They Got Up, and They Walked Out

Richard Allen wrote his own account of it, and that is the source.

He was born into slavery in Philadelphia in 1760, sold as a child with his family to a farm in Delaware, converted as a young man, and eventually bought his own freedom. He came back to Philadelphia and worshipped at St George's Methodist Episcopal Church, where he preached at five in the morning to whoever would come, and where the number of Black worshippers grew steadily.

And then, according to his autobiography, on a Sunday morning, the Black members were told to move.

They had gone up to the gallery. A trustee came and took hold of one of them, Absalom Jones, while he was on his knees praying, and told him to get up and go to another part of the building. Jones asked to be allowed to finish the prayer.

Here is what Allen wrote about what happened next.

They finished the prayer, and then they got up, and then they walked out, and, as he put it, they were no more plagued with them.

What the record disputes, and what it does not

Now I have to say something about the date, because this category requires it and because the dispute is real.

The Free African Society was founded on 12 April 1787, by Allen and Jones and others, and that date is firm. Allen's own account places the incident at St George's before that founding.

But historians have argued, on the basis of when the gallery at St George's was actually built, that the incident is more likely to have occurred in 1792 or 1793. That argument is live and it has been made by serious people, and Allen was writing years afterward. Memory does that with dates and it does not make an account false. What a person remembers exactly is what was said and what it felt like to be on their knees; what gets vague is the year.

I am not going to settle it. What the record does not dispute is that it happened, that Allen wrote it down, and that a body of Black Christians in Philadelphia organized themselves in that decade and never went back.

You are not the one who has to leave the faith over it. James 2:1 says the faith is not to be held with respect of persons, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that verse aimed where the Bible aims it, which is at the room and not at the person who was moved.

Here is the verse.

My brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with respect of persons.James 2:1, King James Version

And read on in that chapter, because James is not being general. He describes a specific scene: a man in fine clothing and a poor man coming into an assembly, and the good seat going to one of them.

The Bible has a paragraph about seating. It is not a modern grievance.

And James does not soften it. He goes on to ask whether the people doing it have become judges with evil thoughts, which is not gentle language, and he addresses it to the congregation rather than to the person who was seated badly. The letter puts the question to the room.

You have a whole passage in Scripture about who gets sat where, and it was written to a congregation doing it. James 2:1-4 names the practice plainly, and the same Spirit who put it in the letter is the reason nobody has to justify noticing.

Now here is the part I most want you to have, and it is about what they did next.

They did not stop.

The Free African Society was formed. Absalom Jones went on to lead a congregation that became St Thomas African Episcopal Church. Richard Allen founded Bethel, and in 1816 the African Methodist Episcopal Church was organized with Allen as its first bishop.

And in 1793, when yellow fever swept Philadelphia and much of the city's leadership fled, Allen and Jones organized Black Philadelphians to nurse the sick and bury the dead. They were then publicly accused of profiteering by a printer named Mathew Carey, and they published a written reply refuting it, which survives.

They nursed the city that had moved them, and then had to defend themselves in print for doing it.

You are looking at people who went back into the building they had been put out of, carrying help. The written reply Allen and Jones published survives and the fever of 1793 is documented, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that as a fact rather than a moral anybody has to live up to.

You have been walked out of a room without walking out of the faith, and the record of those men is the proof it can be done. The written reply Allen and Jones published in 1794 exists, and it is His Spirit who is the reason that document is a comfort and not merely a fact.