(RNS) — The African Methodist Episcopal Church’s top officials have called for the U.S. government to halt all its funding of Israel, citing the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians in the Hamas-Israel war.

“The Council of Bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church calls on the United States Government to immediately withdraw all funding and other support from Israel,” reads a statement issued on Wednesday (Feb. 14), the 264th anniversary of the birth of the historically Black denomination’s founder, Richard Allen.

“Since October 7, 2023, in retaliation for the brutal murder of 1,139 Israeli citizens by Hamas, Israel has murdered over 28,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children. The United States is supporting this mass genocide. This must not be allowed to continue.”

The statement was signed by Bishop Adam J. Richardson, senior bishop of the denomination; Bishop Stafford J.N. Wicker, president of the bishops’ council; Bishop E. Anne Henning Byfield, chair of social action, and Bishop Francine A. Brookins, co-chair of social action.

Bishop Harry L. Seawright, the leader of the AME’s Alabama district, said in a Thursday interview with Religion News Service that he and other bishops also supported the statement, which he said reflects the denomination’s stances on social action.

“We have always tried to take a social stand against injustice, unfair treatment of all people,” he said.

Seawright said he was not aware of any other Black denominations that had adopted the same stance. Bishop Vashti McKenzie, a retired AME bishop and the president of the National Council of Churches,  an organization of Protestant, Orthodox, evangelical and historic African American churches, told Religion News Service that she believed the AME Church was the first national denomination to take this step.

In January, Progressive National Baptist Convention President David Peoples declared his denomination’s stance in favor of a cease-fire at a news conference at the Lorraine Motel, the Memphis, Tennessee, site where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968.

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The "Black Church" of Braşov in Transylvania, ROMANIA

Black church, Búðir, Iceland, 2021 - by Nina Papiorek (1979), German

Praise houses

Praise houses were small, wooden structures used for worship by enslaved people in the American Southeast. They were also known as prayer houses. Praise houses were typically built within plantation complexes. They were often an elder enslaved individual's cabin. 

Praise houses were a part of the early history of the Black church. There is evidence of Christian practice and praise houses from before the first organized Black denominations.

In praise houses, enslaved African Americans held religious services, shared news, and settled disputes. Services were typified by singing, prayer, and the "shout," which was a song accompanied by vigorous hand-clapping and dancing. As an act of resistance, congregants would gather in circle to stomp or shout upon the wooden floors, performing what was known as the Ring Shout. 

These gatherings were not only religious but also a form of resistance and a means of preserving cultural and spiritual traditions in the face of oppression.

"The true shouť takes place on Sundays or on 'praise'-nights through the week, and either in the praise-house or some cabin in which a regular religious meeting has been held. Very likely more than half the population of the plantation is gathered together. Let it be the evening, and a light-wood fire burns red before the door to the house and on the hearth.… The benches are pushed back to the wall when the formal meeting is over, and old and young, men and women, sprucely-dressed young men, grotesquely half-clad field hands—the women generally with gay handkerchiefs twisted about their heads and with short skirts, boys with tattered shirts and men's trousers, young girls barefooted—all stand up in the middle of the floor, and when the 'sperichil' is struck up, begin first walking and by-and-by shuffling round, one after the other, in a ring. The foot is hardly taken from the floor, and the progression is mainly due to a jerking, hitching motion, which agitates the entire shouter, and soon brings out streams of perspiration. Sometimes they dance silently, sometimes as they shuffle they sing the chorus of the spiritual, and sometimes the song itself is also sung by the dancers. But more frequently a band, composed of some of the best singers and of tired shouters, stand at the side of the room to 'base' the others, singing the body of the song and clapping their hands together or on the knees. Song and dance are alike extremely energetic, and often, when the shout lasts into the middle of the night, the monotonous thud, thud of the feet prevents sleep within half a mile of the praise-house."

— New York Nation, May 30 , 1867

The Rev. M.B. Hucless, pastor of the Baptist Temple of New York, laying the cornerstone for the new church being erected at 159 West 132nd Street in Harlem, September 19, 1920. When completed, it was the largest Black church in the country. Members of several neighborhood societies attended.

Photo: Bettmann Archives/Getty Images/Fine Art America

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