Upon This Rock: The Birth Of The New AME Church

The Right Reverend Estella Shabazz is a life long member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) and has always been inspired by its origin as a safe haven amid the religious, social and political repression of a slave-holding America.

Modern religious repression, this time from within the AME church, has led her, like its legendary founder Richard Allen, to start a new church family.

"I want a church of inclusion, where women can also freely preach the Gospel and become leaders according to their calling and training," the founder and Chief Bishop of the New AME Church said in her characteristically upbeat tone of voice.

Less upbeat is the sad story of exclusion and outright refusal to seat her and other female pastors behind empty pulpits crying out for leadership. Most Christian denominations and other religions have wrestled

with similar difficult social issues that literally tested their faith.

Priest scandals publicly rocked the Catholic Church while the issue of ordaining openly Gay priests has led one progressive Christian denomination to rethink its commitment to progress as some clergy and members leave in protest.

Black Christians have always had to either fight uphill against their faith's discrimination or leave to create churches that respected them as children of God. That's why there is to this day White and Black divisions within the denominations.

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That's why today's Christian Methodist Episcopal Church began existence as the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church until changing times prompted a name change.

A Black former Catholic priest named Bishop George Augustus Stallings in the 1990s founded the Imani Temple, an Afrocentric response to the racism he found in his former order.

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Once at the forefront of a social gospel that addressed the myriad needs of slaves and their offspring, founding Bishop Shabazz asserts that, "... the traditional AME Church has lost its way... "when it comes to including women at its helm and focusing upon concerns beyond collecting sufficient amounts of offerings to please the highest officers of the Connectional."

"Fiscal fitness has taken the place of social justice and spiritual fitness. I know of churches forced to take out loans in order to provide the central office with its quarterly collection... What happens to the concerns of the mostly working class community our churches serve?" she rhetorically asked, adding that this undermines the church role as a resource during difficult times.

Episodes like this and the refusal of the AME presiding bishop over Georgia to appoint qualified female pastors reinforced her decision to start the New AME Church. The bishop's refusal added insult to injury by his selection of male pastoral candidates whose personal issues and lack of educational credentials made them questionable choices at best.

This is a particular slap in the face to a woman who had completed all five years of instruction for prospective pastors required by the AME Board of Examiners. She is also the first woman to be ordained as Itinerant Elder in the Old Georgia Annual Conference of the 6th Episcopal District of the AME Church with a Master of Divinity degree obtained from Turner Theological Seminary, located within Atlanta's Interdenominational Theological Center (ITC).

An ordained Itinerant Elder, she has also been accepted to pursue a Doctor of Divinity degree. Being denied what she is so well qualified to possess sums up the current inequality women leaders in the AME Church face on a daily basis.

Mrs. Shabazz comes to her calling with a background rich in achievement in various demanding fields. In addition to being a human rights champion, she is also a Civil Engineer by trade; a publisher and member of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA); a world traveler; actively monitors politics and is a seasoned entrepreneur.

Had she been given the opportunity, the pulpit she would have held would have been a public service platform for a clergy person who is very aware of what her parishioners face, because she fights these same problems on a regular basis, in a number of effective ways.

Bishop Shabazz has been in ministry since 1990. Her progress in the AME Church has included years spent as a very active and faithful lay member at the Mother Church of African Methodism in the state of Georgia, Savannah's St. Phillip Monumental AME Church. She was also baptized there. She leaves a church whose connectional organization of the AME Church General Conference consecrated and elected its first woman Bishop after 212 years!! Globally, today in 2008, only 3 bishops out of 20 in the world connectional church are women.

In a nation where a Black man and White woman ran neck and neck to win the Democratic Presidential nomination; with a Black male governor of New York and whose past two Secretaries of State have been African-American (the current one being a Black woman) , is it too much to ask the AME Church and its peers to finally realize spreading the Good News includes women too!?!

Whether the traditional AME Church does so or not, the New AME Church founder and Chief Bishop Estella Edwards Shabazz has opted to follow her Lord and Savior Jesus, the Resurrected Christ, along with AME patriarch Richard Allen, and find a new rock upon which to build a fellowship that opens doors to its members, not slams them shut.

While the New AME Church is brand new, the promise it stands upon is old as the Gospel itself.

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CONTACT:

Rev. Estella Shabazz

P. O. Box 44473

Atlanta, GA 30336

or

Email her at: eshreet@aol.com for speaking engagements

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