NEWS STORY: AME Church Adds to Number of Women Bishops

c. 2004 Religion News Service UNDATED _ The African Methodist Episcopal Church has made history twice in its election of eight new bishops at its quadrennial meeting in Indianapolis. Following the election of its first woman bishop four years ago, delegates elected two more women to the highest leadership rank in balloting that ended in […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ The African Methodist Episcopal Church has made history twice in its election of eight new bishops at its quadrennial meeting in Indianapolis.

Following the election of its first woman bishop four years ago, delegates elected two more women to the highest leadership rank in balloting that ended in the early hours of Tuesday (July 6).


They also elected an unprecedented three African bishops, demonstrating a further commitment to indigenous leadership on the African continent.

“The election of Bishop Vashti (McKenzie) four years ago cracked that stained-glass ceiling that many denominations have been struggling with,” said Mike McKinney, spokesman for the denomination, in an interview Tuesday. “This quadrennial in Indianapolis has shattered that and shows not only our denomination, but shows the world, that gender is not a prerequisite for talent, for skill, for administrative abilities … for someone to lead our church.”

The bishops-elect for Africa are the Rev. Wilfred Messiah of South Africa, the Rev. Paul J.M. Kawimbe of Zambia, and the Rev. David R. Daniels of Liberia.

Those who will serve as bishops in the United States are the Rev. Carolyn Tyler Guidry, a presiding elder from Los Angeles, and four pastors: the Rev. James L. Davis of Atlanta; the Rev. Samuel L. Green Sr. of Orlando, Fla.; the Rev. Sarah Frances Davis of San Antonio; and the Rev. Earl McCloud Jr. of Atlanta.

In addition to being one of three women in the denomination’s top ranks, McKenzie began serving as president of the AME Church’s Council of Bishops at the outset of the meeting.

“That means that she is the first woman bishop in any of the black church traditions to be the titular head of the church,” said Bishop John Hurst Adams, who has been the senior bishop of the denomination and is retiring at the close of the meeting.

He called McKenzie’s new role part of “our deliberate effort to overcome whatever gender bias has been in our history.”.


Top officials of the church said the new African leadership was as significant as the advance of women in the denomination.

“We’ve raised the level of our commitment to be one church, to be really global, in that we have elected three from Africa,” said Bishop Vinton R. Anderson, chairperson of the General Conference Commission.

“We needed to free ourselves of being colonialists, black colonialists at that.”

The denomination previously elected a single bishop from Africa in 1956 and in 1984. Often the first assignment of new U.S. bishops has been to one of the denomination’s African districts.

The AME Church will now have six districts in Africa instead of five, dividing one that covered a large geographical area.

An observer of African-American church life said the denomination has overcome another boundary to its top positions.

“The AME Church, as a truly international church, is now truly international in its leadership,” said the Rev. Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, professor of African-American studies and sociology at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. “Those bishops are going to circulate through the United States as well and that will make the AME church … so much more visibly international to people outside of the church.”


About 30,000 people have attended the General Conference of the 2.5-million-member denomination, which ends Wednesday (July 7). On that day, those who have been chosen as bishops-elect will be consecrated as bishops and assigned to districts across the United States and abroad.

Sen. John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, addressed the convention on Tuesday.

Kerry credited AME Church leaders for their work on economic development and said, if elected president, he would move beyond “empty words” of the Bush administration.

“I am running for president because it’s time to turn the words into deeds and faith into action,” he said, garnering applause.

Anderson said President Bush, who is seeking re-election, also was invited but he declined.

(OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

More than 2,000 delegates are considering church legislation that would codify stances on same-sex marriage and homosexual clergy.

“We are definitely against same-sex (unions) or the ordination of openly gay clergy,” Bishop Philip R. Cousin, who has led the church’s Chicago-based district, told reporters just before the conference. “We do not condone any clergy that would support those unions.”

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