Christian Methodist Episcopal Church

*Distribution (membership):
- USA : 792,670
- Africa: 61,000
- Caribbean: 5,000

Known until 1954 as the Coloured Methodist Episcopal Church, this church was established in the South of the USA, in an amicable agreement between white and black members of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. There were at that time at least 225,000 slave members in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, but with the emancipation proclamation, all but 80,000 of them joined the two independent black bodies. When the general conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, met at New Orleans in 1866, a commission from the black membership expressed the desire to have a separate church of their own. The request was granted, and in 1870 the Coloured Methodist Episcopal Church was organized. This name was kept until the meeting of the general conference of the Coloured Methodist Episcopal Church at Memphis in 1954, when it was decided to change it to the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.

The doctrine of the CME Church is the doctrine of the parent church. The denomination adds a local church conference to the quarterly, district, annual, and general conferences usual in Methodism. Seven boards supervise the national work, each presided over by a bishop assigned as chairman by the college of bishops. The general secretaries of the various departments are elected every four years by the general conference. The CMEC sponsors four colleges: Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee; Miles College in Birmingham, Alabama; Texas College in Tyler, Texas; and Paine College in Augusta, Georgia. Its theological seminary is the Philipps School of Theology of the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, Georgia. The church has 2,850 Sunday schools with a total enrolment of 67,514. The ten episcopal districts of the CMEC are located in the United States, Haiti, Jamaica, Liberia, Ghana and Nigeria.