St. Stephen's Episcopal Church hosts historic celebration

By: Staff reports | Morganton News Herald
Published: February 12, 2010

MORGANTON --

The celebration of the Feast of Absalom Jones will begin at 3 p.m. Sunday in St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, 318 Bouchelle St.. The service will include preaching and the celebration of the Holy Eucharist.
Guest preacher will be the Rev. Walter Bryan, the rector of Good Shepherd Episcopal Church in Tryon.
In 1794, Absalom Jones founded the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas in Philadelphia in 1794. Ten years later, in 1804, he became the first African-American ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church in the United States. He was a noted pastor, evangelist and abolitionist.
Jones was born into slavery in Delaware in 1746. When he was 16, he was sold to a store owner in Philadelphia, Pa. While still a slave he married Mary King, another slave. By 1778 he had purchased his wife's freedom so their children would be free; seven years later he purchased his own.
Jones became a lay minister for black members in the interracial congregation of St. George's Methodist Church.
In 1787 Jones and his friend Richard Allen, together with other black members, left St. George's because they were tired of being segregated to a gallery and given second-class status in the congregation. They founded the Free African Society (FAS), first conceived as a non-denominational mutual aid society to help newly freed slaves in Philadelphia.
Jones started holding religious services in 1791. This became the core congregation for a new church. Wanting to establish a black congregation independent of white control, Jones in 1792 founded the congregation of the African Church in Philadelphia. It petitioned to become an Episcopal parish. The church opened its doors on July 17, 1794, as the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, the first black church in Philadelphia.
Jones and Allen separated over their different directions in religion, but remained lifelong friends and collaborators. Allen founded Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1794 and Bishop Francis Asbury ordained Allen in 1799. Allen gathered other black congregations in the region to create a new and fully independent denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and in 1816 was elected the A.M.E.'s first bishop.
Absalom Jones is celebrated in the Episcopal Church's Calendar of Saints.
The event hosted by St. Stephen's is sponsored by the Episcopal churches of Morganton and Burke County.

St. Stephen's Episcopal Church hosts historic celebration

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