Jarena Lee Essay, Research Paper

Jarena Lee felt imbued with a religious mission in life, and because of this,

she bravely defied the conservative sex biases of the church to become, as she

contended, the “first female preacher of the First African Methodist Episcopal

Church”. As an evangelist, Mrs. Lee sometimes traveled on foot to spread her

religious message and would walk as far as 16 miles to preach. When over forty

years old, the unordained minister logged 2,325 miles on the Gospel circuit. She

preached up and down the Eastern Shore and traveled into sections of Illinois

and Ohio, converting blacks as well as whites to the Christian faith. Believed

to have been born free in Cape May, New Jersey, February 11, 1783, to parents

who were “wholly ignorant of the knowledge of God,” she left home at the age

of seven to work as a maid sixty miles away. Her first religious experience

occurred relatively late in life–in 1804 when she was twenty-one. Listening to

a local Protestant missionary who was holding services in a schoolroom, she

became overwhelmed by the “weight of my sins”. Afterward, she contemplated

committing suicide and credited the “unseen arm of God” with preventing her.

After moving to Philadelphia, she was inspired by the preaching of the Reverend

Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and became

“gloriously” converted to God. Five years later, she experienced a religious

sanctification of mind and spirit and was moved by a vision to preach. She went

to see the Reverend Allen, who informed her that she could hold prayer meetings,

but that his discipline did not call for women preachers. Later writing in her

journal, she reflected on the decision, noting, “O how careful ought we to be,

lest through our by-laws of church government and discipline, we bring into

disrepute even the word of life. For as unseemly as it may appear now-a-days for

a woman to preach, it should be remembered that nothing is impossible with God.

And why should it be thought impossible, heterodox, or improper for a woman to

preach? seeing the Savior died for the woman as well as for the man. If the man

may preach, because the Savior died for him, why not the woman? seeing he died

for her also. Did not Mary first preach the risen Savior, and is not the

doctrine of the resurrection the very climax of Christianity–hangs not all our

hope on this? Then did not Mary, a woman, preach the gospel? for she preached

the resurrection of the crucified Son of God.” In 1811, she married Joseph

Lee, a pastor of a congregation in Snow Hill, a town six miles from

Philadelphia. Feeling that she did not fit into the community, she became

discontented the first year and told her husband she wanted them to move. But