Members of the historic Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church have an extra reason to celebrate on Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year.
The congregation at the 134-year-old house of worship at Sixth and Lombard streets in Society Hill learned today that they’ve been awarded a grant from a national nonprofit to preserve its historical and architectural grandeur.
The church, a designated National Historic Landmark, will receive $90,000 to help rehabilitate its intricate stained-glass windows, the National Trust for Historic Preservation announced. The senior pastor, Rev. Mark Kelly Tyler, said he hopes to see work begin in March and expects it will take several months to complete.
“Mother Bethel is one of the oldest African American treasures of the country, and I’d really say an American treasure,” Tyler said. “So any time we have an opportunity to help support the work of preservation — because we’re still telling an important story every day, with visitors coming to our site — it’s a big win, not just for us, but for those who come behind us.”
Mother Bethel is famously one of the nation’s oldest Black churches and the first AME church. It was built by minister and Richard Allen who was formerly enslaved in 1794 so Black Methodists could worship without having to sit in segregated sections of local white churches.
That makes it the oldest parcel in the country continuously owned by African Americans. The current building, built in 1890, is the fourth Mother Bethel there.
Designed by the architectural firm of Hazlehurst and Huckel in the 19th-century Romanesque Revival style, it has a three-story limestone entrance and a four-story tower.
“With this great beauty comes a lot of responsibility,” Tyler said. “There are huge and numerous stained glass windows all around the building, and there’s a lot of intricate work around the metalwork and the wood. This is going to help keep those windows beautiful and keep the building more energy efficient.”
He said the work is costly and time-consuming because it requires planning and handiwork by experts in historic preservation, as well as the erection of scaffolding for months.
The work will benefit not just the church’s 700 members, but thousands of AME members and others who visit from around the world every year to admire the denomination’s mother church, Tyler said.
In addition to its historical and architectural significance, the church is the “cradle” of a larger Black church movement that gave rise to renowned social justice leaders like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he said.
King’s daughter, Dr. Bernice L. King, visited the church last year for a Black History Month event to talk with Tyler and discuss her work with the King Center in Atlanta advancing nonviolent social change.
Mother Bethel’s younger congregants are participating in King Day of Service events today, Tyler said. Other members are doing a training with POWER Interfaith to learn about the threat of white Christian nationalism or attending services held elsewhere by the Black Clergy of Philadelphia & Vicinity.
“I always like to say it’s like second Easter in the Black church,” he said.
Funding for the window restoration comes from the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, which announced $4 million in preservation grants for 31 historic Black churches across the country.
Other institutions in the region that are receiving grants include Jacob’s Chapel AME Church in Mount Laurel, NJ.; Yardley AME Church in Yardley, Pa.; and Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum, which is housed in the restored Mt. Zion AME Church in Hopewell, NJ.
“Black churches have been at the forefront of meaningful democratic reform since this nation’s founding. They’re a living testament to the resilience of our ancestors in the face of unimaginably daunting challenges,” said Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., historian and advisor to the Action Fund, in a press release. “The heart of our spiritual world is the Black church. These places of worship, these sacred cultural centers, must exist for future generations to understand who we were as a people.”
