A Founder Who Also Compiled His Own Hymnal

Richard Allen led his congregation out of St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church over segregated seating and gathered Bethel Church in Philadelphia in 1794, the congregation that would become the founding church of the African Methodist Episcopal Church when Allen formally organized the denomination in 1816. Between those two dates, in 1801, he did something a congregation's founder does not always do himself: he sat down and compiled its hymnal.

Fifty four hymns, printed that year by John Ormrod in Philadelphia, drew on material already circulating from Isaac Watts and from John and Charles Wesley, set alongside pieces attributed to Allen and to members of his own congregation, printed without author credits or musical notation. Later that same year Allen issued an enlarged edition under a new title, A Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs. Hymnologists identify the 1801 collection as the first hymnal published by an African American for African American worshippers, a distinction that sits naturally beside Allen's larger role: a man who would not accept a congregation shaped by someone else's seating chart was, unsurprisingly, also unwilling to hand its songbook to someone else's selections.