By Ryan Foley
One Sunday in 1817, Jarena Lee attended a service at Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Philadelphia. A former servant, Lee had become a Christian nearly a decade before—a conver- sion experience which also awoke her desire to preach. Although she had expressed this calling to church leaders, Lee had never taken the pulpit. Until today.
Originally scheduled to preach, the Reverend Richard Williams was unable to speak the words he had prepared.
“During the exhortation, God made manifest his power in a manner sufficient to show the world that I was called to labor according to my ability, and the grace given unto me, in the vineyard of the good husbandman,” Lee later wrote.
Richard Allen, the African Methodist Episcopal Church founder and denomination bishop who also served as Mother Bethel’s pastor, was in the audience that day. Lee had informed Allen of her aspirations eight years earlier, but he hadn’t felt comfortable letting a woman speak from the pulpit. But that Sunday Allen changed his mind, convinced that God’s gift was operating in her that day.
The first African American woman to preach the gospel publicly, Lee preached to racially mixed Methodists, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Wesleyan audiences across the mid-Atlantic states, lower Canada, Cincinnati, Detroit, and New England.
According to her autobiography, Lee was born on February 11, 1783 in Cape May, New Jersey. Though born into freedom, Lee grew up separated from her parents because of her work as a maid in a white household 60 miles from her hometown. She later recounted that at the age of seven, she recognized her sinful condition, though she had no knowledge of the gospel.
Lee’s autobiography offers few other details about her childhood or young adult life, jumping to 1804—a year that marked the beginning of her conversion. At the age of 20, Lee attended a Presbyterian meeting in Philadelphia where once again she was convinced of her wretched- ness, but found no place of refuge. “But not knowing how to run immediately to the Lord for help, I was driven of Satan, in the course of a few days, and tempted to destroy myself,” she wrote.
