Denominations

Christian Methodist Episcopal Church

Christianity

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "Christian Methodist Episcopal Church." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://divinity.interactivelion.com/denominations/christian-methodist-episcopal-church.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://divinity.interactivelion.com/denominations/christian-methodist-episcopal-church

BibTeX

@misc{divinityatlas-christian-methodist-episcopal-church,
  author = {Divinity Atlas},
  title = {Christian Methodist Episcopal Church},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://divinity.interactivelion.com/denominations/christian-methodist-episcopal-church},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Origin 1870

The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church was organized on December 16, 1870, in Jackson, Tennessee, by 41 formerly enslaved members of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, who founded it as the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in America with the cooperation of their former white denomination; it adopted its present name in 1954. It was the first Black Methodist denomination organized in the South rather than the North. Its headquarters, the CME Church Episcopal Office, are located in Memphis, Tennessee, and its membership, once concentrated in the American South, today includes congregations across the United States and mission churches in Africa and the Caribbean.

Facts

Status

Status Todaythe subject's own account

Living tradition, practised today 1

Trajectory

Membership Over Timethe subject's own account

The CME Church's own website states more than 1.2 million members across the United States as of 2025, with mission and sister churches in Haiti, Jamaica and fourteen African nations, a church-reported figure. 1

Membership Over Timethe subject's own account

The Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches' 2008 edition estimated 850,000 Christian Methodist Episcopal Church members in 3,500 congregations for 2006, an outside compilation of the denomination's own reported rolls. 1

Membership Figure As Ofthe subject's own account

2006-01-01 1

Membership Figure As Ofthe subject's own account

2025-01-01 1

Basis of the Membership Figurethe subject's own account

Church-Reported Rolls 1

Belief

Defining Doctrinal Positionthe subject's own account

Trinitarian: one God in three persons 1Christianity

Doctrinal Standards

The Articles of Religion, derived from the Church of England and abridged by John Wesley for Methodists in America in 1784. 2

Organisation

Governance

Connexional: congregations bound in a conference with itinerant ministry 1

the subject's own accountConnexional: bishops oversee episcopal districts and annual conferences, with church law set by a quadrennial General Conference

Episcopal Tenurethe subject's own account

Bishops are elected by delegate vote and hold the office for life until the age of seventy-four. The General Conference that elects them meets every four years with equal numbers of clergy and lay delegates. 1

Ordination

Open to women and men 1

the subject's own accountOrdains women to the itinerant ministry and to the episcopacy; Teresa E. Snorton became its first woman bishop in 2010

Origins

Origin Periodthe subject's own account

1870 1

Place of Originthe subject's own account

Jackson, Tennessee 1

Founderthe subject's own account

No single founder; organized by 41 delegates formerly enslaved in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, with William H. Miles and Richard H. Vanderhorst consecrated its first bishops 1

History

Separation or Divergencethe subject's own account

The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, organized with that church's cooperation rather than by walkout 1

Date of Separationthe subject's own account

from 1870 1

Practice

Liturgical Languagethe subject's own account

The vernacular 1

Reach

Adherents Todaythe subject's own account

from 1,200,000 3

Learn More

A Church Organized Out of Emancipation

The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church has an origin unlike the AME and AME Zion churches: it was not founded by a walkout from a segregated congregation, but organized after the Civil War with the formal, if self-interested, cooperation of the very denomination its founders were leaving. Before emancipation, roughly 200,000 enslaved and free Black people belonged to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, worshipping in segregated galleries and mission stations. After the war most left for other churches or for the older independent Black Methodist bodies, but the Southern church's white leadership, eager to avoid a legal fight over property held for its Black membership, proposed helping organize a fully separate denomination instead.

Forty-one delegates, all formerly enslaved members of the Southern Methodist church, met in Jackson, Tennessee, on December 16, 1870, and organized the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in America, adapting the Methodist Episcopal Church, South's own Discipline as a starting point for their own. Two bishops were consecrated to lead it, William H. Miles and Richard H. Vanderhorst, both formerly enslaved ministers. It was the first independent Black Methodist denomination founded in the South rather than transplanted from the North, and it grew initially among Black communities across Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and neighboring states.

From Colored to Christian, and a National Church

For its first eight decades the denomination carried the name given at its 1870 founding, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, chosen partly because its founders wished to keep it distinct from the older AME and AME Zion churches. In 1954, in the early years of the modern civil rights movement, the denomination's General Conference voted to rename it the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, retaining the CME initials while dropping a racial designation its members had come to see as limiting.

The CME Church built a network of colleges alongside its congregations, including Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee, and Miles College in Birmingham, Alabama, both named for its founding bishops, and it retains the connexional government common to Methodism, with bishops presiding over episcopal districts and a General Conference meeting every four years to set church law. Its headquarters, called the Episcopal Office, are in Memphis, Tennessee. Though historically concentrated in the American South, the church has extended mission and sister congregations into Haiti, Jamaica, and more than a dozen African nations, and its own reporting in the mid-2020s puts total membership at more than 1.2 million. The denomination elected its first woman bishop, Teresa E. Snorton, in 2010, and has since elected a second.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (Wikipedia)

This source names Christian Methodist Episcopal Church directly: "community-edited article on the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, a historically Black Methodist denomination."

Source Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

The Black Church in the African American Experience

This source names Christian Methodist Episcopal Church directly: "Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, the National Baptist Convention, USA, Incorporated, the National Baptist Convention of America, the Progressive National..."

Source The Black Church in the African American ExperienceC. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya

Classified as historically Black Protestant tradition per Pew Research Center's 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study.

Source Pew Research Center: 2023-24 Religious Landscape StudyPew Research Center

Critiqued

Seven Sacraments

Kept in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. The Articles of Religion hold that there are two sacraments ordained of Christ, and that the other five are not to be counted for sacraments of the Gospel.

Veneration of icons

Kept in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. The Articles name the worshipping and adoration of images and of relics as a fond thing vainly invented.

Veneration of saints and Mary

Kept in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. The Articles name the invocation of saints in the same place, and Methodist prayer is addressed to God alone.

Derived From

Methodism

Methodist in doctrine and polity.

Source Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

Excluded from Canon

The Apocrypha

Source Articles of Religion, What We Believe, The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (thecmechurch.org)The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church

Holds Element

A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists

A Methodist body whose hymnody descends from the 1780 collection and from the American connexional books built on it.

Source The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical StudyJ. R. Watson

Gospel Music

The ordinary music of worship in the congregations of the connexion.

Negro Spirituals

Sung in a church formed in the South out of the Methodist congregations of the freed, whose members had made the spirituals in the first place.

Held Differently

Temperance

The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church holds the Methodist reading of temperance as abstinence.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

Predestination and free will

Source Articles of Religion, What We Believe, The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (thecmechurch.org)The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church

Objects and Practices of This Tradition

Advent

Almsgiving / Charity

Kept in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Works of mercy stand beside works of piety in the Methodist account of the Christian life, and neither is optional.

Arminianism (free will and universal atonement)

Ash Wednesday

Baptism

Kept in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Baptism is administered by sprinkling, pouring or immersion, the mode being left to the person receiving it, which is unusual among the churches that baptise infants.

Baptismal life

Kept in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Baptism is understood as the sign of the new covenant and the beginning of a life of grace to be grown into, not a moment complete in itself.

Christian perfection (entire sanctification)

Christmas

Collect for Purity

Kept in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.

Confirmation

Kept in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Confirmation is the profession of faith by which a baptised person is received into full membership, and it is not held to be a sacrament.

Connexionalism

Easter

Ecclesiastical Polity and the Validity of Holy Orders

Source Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

Ecumenism

Source Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

Episcopal church governance

Fasting

Kept in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Fasting is one of the means of grace, and Wesley kept the Friday fast himself and pressed it on the societies.

Funeral Rites

Kept in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. The Service of Death and Resurrection is the modern form of the burial office and takes its name from what it is meant to proclaim.

Gloria Patri

Kept in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.

Good Friday

Holy Orders

Kept in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Ordination is to the orders of deacon and elder. The episcopacy is an office to which an elder is elected and consecrated, not a third order, which is the settled Methodist difference from Anglican practice.

Holy Week

Infant baptism (paedobaptism)

Source Articles of Religion, What We Believe, The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (thecmechurch.org)The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church

Infant Baptism and Christening

Kept in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Infants are baptised, and the service places the congregation under a vow to nurture the child.

Intinction

Kept in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Intinction is the ordinary manner of receiving in many congregations, and it follows from the use of unfermented grape juice in a common cup.

Justification by faith alone (sola fide)

Source Articles of Religion, What We Believe, The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (thecmechurch.org)The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church

Lent

Liturgical Colors

Kept in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. The liturgical colours were retained from the Anglican inheritance and are set out in the modern service books.

Marriage Ceremony

Kept in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. The marriage service descends from the Prayer Book by way of Wesley's abridgement of it for the American societies.

Maundy Thursday

New Testament

Source Articles of Religion, What We Believe, The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (thecmechurch.org)The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church

Observing the Sabbath

Kept in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Sunday is kept for public worship, and the General Rules bind members to attend upon the ordinances of God.

Open communion

Palm Sunday

Pentecost

Prayer

Kept in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Prayer stands among the means of grace Wesley called the works of piety, alongside searching the scriptures, the Lord's Supper and fasting.

Prayer of Humble Access

Kept in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.

Salvation by grace

Source Articles of Religion, What We Believe, The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (thecmechurch.org)The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church

Subscription to a confession of faith

The Anaphora

Kept in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. The Great Thanksgiving is a full anaphora, restored to Methodist worship in the twentieth century after two hundred years in which the Supper was celebrated from a much shorter form.

The Articles of Religion of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church

The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church names these as its own doctrinal foundation on its own official website; already an existing citation source in this atlas, cited here as the encyclopedia entry for the confession itself.

Source Articles of Religion, What We Believe, The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (thecmechurch.org)The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church

The Epiclesis

Kept in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. The Great Thanksgiving carries an explicit invocation of the Holy Spirit on the gifts and on the people, which the sixteenth-century English rite did not.

The Fraction

Kept in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. The breaking of the bread is a distinct action with its own words.

The Grace

Kept in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.

The Holy Trinity

Source Articles of Religion, What We Believe, The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (thecmechurch.org)The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church

The Lord's Prayer

Kept in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.

The Mass / Eucharist

Kept in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. The Lord's Supper is celebrated as a means of grace and Wesley pressed constant communion on the societies, though quarterly celebration became the practice for most of Methodist history for want of ordained ministers.

The ordination of women

The resurrection of Christ

Source Articles of Religion, What We Believe, The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (thecmechurch.org)The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church

The Words of Institution

Kept in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. The words of institution stand within the Great Thanksgiving.

Watch Night

Kept as Freedom's Eve, from the night of December 31 1862 when congregations waited for the Emancipation Proclamation to take effect at midnight.

Sources

1. Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (Wikipedia)

Wikipedia contributors, WikipediaWhole articleView the Source

2. Articles of Religion, What We Believe, The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (thecmechurch.org)

The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, Christian Methodist Episcopal ChurchWhat We Believe. The Articles of Religion, abridged by John Wesley for Methodists in America in 1784View the Source

3. Members, The CME Church (thecmechurch.org)

Christian Methodist Episcopal ChurchMembership statementthe holders' own accountView the Source

The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study

J. R. Watson, Oxford University Press, 1997

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition

F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.), Oxford University Press, 2005View the Source

Essays About This Entity (1 essay)

Eleven Bodies Read Temperance as a Wall, Not a Measure
Holds the same Methodist reading of temperance as abstinence

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Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (Episcopal Office)Memphis Verified

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