The Civil War transformed the African Methodist Episcopal Church from a Northern denomination of some 20,000 members into a national one. As Union armies advanced, AME missionaries followed close behind, organizing congregations among the newly freed in Georgia, South Carolina, and across the former Confederacy; membership multiplied several times over within a generation, driven by the church's promise of a fully Black-led Christianity to people who had known only white-controlled worship. Bishop Daniel Alexander Payne, who led the church through much of this expansion, pushed hard for an educated clergy. Wilberforce University in Ohio was founded in 1856 as a joint venture with the white Methodist Episcopal Church; when that venture failed financially, Payne led the AME Church's 1863 purchase of the college for itself, becoming its president, the first African American to lead a college in the United States, and the point at which Wilberforce became the first college owned and operated by African Americans.
The church organizes today into episcopal districts, each overseen by a bishop and covering multiple annual conferences, with districts now spanning the United States, West and Southern Africa, the Caribbean, and parts of Europe and South America. Its General Conference, a legislative body of clergy and lay delegates, meets every four years to set church law and elect bishops, and its general officers are headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. Membership estimates vary by source and counting method, commonly cited in a range of roughly two and a half to three and a half million worldwide, making the AME Church one of the largest historically Black denominations and a member of the World Methodist Council and the World Council of Churches.