Kept in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Works of mercy stand beside works of piety in the Methodist account of the Christian life, and neither is optional.
Kept in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion 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.
Kept in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion 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.
Kept in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.
Kept in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion 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.
Kept in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Fasting is one of the means of grace, and Wesley kept the Friday fast himself and pressed it on the societies.
Kept in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion 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.
Kept in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.
Kept in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion 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.
Kept in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Infants are baptised, and the service places the congregation under a vow to nurture the child.
Kept in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion 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.
Kept in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. The liturgical colours were retained from the Anglican inheritance and are set out in the modern service books.
Kept in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. The marriage service descends from the Prayer Book by way of Wesley's abridgement of it for the American societies.
Kept in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Sunday is kept for public worship, and the General Rules bind members to attend upon the ordinances of God.
Kept in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Prayer stands among the means of grace Wesley called the works of piety, alongside searching the scriptures, the Lord's Supper and fasting.
Kept in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.
Kept in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion 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 denomination's own governing and doctrinal text, first published in 1820 in the same act the church names as its declaration of independence; grounded in the church's own official history page, read directly.
Kept in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion 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.
Kept in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. The breaking of the bread is a distinct action with its own words.
Kept in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.
Kept in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.
Kept in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion 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.
Kept in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. The words of institution stand within the Great Thanksgiving.
Kept as Freedom's Eve, from the night of December 31 1862 when congregations waited for the Emancipation Proclamation to take effect at midnight.