Religious Experience and Journal is the spiritual autobiography of Jarena Lee (1783–1864), the first woman authorized to preach in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. It is her own account, in her own plain words, of a poor free-born Black woman who heard God call her to the pulpit at a time when neither her sex nor her race was permitted anywhere near it — and who spent the rest of her life proving that the call was real. If you have come looking for a summary or a study guide, here is the short answer: this is the testimony of holy boldness, a record of conversion, sanctification, and decades of travelling ministry, held together by an unshakable conviction that the God who calls will also make a way.

You can read the whole book free on Ochorus — Religious Experience and Journal — and this guide is meant to walk beside it: what the book is, how it unfolds, the themes worth watching for, and some questions to carry into your own life. Lee wrote it so her witness would outlast her. Read with that in mind, and it does.

What the book is, and who Jarena Lee was

Jarena Lee was born free in Cape May, New Jersey, in 1783 — a rare mercy for a Black child in revolutionary America. Freedom did not spare her hardship; at seven she was sent sixty miles from her parents into domestic service, and she grew up lonely and hungry for something her circumstances could not supply. That hunger eventually drew her to Philadelphia, the cradle of the free Black church, where she came under the preaching of the Reverend Richard Allen, the former slave who founded Bethel Church and became the first bishop of the AME denomination. Under his ministry, around 1804, her long religious searching came to its end and she was, in her word, gloriously converted.

The book itself first appeared in 1836 as a slim autobiography — the first published by an African American woman, printed at her own expense — and was expanded in 1849 into the fuller Religious Experience and Journal that Ochorus hosts. The later volume adds the travel journal that makes up most of its pages: a diarist’s record of towns, texts, congregations, conversions, sicknesses, and mercies, kept faithfully across the 1820s, 30s, and 40s. It is not a treatise. It is a testimony, written in the warm, experience-rich idiom of early Methodism, where the state of one’s soul mattered as much as the events of one’s days.

The shape of her life and journal

The narrative moves in a clear arc. It opens with conversion and a restless seeking after a deeper work of grace, which breaks over her one day as an assurance so sudden she springs to her feet crying that God has sanctified her soul. Then comes the call. Four or five years after that sanctification, an inward voice she cannot explain away commands her to preach — and the rest of the book is the story of what she did with it.

She carried the call to Richard Allen himself, who, bound by a Methodist Discipline that made no provision for women preachers, gently refused her. She married the Reverend Joseph Lee in 1811 and moved to Snow Hill, only to be widowed within a few years and left with a young child and almost nothing. Yet the loss clarified rather than extinguished the call. Around 1819, in the very church where she was converted, a visiting preacher faltered mid-sermon; Lee rose unbidden, finished his text, and preached. This time Allen stood before the whole assembly and publicly affirmed that God had called her. From that day she became a travelling preacher, and the journal chapters — The Journal, Part I through Part V — record decades of relentless motion: on foot, by wagon, and by the new railroad cars, thousands of miles a year, into free states and slave territory alike, to Black and white congregations, in churches, camp meetings, homes, and open fields.

The central themes

The call she could not silence

The engine of the whole book is a call Lee could neither prove to others nor escape herself. She describes it with almost frightening precision:

But to my utter surprise there seemed to sound a voice which I thought I distinctly heard, and most certainly understand, which said to me, “Go preach the Gospel!” I immediately replied aloud, “No one will believe me.”

Jarena Lee

She first suspected Satan, knowing he could transform himself into an angel of light, and she went to a secret place to test whether God had truly called her. The conviction only deepened. When she finally rose to preach, she compared herself to a reluctant prophet: she told the congregation she was like Jonah, for the Lord had called her nearly eight years before and she had lingered and delayed to go at his bidding. Readers who know the story of Jonah 2:9 — the text her faltering brother had taken, Salvation is of the Lord — will feel the weight of that comparison. Her call burned in her the way Jeremiah 20:9 describes, a fire shut up in the bones; she uses almost exactly that image, writing that the subject of her call was renewed until it was as a fire shut up in her bones. And it kept its supernatural quality to the end:

The same instant, I sprang, as by altogether supernatural impulse, to my feet, when I was aided from above to give an exhortation on the very text which my brother Williams had taken.

Jarena Lee

A whole Saviour: God is no respecter of persons

Lee’s boldest theme is one the church of her day was not ready to hear: that the gospel belongs to the woman as fully as to the man, and to the Black preacher as fully as to the white. Her argument is disarmingly simple and rooted in the resurrection:

If the man may preach, because the Saviour died for him, why not the woman? seeing he died for her also. Is he not a whole Saviour, instead of a half one?

Jarena Lee

She presses the point by remembering that it was Mary who first preached the risen Saviour. Her instinct here runs straight along the grain of Scripture — Joel 2:28 promises that sons and daughters shall prophesy, Galatians 3:28 declares there is neither male nor female in Christ, and Acts 10:34 announces that God is no respecter of persons. That last phrase becomes almost a refrain in her journal; she notes with joy a man who had never heard a woman preach and left convinced that God was no respecter of persons, and that a woman as well as a man, when called of God, had a right to preach. Present this theme with historical sympathy: Lee was not staging a modern argument but obeying what she was sure God had shown her, and paying the cost of it town by town.

Holiness, prayer, and dependence

Underneath the boldness is a deeply Methodist spirituality of sanctification and constant prayer. Lee sought and testified to a definite experience of holiness, and she measured her ministry not by crowds but by whether God met the people. Her journal turns, again and again, mid-account, into petition and thanks. She preached from texts of consecration and anointing — she records speaking from Isaiah 61:1 and adds simply that she was anointed — and she never lost her astonishment that God would use her at all:

When I contemplate the goodness of God to the human family, in putting them in a proper capacity of choosing the way of salvation, I feel sometimes almost lost, to think that God has called such a worm as I to spread the common Saviour’s name.

Jarena Lee

The texts she chose tell you where she lived: Acts 2:41 and the Pentecostal harvest, Acts 13:41 with its warning to despisers, Isaiah 53:3 and the man of sorrows, Ephesians 2:8 on grace through faith. Hers was a preaching soaked in Scripture and carried by prayer for the next meal and the next mile.

Suffering, perseverance, and the witness against slavery

Lee refused to sentimentalize the cost. She warns her reader plainly:

Dear reader, think not that I am going to heaven as in golden slippers, for I have various trials to encounter while travelling over this world so wide, but I feel willing to suffer for the cause of God.

Jarena Lee

She counted her hardships as fellowship with Christ, taking comfort in Revelation 12:11 — that they overcame by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony, and loved not their lives unto death, a verse she quotes outright. Her travels carried her into slave states, where a free Black woman proclaiming the equal worth of every soul Christ died for was a provocation. She preached with enslaved men and women weeping before her while their masters looked on, and she never separated the gospel from the bondage she witnessed. Like the trumpet-cry of Isaiah 58:1, she was willing to lift up her voice and show the people their transgressions.

Who should read it

Read this book if you are wrestling with a sense of calling that others do not yet see, or that your circumstances seem to forbid. Read it if you care about the history of the Black church in America, or the long story of women in ministry, and want it from a primary voice rather than a summary. Read it if your own faith has gone abstract and you want the tonic of a Christianity that is concrete, experiential, and unembarrassed about the presence of God. And read it if you love the older journal-keepers — those who wrote their souls down honestly — because Lee belongs in that company.

How to read it today

Take it slowly and in order; it is a journal, and its power is cumulative rather than argued. Keep a Bible near, because Lee constantly names the texts she preached from, and looking them up turns her diary into a preaching companion. Let the nineteenth-century spelling of place names and the abbreviated dates wash past you — the reward is in the persons and the mercies, not the itinerary. When she describes inward experiences in the heightened language of her tradition, read with historical sympathy rather than suspicion: she is telling you the truth as her whole world taught her to tell it. And notice how often the narrative bends into prayer; try pausing to pray where she does, and the book becomes less a record to observe than a practice to share.

When you finish, follow the story outward. Her mentor Richard Allen tells the founding of the AME Church from the inside in The Life, Experience, and Gospel Labours, and the great journal-keeper of an earlier generation, whose diary of prayer and perseverance clearly stands behind hers, waits in The Life and Diary of David Brainerd. To sit longer with Lee herself, her author page gathers her life and writing in one place.

For reflection

  • Lee tested her call in secret before she ever acted on it, then obeyed even when the church said no. How do you discern the difference between a genuine call of God and your own desire — and what do you do when the two seem to conflict with authority?
  • She asked whether Christ is a whole Saviour or a half one. Where might you be quietly treating the gospel as if it were for some kinds of people more than others?
  • Lee likened herself to Jonah, lingering nearly eight years before she obeyed. Is there a bidding of God you have delayed, and what has the delay cost?
  • Her journal keeps turning into prayer. What would it change if you treated prayer not as the frame around your work but, as she did, as its engine?
  • She said she was not going to heaven in golden slippers. What trials are you tempted to avoid that might actually be fellowship with Christ — and how does Revelation 12:11 reframe them?