipice of doubt, he girds up the loins of his mind with the solemn words, “‘With God one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day. Trust in him, and he will bring slavery and all its outrages to an end.’ These words from the spirit world acted on my troubled soul like water on a burning fire, and my aching heart was soothed from its burden of woes.”[vi] Payne engages in a spiritual conversation with himself in which he exhorted himself to see life from God’s eternal perspective.

Payne then pens a lengthy poem expressing both his feelings and theological reflections. Of this spiritual exercise, he concludes, “The writing of this poem was the safety-valve which let out the superabundant grief that would otherwise have broken my heart and sent me headlong to an untimely grave.”[vii] Some males decry poetry or journaling as less-than-masculine. However, Payne, like King David before him, understands the manly value of candid “psalming.”

Other males disparage depending on others during times of spiritual despondency. Not Payne. In response to his internal battle with his external situation, he received letters of spiritual consolation from the poetess, Miss Mary S. Palmer, and her sister Miss Jane Keith Palmer. He reflects in response to these letters, “At a time when my heart seemed ready to burst with grief and my lips ready to deny the existence of God, or to blaspheme his holy name for permitting one race to grind another to powder, such white friends were exceedingly dear and precious to me. I looked on them then, and regard them now, as God’s angels sent to strengthen me when the powers of darkness seemed to be let loose against me and against the race which I was so earnestly serving. I can never cease to remember them without emotions of gratitude and love.”[viii]

Given Payne’s circumstances and the culture of the day, we find here triple humility. He models the humility to dependently receive help, to gladly receive help from females, and to non-judgmentally and non-defensively receive help from whites.

[i]Excerpted from Kellemen, Beyond the Suffering, Baker Books, 2007.
[ii] Frazier, The Negro Church in America.
[iii] Becker, “The Black Church,” in Fulop, African-American Religion, p. 180.
[iv] Arnett, Proceedings of the Quarto-Centennial Conference of the A.M.E Church, p. 384.
[v] Payne, A History of the A.M.E. Church, I, pp. 9-12.
[vi] Payne, Recollections of Seventy Years, p. 28.
[vii] Ibid., p. 34.
[viii] Ibid., p. 39.