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Joseph Gomez was a charismatic minister who rose throughthe ranks of the African Methodist Episcopal church to be ordained abishop in 1948. His daughter has drawn on letters, journals, andchurch records to write this biography. However, it is more than justa simple biography. This book is a history of Black life during theearly part of the century and a chronicle of the political andreligious struggles of the first autonomous Black church in the U.S. ... Read more

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Inspiring
Joseph Gomez (1890-1979) was an AME minister, and was ordained a Bishop in 1948. He was also a teacher, civil rights pioneer, scholar, writer, and humanitarian. He was born on the island of Antigua and came to the US in 1908. He served several congregations but was most closely associated with Ohio, particularly Cleveland and also Wilberforce college, from which he graduated.

His biography tells the inspiring story of his life, family, ministry, struggles, and victories.

Reviewer: Bob Kellemen, Ph.D., is the author of "Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction." He has also authored "Soul Physicians," "Spiritual Friends," and the forthcoming "Sacred Friendships: Listening to the Voices of Women Soul Care-Givers and Spiritual Directors."

An excellent read on the African-American experience.
An absorbing biography of an Afircan-American's rise to the highest position of the AME church as a Bishop, and his challenges to build and maintain the church.It also explains his challenges and struggles inAmerica as a African-American and the love of God, his family, friends anassociates . It was hard to put down.At times I was with him in thestruggles.It provides another format to look at the African-Americanhistory in America, and the impact on a cutlture and people. His daughterhas done an excellent job at collecting and recording this history.I onlyhope others will follow in her footsteps.The book was rather pricey butwell done with adequate references.

Stuggles ofa Spanish-Black bishop in AME church; Excellent
Bishop Gomez built the AME church in Cleveland, Ohio.He rewrote church doctrine in the 1970s for the first time since written by Richard Allen.The book also depicted his struggles and lonely walk with God as he lead aBlack congregation and was faced with issues during the Civil Rightsmovement.The book was easy to read, inspiring, and you didn't want to putit down until finished! ... Read more

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The conclusions reached in this work will allow scholars, hymnologists, and hymn singers to explore the social and musicological influences on hymn tune writing, how long it took for texts to acquire a fixed tune, how tastes in hymn tunes change ever so slowly, and how many delightful tunes found in the core repertory of the 19th century have been dropped from today's repertoire. ... Read more

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This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishings Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the worlds literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

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Founded by free people of color in Philadelphia in the aftermath of the American Revolution, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church emerged in the nineteenth century as the preeminent black institution in the United States. In 1896, the church opened mission work in South Africa, absorbing an independent "Ethiopian" church founded by dissident African Christians a few years earlier. In the process, the church helped ignite one of the most influential popular movements in South African history.

Songs of Zion examines this remarkable historical convergence from both sides of the Atlantic. James Campbell charts the origins and evolution of black American independent churches, arguing that the very act of becoming Christian forced African Americans to reflect on their relationship to their ancestral continent. He then turns to South Africa, exploring the AME Church's entrance and evolution in a series of specific South African contexts. Throughout the book, Campbell focuses on the comparisons that Africans and African Americans themselves drew between their situations. Their transatlantic encounter, he argues, enabled both groups to understand and act upon their worlds in new ways. ... Read more

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This book has DirectLink Technology built into the formatting. This means that we have made it easy for you to navigate the various chapters of this book. Some other versions of this book may not have the DirectLink technology built into them. We can guarantee that if you buy this version of the book it will be formatted perfectly on your Kindle. ... Read more

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The long road to social conscience
This text, `An Ex-Colored Church: Social Activism in the CME Church 1870-1970', is the first major publication by the newly-tenured professor of church history at my seminary, Raymond (Ron) Sommerville, Jr.Sommerville is an interesting and engaging author, and a careful scholar.

History never exists in a vacuum, nor does it fall neatly within specified dates.While the title looks at the primary century of the CME Church from the aftermath of the Civil War to the period of full engagement with Civil Rights, Sommerville does not hesitate to digress into prior history when such is called for.For example, when highlighting the role of Memphis in the leadership of the CME, Sommerville gives a brief sketch of the development of Memphis both as a city and as a place for African-Americans to reside from the first major incorporations in the early 1800s to its role as an informal capital of the three-state area, then to its status as a major port in the slave trade, and finally as a city with a large free African-American population after the Northern forces secured the city in the Civil War.Memphis continues to be a major centre in terms of congregations and leadership.

Sommerville similarly traces population trends during various points in history, such as the exodus from Birmingham and the migration to cities like Atlanta during the increasingly turbulent years of the 1950s and 1960s.Sommerville traces the history of the church with a diverse set of guides - sometimes he lets the primary personalities drive the narrative (leaders in the church as well as general figures in the ongoing struggle for community and civil rights), sometimes the institutional actors (the NAACP, for example), and sometimes the major events.By not confining his method to any one particular system, Sommerville was free to incorporate a broad range of perspectives and information.

History is necessarily selective.Figuring out the pivotal events and major players of direct influence is very easy; not so simple is figuring out the overall strands of influence from indirect events and persons.Sommerville is very clear in his development of the different sources and identifying key influences in the overall development.The book is well documented with a generous bibliography of primary sources, articles, archival, newspaper and periodical sources.The footnotes are informative without being oppressive in number or physical space.

One theme that runs through much of the discussion is the continuing situation with regard to unity among the AME, AMEZ and CME churches.At various points in their history, merger seemed possible and desirable, but various factors (personality or other situations) kept merger from becoming a possibility.Sommerville quotes a lay leader (Ervin Miller) from the 1960s as someone who has lost faith in the merger process after so many abortive attempts.Such could be a critique of the entire ecumenical enterprise of the twentieth century, in many respects.`I'll believe in merger when I see it and not before.'

In some ways, the CME was a late-comer the forefront of ecumenical action and social justice ministry; however, as Sommerville shows, the CME has always been a part of this ongoing process in American history.Drawing on the idea of history being in significant part the history of indirect influences, the CME was always there, and Sommerville's development demonstrates that well.

Perhaps the most fascinating section for me was the chapter on the CME Church at the birth of the Civil Rights Movement.Until the 1950s, CME stood for Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, a name that served to highlight the division between the races.The 1954 General Conference voted to change the name to something else that would preserve the initials (CME) while losing the word `Colored' from its title, to adopt a more inclusive posture in the growing ecumenical and civil-rights conscious America.However, the change was not without vigorous debate.Ultimately, the same day as the momentous Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, the CME voted to change the word `Colored' to `Christian'.The timing helped to solidify the idea that the church and the world were inextricably linked, and that the church was needed in the social and political sphere as well in working toward inclusiveness and racial reconciliation.

This is a fascinating text.As an outsider looking in, it is hard to discern the nuances of church life, but Sommerville brings to life the struggle toward social consciousness in the CME, the long road from the post-war South to an actor for good on the national stage, one from a church faithful to its Methodist origins and its need to engage in social justice. ... Read more

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In presenting a history of this denomination of Christians to the reader, it seems proper to introduce it by a few historical sketches of the first settlements of the country, accompanied with an account of the civil and religious state of the people at the time Methodism was introduced.
The discovery of America by Columbus in 1492, *[3] awakened a spirit of bold and adventurous enterprise in Europe to which the minds of men heretofore had been strangers, and gave them an impulse in quite a new direction. The impetus thus given to European adventure received a fresh impulse by the discovery of the northern continent of the new world, by John and Sebastian Cabot, father and son, in 1497, only five years after the intrepid Columbus had solved the problem respecting the existence of a western hemisphere.
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This scarce antiquarian book is included in our special Legacy Reprint Series. In the interest of creating a more extensive selection of rare historical book reprints, we have chosen to reproduce this title even though it may possibly have occasional imperfections such as missing and blurred pages, missing text, poor pictures, markings, dark backgrounds and other reproduction issues beyond our control. Because this work is culturally important, we have made it available as a part of our commitment to protecting, preserving and promoting the world's literature. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, 2nd ed., brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 2758 words.The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase.You can view it with any web browser.The Early Civilizations in the Americas Reference Library provides a comprehensive overview of the history of the regions of the American continents in which two of the world's first civilizations developed: Mesoamerica (the name for the lands in which ancient civilizations arose in Central America and Mexico) and the Andes Mountains region of South America (in present-day Peru and parts of Bolivia, northern Argentina, and Ecuador). In both regions, the history of civilization goes back thousands of years. ... Read more

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This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishings Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the worlds literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

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Institutions develop geographic strategies in order to diffuse their ideas and organizations.These strategies may be either or both explicit and implicit and involve the generation of organizational structures, the examination of problems and possibilities and the deployment of resources.American Protestant religious institutions expand territorially and numerically by establishing new congregations.Founding methods, operational relationships between judicatories and existing congregations, and deployment processes of six denominations (Dutch Reformed, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Congregational, Baptist and Methodist) in upstate New York before 1810 are explored, with special emphasis on the Methodist Episcopal Church which showed the most successful expansion during that period.A series of maps and charts have been assembled to indicate the diffusion patterns of these six religious institutions.The various time periods examined, 1788 and before, 1789-1793, 1794-1798, 1799-1803, 1804-1810, correspond with significant growth and realignments of Methodist districts.The results of this study show that geographic strategies have directly affected the success and failure of denominational expansion. ... Read more