Jarena Lee

Jarena Lee, who became "the first female preacher of the First African Methodist
Episcopal Church" ( Gates97), was born February 11, 1783, in Cape May, New
Jersey, to free parents. That when she was seven she was sent not far away from
her birthplace to be a servant in the Sharp family is among the few known details
about her childhood. Hearing a sermon by Richard Allen, who was to become
bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1816, was the most
significant capstone of a sequence of experiences that eventually led to Lee's
conversion to Christianity in 1804 at age twenty-one. Months later, after a con-
versation with a man named William Scott, Lee prayerfully sought and received
sanctification of her soul to God as the third and final step in spiritual devel-
opment beyond conviction and justification from sin.

Lee received the call to preach a few years after her sanctification and went
to see Richard Allen "to tell him that I felt it was my duty to preach the gospel"
( 11 ). Methodism, as Allen told her, permitted women to exhort and hold prayer
meetings but "did not call for women preachers" ( 11 ). A marriage in 1811 to
Joseph Lee, a pastor, took her six miles away from her familiar surroundings in
Philadelphia to Snow Hill. She was unhappy in the Snow Hill church community
until she had a dream revealing the importance of Joseph Lee's ministry there.
Within six years, death had claimed five members of her family, including her
husband. Thus, Lee was "left alone in the world" with an infant and a two-year-
old child ( 14 ).

Eight years after her initial call, she claimed a space at Mother Bethel Church
in Philadelphia to stand and exhort the congregation on the basis of the presiding
minister's text; it confirmed for Richard Allen that she was meant to preach, and

-324-



Questia Media America, Inc. www.questia.com

Publication Information: Book Title: African American Authors, 1745-1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Contributors: Emmanuel S. Nelson - author. Publisher: Greenwood Press. Place of Publication: Westport, CT. Publication Year: 2000. Page Number: 324.