Since 2003, leaders of this 2.5 million-member African Methodist Episcopal Church are making a few community statements declaring the denomination’s resistance into the ordination of openly gay clergy users and matrimony rights for same-sex couples. It offers, as of yet, remained hushed on transgender members.
BACKGROUND
The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) chapel try a mostly African United states Methodist denomination based in the United States. The AME Church got its start as a protest resistant to the racial discrmination skilled by folks of African lineage at white Methodist congregations, for instance the St. George Methodist Episcopal chapel in Philadelphia. In 1787, Rev. Richard Allen and Rev. Absalom Jones withdrew from St. George Methodist Episcopal Church and started The complimentary African people, establishing the starts for the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
It was previously structured in 1816 by a team of several black colored congregations during the mid-Atlantic region and additionally they consecrated Richard Allen as the basic Bishop for the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The denomination remains a part with the class of Methodist places of worship.
The AME chapel operates under an epsicopal type national. Bishops contitute the principle manager and administative officials regarding the church, in addition to their expert is derived from the General Conference.
LGBTQ EQUIVALENCE
ON INTIMATE DIRECTION & SEX IDENTIFICATION
The African Methodist Episcopal Church has traditionally established no formal policy on conditions that affect LGBTQ people. Nevertheless is definitely obvious your church condemns same-sex connections. And also in 2004, church leadership articulated that condemnation in an unusual declaration against marriage equality that same-sex relationships oppose her knowledge of Scripture.
The AME Church dooes maybe not appear to deal with transgender dilemmas especially, but do directly adhere scriptural lessons with regards to God’s production of guy and girl utilizing the implication that gender are biologically determined.
ON RELATIONSHIP EQUALITY
On AME national meeting in July 2004, delegates chosen to forbid ministers from executing relationship or municipal union ceremonies for same-sex people. The vote was unanimous, so there was no discussion on the subject. The decision noted the initial vote regarding the issue of marriage legal rights for same-sex lovers by a predominantly African-American denomination.
Before around, before relationships turned legal for same-sex couples in Massachusetts, the Rev. Gregory G. Groover Sr., an AME pastor in Boston, demonstrated exactly why AME preachers compared the action. He had been quoted in Boston world on Feb. 10, 2004, as claiming: “As black colored preachers, we are progressive in our social consciousness, along with our very 
own governmental ideology as an oppressed folks we shall often be from the status quo, but our very own earliest call is to listen to the sound of God in our Scriptures, and in which a concern plainly contradicts our very own comprehension of Scripture, we have to apply that understanding.”
ON NON-DISCRIMINATION
The AME chapel does not seem to have taken the official stand on the equivalence operate or other issues regarding non-discrimination defenses for LGBTQ visitors.
ON ORDINATION
In August 2003, after an article in USA These days wrongly reported your African Methodist Episcopal chapel ordained gay ministers, Bishop Richard Franklin Norris granted this statement refuting that position and advised all AME pastors to learn they on their congregations: “The official place associated with African Methodist Episcopal Church isn’t and only the ordination of honestly homosexual individuals on ranks of clergy within our chapel. This situation reaffirms our printed situation forms, community statements and earlier rulings, which show that we cannot support the ordination of honestly gay persons.”
RESOURCES
Lots of Voices was dark chapel action for LGBTQ fairness working toward a residential area that welcomes the variety associated with the real group and means that each one is treated with admiration, compassion, and fairness
CALL INFO
African Methodist Episcopal Church 500 8th Avenue Southern Nashville, TN 37203