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Jarena Lee

The Power to Speak

(1783–?)

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The young woman leapt to her feet before she even realized what she was doing. Standing at her place in the pews, she interrupted the bishop’s sermon on Jonah and began to preach on the text herself. As the bishop stood speechless in the pulpit, the church members turned to gape at the woman preaching from the pews. When she was finished, she collapsed into her seat, mortified by her own outburst and terrified that she would be immediately expelled from the church. Instead, to her surprise, the bishop turned to the bewildered congregation and claimed that Jarena Lee was called by the Lord to be a preacher.

The Lord’s Handmaiden

Aside from the few details she provides in her own autobiography, not much is known about Jarena Lee’s childhood. We know that she was born to free parents in Cape May, New Jersey, and was sent at the age of seven to work as a maid about sixty miles from her home. We know that she didn’t see her parents again for fourteen years, and that Jarena saw her family only four times in her entire life. We don’t know Jarena’s maiden name, the names of her parents or siblings, or how she learned to read and write.

Despite the fact that her parents were irreligious, “wholly ignorant of the knowledge of God,”1 Jarena’s faith was strong. Her first order of business when she moved to Philadelphia at the age of twenty-one was to find a church. She tried a number of different denominations, but when she discovered the African Methodist Episcopal Church led by Reverend Richard Allen, Jarena felt immediately, as she put it, that “this is the people to which my heart unites.” Three months from the first service she attended at the Philadelphia A.M.E. Church, her “soul was gloriously converted to God.”2

Despite her joy at finding a faith community, Jarena struggled with such severe depression that she was tempted on more than one occasion to commit suicide. Convinced that she would never find happiness and contentment, she prayed relentlessly for relief. Finally, after four years of desperate wandering in the wilderness of despair, Jarena felt that she was not only converted but also sanctified by God, a fact that she believed led to her full recovery from depression.

As an African American woman in pre–Civil War times, Jarena Lee ventured boldly into uncharted territory when she felt the call to preach. When she first recognized the call, no one was more surprised than Jarena herself. In fact, when she heard the clear voice directing her to preach the gospel, her first response was an emphatic no. “No one will believe me!” she replied aloud to the command. Initially Reverend Allen was hesitant as well, informing a relieved Jarena that the Methodist theology did not support women preachers. He encouraged her to hold prayer meetings and to exhort, but he drew the line at preaching. “This I was glad to hear,” wrote Jarena, “because it removed the fear of the cross.”3 Accepting Allen’s verdict, Jarena was content to marry Pastor Joseph Lee and move with him to Snow Hill, a small town outside of Philadelphia.

Still, as much as she wanted to, Jarena couldn’t shake the feeling that she was called to preach. The more she pondered this strange directive from God, the more she began to see it not only as possible but as inevitable. “For as unseemly as it may appear now-a-days for a woman to preach,” she wrote, “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 Saviour died for the woman as well as the man.”4

After her husband died only six years into their marriage, Jarena returned to Philadelphia and her church home with her two young children. Shortly after her return, Allen, who was now bishop of the African Episcopal Methodists of America, gently rebuffed Jarena’s plea to preach a second time. This time, though, Jarena was not to be deterred. Sensing a loss of momentum in Allen’s sermon on Jonah, she sprang to her feet “as by an altogether supernatural impulse”5 and began to preach to the shocked congregation. At the conclusion of her sermon, even Bishop Allen had to admit that her calling was legitimate.

The following Sunday, after begging God to allow her to preach anywhere but in church, Jarena knocked on a neighbor’s door and asked if she could lead a prayer meeting in the woman’s living room. That day she preached to a congregation of five. Six months later, leaving her young son in the hands of a neighbor, she traveled thirty miles with her infant to another Methodist church, where she preached for a week. There, “by the instrumentality of a poor coloured woman, the Lord poured forth his spirit among the people,” Jarena wrote. “The Lord gave his handmaiden power to speak for his great name, for he arrested the hearts of the people, and caused a shaking amongst the multitude, for God was in the midst.”6

Life on the Road

Jarena worked as an unordained itinerant preacher for more than thirty years, traveling ceaselessly, sometimes walking twenty miles at a time to preach at two churches in one day. In a single year she traveled more than two thousand miles and delivered 178 sermons. We don’t know what happened to her young son or her infant, who are mentioned only once in her autobiography. Her ministry was her entire existence, and she sacrificed everything, including her family, for it.

Because she could not earn an official living as a preacher, Jarena was dependent on the charity and hospitality of others. Occasionally she received a freewill offering collected from a service, but more often she did not know the source of her next meal or where she might find a roof over her head. Life for an itinerant preacher in the early nineteenth century was exceedingly difficult, and for Jarena, it was further complicated by the fact that she was a woman and an African American. As Anna Carter Florence notes, nineteenth-century ladies did not, as a rule, leave their domestic sphere and travel alone. To do so was uncouth as well as dangerous. Says Florence, “African American women traveling in the North faced the perpetual threat of male assaults to both body and character.”7 Further complicating matters, Jarena traveled into slave territory as a missionary, a gravely dangerous endeavor considering that any black person, even a free black person, who crossed the Mason-Dixon Line could be legally enslaved, regardless of his or her free status in other states. But as Florence also notes, “God calls whom God will. If the preacher is a black woman in antebellum Philadelphia in the year 1811, a woman whom no one will believe and for whom living out the call will be unimaginably difficult, so be it: God does not call preachers to be believed. God calls preachers to preach.”8

If Jarena was ever afraid, she did not let on in her autobiography. She was focused entirely on one goal, regardless of the enormous risks and sacrifices involved. Against all odds, Jarena preached. “My tongue was cut loose, the stammerer spoke freely,” she wrote. “The love of God, and of his service, burned with a vehement flame within me—his name was glorified among the people.”9

“My Ardour Abates Not a Whit”

Writing her autobiography was a natural extension of what Jarena understood as her life’s work. Entitled The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, a Coloured Lady, Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel, the book was published by Jarena at her own expense in 1836. Today the book is considered the first spiritual autobiography ever written by an African American woman. In the book’s conclusion, Jarena clarified exactly why her story needed to be told and publicized. “But for the satisfaction of such as may follow after me,” she stated, “I have recorded how the Lord called me to his work, and how he has kept me from falling from grace, as I feared I should.”10 The book sold so well in its first printing that Jarena financed a second printing in 1839 and then petitioned the African Methodist Episcopal Church to publish the autobiography as part of its official inventory. However, while the book committee accepted Bishop Allen’s autobiography for publication, they rejected The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, citing the manuscript as indecipherable and in need of explanation.

As Florence notes, “The rejection of Lee’s book, of course, had nothing to do with writing style, and she knew it.”11 After all, this was a woman who had spent three decades as an itinerant preacher, a woman who had preached thousands of sermons, certainly more than most men. While it was unlikely that the manuscript was in need of further explanation, it was quite likely that the church was not prepared to support such a radical endeavor.

Stung by the rejection, Jarena revised the manuscript on her own, this time including seventy additional pages specifying her preaching duties, as well as details concerning which congregations had either supported or rejected her ministry as a female preacher. The 1849 edition of Jarena’s book sparked an immediate backlash in the denomination. “Clergy who had once encouraged Lee in her struggle for recognition now rejected both her book and her ministry,” Florence observes, “making it clear that women preachers, especially those who dared to criticize men in pulpits and in print, would no longer be tolerated in the A.M.E. Church.”12 As a result, in 1852 the denomination declared its official ruling: women were not allowed to preach.

Just three years after the last printing of her autobiography, women were effectively removed from any formal leadership in the A.M.E. Church, and Jarena herself disappeared from historical records. We don’t know if she continued to preach in her remaining years, nor do we know the year or the circumstances of her death.

What we do know is this: Jarena Lee believed the Lord had given her, “his handmaiden,” the power to speak in honor of his great name, and she demonstrated her determination to fulfill that calling, regardless of great personal expense. She may have lost her reputation, her profession, her status, and her loved ones, but Jarena never lost her faith. “In all things he has proved himself a God of truth to me,” she wrote in the closing paragraph of her autobiography, “and in his service I am now as much determined to spend and be spent, as at the very first. My ardour for the progress of his cause abates not a whit.”13 Although the history books cannot prove it, Jarena Lee undoubtedly spent the rest of her life serving God, and her legacy as a preacher and a heroine of the faith continues to serve and inspire us today.