Religious Experience and Journal

It is the autobiography of Jarena Lee, the first woman authorized to preach in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. She tells her own story: her conversion under Richard Allen, her long struggle to be permitted to preach as a woman, and then decades of travelling thousands of miles to proclaim the gospel — a pioneering record of faith, calling, and perseverance against great obstacles.

Jarena Lee was a free-born Black woman of the early nineteenth century who became the first woman authorized to preach in the AME Church under its founder, Richard Allen. Believing herself called by God to preach at a time when almost no church would allow it, she travelled vast distances and preached widely, leaving this journal as the testimony of her ministry.

Through a conviction she could not shake that God had called her to it. When she first told Richard Allen, the discipline of the church made no provision for women preachers, and she was not permitted; but years later, after she spontaneously exhorted during a service, Allen affirmed her call, and she became a travelling preacher — the first woman so recognized in the denomination.

The great obstacle was the near-universal refusal of her day to let a woman preach. Lee had to contend with the doubts of church leaders, the prejudices of congregations, and the hardships of constant travel as a Black woman in early nineteenth-century America. Her journal records both the opposition and the evident fruit of a ministry she was sure God had appointed.

A deep, experiential faith marked by conversion, a longing for holiness, and an unshakable sense of divine calling. Lee writes in the warm, testimony-rich style of Methodist spirituality, recounting her spiritual struggles and consolations, and her account is as much a record of inner religious experience as of outward labour.

Because it is a rare first-hand narrative from a Black woman preacher in the early American republic, and a landmark in the history of both African American Christianity and women in ministry. Lee's insistence on her calling, and her account of exercising it, preserve a voice too often absent from the record of the church's life.

Closely — Lee was converted under Allen's preaching and it was Allen who eventually affirmed her right to preach. Her story unfolds within the early life of the African Methodist Episcopal Church that Allen founded, and it stands alongside his own Life and Gospel Labours as part of the founding testimony of independent Black Methodism.

At the beginning, with Lee's conversion and her growing sense of call, and on through her struggle to preach and her years of travelling ministry. It is a first-person journal meant to be read in order, and taken that way it conveys both the reality of her faith and the courage of a woman who preached against every obstacle.